Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Inanimate Carbon Rod]

We went to Hotel Cristal Park. They also had other hotels where you could get your lunch/evening meal (probably breakfast, too, I suppose!) on production of your pass, if you were out and about the resort.
There was one with a horrendous amount of steps where we went a couple of times. Couldn't do it now between my COPD and my wife's arthritis! 

I think i stayed at the one with the stairs when I was 10/11? Had a big theatre beside the hotel too and had a ‘drifters’ show? Right at the far end of Benidorm up a huge hill? Havent been there in about 20 years but remember the cristal park being one of the hotels you could go eat in.

[madwullie]

40 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

Are you not beginning to wonder what the alternative to herd immunity is?

It was a honking idea at the outset of this, but with appropriate shielding of vulnerable people, it's starting to look like more and more like the only option we have.

WHO and the like are shifting expectations. Its not that long ago the spiel was potential vaccine by September and 18 months peddled as a doomsday case. Now theres more talk of there never being a vaccine than either of those. In fact, vaccine progress has gone very quiet.

I dont want anyone to die, but the more thats learned about this virus, and with an antibody test hopefully painting a better picture of spread and lethality, we are going to have to think about giving the virus some slack on the leash.

If there are better options with less loss of life, then let's hear them but I dont consider indefinite lockdown to be an option.

This isnt what I want, and I am happy to stay locked down a few more weeks to drive the R down in Scotland, but I think folk need to start thinking about how this could end up going without an absolute idealist head on.

I think the September chat was desperate fannies like Hancock and trump. Noone who actually looked into the process of creating a vaccine took that seriously. 

[madwullie]

21 minutes ago, HeartsOfficialMoaner said:

I think we are screwed for a good while, maybe 10 years, who knows but, yes, we have to get going again at some point.

I was watching that tv series about John Adams (US president). In one of the shows his family were given the small pox so they could become immune to the disease and that kind of links to what is going on now.

Herd idea might have to be taken up and people should be allowed to volunteer to take the virus and get this done.

No way you're going to get 60-80% of the population volunteering. 

[HeartsOfficialMoaner]

24 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

Ah. I thought you were being sarcastic with that idea. 

I was a little bit at the end. We have to find a way out. I don't know anything, we are all just guessing. 

[HeartsOfficialMoaner]

10 minutes ago, madwullie said:

No way you're going to get 60-80% of the population volunteering. 

Not at first but with a big survival rate and the right propaganda...

[Granny Danger]

Early on in this crisis I recall reading that people were subject to different levels of the infection and that frontline healthcare staff had the potential of contracting a ‘heavier dose’ due to their environment.  I’m not sure how scientifically valid this was.

Assuming there is a scientific basis for this I assume administering the virus would allow people to be infected with a light dose allowing antibodies to develop but minimising the impact.

[Paco]

The UK as a whole tested 71,644 people yesterday. Around 2000 of them were in Scotland, so you could probably revise that to just under 70k.

As of 2pm today, 80,275 people have been tested in Scotland since the outbreak began.

TTI, our exit strategy, requires around 15,000 tests every single day. We need that by the end of the month, 17 days away.

Why is this not front page news? Why are our journalists wasting time asking nonsense about Nike conferences and diverging from Johnson’s approach?

This should be a national outrage and the Scottish Government should be under severe pressure to sort it, and fast. I don’t see a way forward for Scotland until this is sorted, aside from essentially hoping there is no second wave and the weak are already dead.

[Todd_is_God]

3 minutes ago, Paco said:

The UK as a whole tested 71,644 people yesterday. Around 2000 of them were in Scotland, so you could probably revise that to just under 70k.

As of 2pm today, 80,275 people have been tested in Scotland since the outbreak began.

TTI, our exit strategy, requires around 15,000 tests every single day. We need that by the end of the month, 17 days away.

Why is this not front page news? Why are our journalists wasting time asking nonsense about Nike conferences and diverging from Johnson’s approach?

This should be a national outrage and the Scottish Government should be under severe pressure to sort it, and fast. I don’t see a way forward for Scotland until this is sorted, aside from essentially hoping there is no second wave and the weak are already dead.

Could it be that, outwith the Central Belt, the number of infections is actually so low that testing in huge numbers there is not neccessary?

Assuming placing restrictions on long distance travel is a thing that is being considered initially, could testing not be concentrated on the areas where infections are highest?

There is little value, for example, in testing people in D&G for the sake of it to get numbers up, especially whilst still in a lockdown.

[Todd_is_God]

17 minutes ago, Granny Danger said:

I assume administering the virus would allow people to be infected with a light dose allowing antibodies to develop but minimising the impact.

I might be wrong here, but haven't you described the majority of vaccines there?

I imagine the answer to that is probably no.

[Paco]

Could it be that, outwith the Central Belt, the number of infections is actually so low that testing in huge numbers there is not neccessary?
Assuming placing restrictions on long distance travel is a thing that is being considered initially, could testing not be concentrated on the areas where infections are highest?
There is little value, for example, in testing people in D&G for the sake of it to get numbers up, especially whilst still in a lockdown.

It’s a reasonable point, and if it’s true the First Minister should be saying so.

We can’t know how the virus is moving through the population, literally the point of TTI, if we aren’t testing people. As you say, no point doing it for the sake of it, but we’re still at very small numbers of uptake versus alleged capacity. If that’s the case the obvious thing to do is expand who can receive a test.

[renton]

5 minutes ago, Paco said:

The UK as a whole tested 71,644 people yesterday. Around 2000 of them were in Scotland, so you could probably revise that to just under 70k.

As of 2pm today, 80,275 people have been tested in Scotland since the outbreak began.

TTI, our exit strategy, requires around 15,000 tests every single day. We need that by the end of the month, 17 days away.

Why is this not front page news? Why are our journalists wasting time asking nonsense about Nike conferences and diverging from Johnson’s approach?

This should be a national outrage and the Scottish Government should be under severe pressure to sort it, and fast. I don’t see a way forward for Scotland until this is sorted, aside from essentially hoping there is no second wave and the weak are already dead.

They reckoned capacity would be 12,000 a day by the middle of May. I'd be interested as to the challenges in translating capacity into throughput. Interestingly the strategy page here says "up to" 15,500 a day

https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-test-trace-isolate-support/pages/5/

So what would be nice to know is what is the minimum throughput required for a given R value. I guess the UK, although some of it was playing with numbers, was able to get its throughput up significantly in a short period of time.

The contact team applications dont close until 22nd May as well. I can't believe that they can translate that into a fully trained and deployed force a week later, so either the plan is to deploy a smaller contact team and test throughput at the start, based on a low enough R value to allow that and to scale it as necessary, or we wait until the while apparatus is ready to ramp up in one go which is still probably a month away at least.

[LongTimeLurker]

1 hour ago, Todd_is_God said:

This seems random

https://nypost.com/2020/05/13/greta-thunberg-added-to-cnn-expert-covid-19-panel-twitter-erupts/amp/#click=https://t.co/pNTgq3s4hq

She needs to finish her schooling and pursue and complete tertiary education before she should be allowed anywhere near a mainstream media microphone again. It's absurd that she is still given so much attention at this point. 

[Granny Danger]

6 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

I might be wrong here, but haven't you described the majority of vaccines there?

I imagine the answer to that is probably no.

It may be but you need to repost my post in full for it to (hopefully) make sense.

[Granny Danger]

1 minute ago, LongTimeLurker said:

She needs to finish her schooling and pursue and complete tertiary education before she should be allowed anywhere near a mainstream media microphone again. It's absurd that she is still given so much attention at this point. 

^^^^ raging da 

[Todd_is_God]

2 minutes ago, Paco said:

It’s a reasonable point, and if it’s true the First Minister should be saying so.

 

I think there is a lot the first minister should be saying to us now.

Agree with it or not, at least BJ has set out what will happen and when providing certain criteria are met.

We are now getting nothing other than "not yet"

NS won a lot of praise for her communication during the early part of the pandemic, and rightly so. Time to do so again.

[welshbairn]

3 minutes ago, LongTimeLurker said:

She needs to finish her schooling and pursue and complete tertiary education before she should be allowed anywhere near a mainstream media microphone again. It's absurd that she is still given so much attention at this point. 

Properly qualified adults don't have the media queuing up to broadcast her message.

[LongTimeLurker]

7 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

Properly qualified adults don't have the media queuing up to broadcast her message.

...because the media isn't doing its job properly.

[dundeefc1783]

So according to NS today number of positive tests in Scotland was 188 and 34 recorded deaths.

 

I know they are waiting in the R coming down before easing of restrictions and she by her own admission doesn't know exactly where the number is but say the positive tests continues to fall towards the 100 mark is that when we will likely see an easing of restriction?

 

Personally I am happy to wait another couple weeks and see what the number is as obvously if we can get that as low as possible before easing restrictions hopefully that will shorten the length in the next stages.

 

Although I understand its probaly not as simple as that

 

 

 

 

[D.A.F.C]

Potholes getting filled in.

£6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 budget

[Granny Danger]

50 minutes ago, Paco said:

The UK as a whole tested 71,644 people yesterday. Around 2000 of them were in Scotland, so you could probably revise that to just under 70k.

As of 2pm today, 80,275 people have been tested in Scotland since the outbreak began.

TTI, our exit strategy, requires around 15,000 tests every single day. We need that by the end of the month, 17 days away.

Why is this not front page news? Why are our journalists wasting time asking nonsense about Nike conferences and diverging from Johnson’s approach?

This should be a national outrage and the Scottish Government should be under severe pressure to sort it, and fast. I don’t see a way forward for Scotland until this is sorted, aside from essentially hoping there is no second wave and the weak are already dead.

Scotland seems way behind when it comes to testing.  I don’t think there’s any merit in putting stupid targets up as a publicity stunt, nonetheless testing should be up there as one of the top priorities of the Scottish Government.  It is also correct that the FM should be getting questioned more thoroughly on this.