Meanwhile, the US still has around 40,000 new confirmed cases every day, and confirmed deaths just passed 200,000, and the "Everyone go back to business as usual" approach is still in full gear.

Do tell me, is the UK anywhere near as stupid as the US is when it comes to Covid denial and anti-mask conspiracy bullshit as the general American population has turned out to be?

I don't think we're quite as bad en-masse, but we do have our own subculture of idiots staging anti-mask protests in London, COVID was made up by Microsoft, that kind of thing. There's a fair amount of 'oh don't be a wimp'-ism about, but far less of the 'you can't take my rights' nonesense.

Our political leadership aren't quite as obviously malicious as someone like Donald, but they're just as obsessed with the money side - they don't mind if a few hundred-thousand people die, so long as the FTSE-100 looks ok.

It's so fucking depressing when I watch British news and see a moppy haired Boris Johnson speaking and I ask myself, "why can't America have a leader as smart, well-spoken and compassionate as this man." Despite him being probably the most odious PM in quite a few years.

It's basically like sailors trapped at sea for months and suddenly noticing how gorgeous the wooden figurehead on the bow of the ship is.

The flu kills more than 200,000 every year. Before flu season. /s

Other amusing pivots:
-2.8 million Americans die every year! 200,000 isn't much at all.
-Because only 11,000 people died of COVID-19 alone and without any other factors, that means only 11,000 people actually died of COVID.
-It's not fair to count poor people in the death counts the same as other people, because poor people are predisposed to have worse health anyway.
-We have so many deaths because we do so many tests (as said by Kayleigh McEnany a few days ago).

One of the great takes we've had from bitter people is "we need to re-run the Brexit referendum, because so many of the voters just died off, or will die off"

I just talked to someone at the gym yesterday who parroted the "It only kills 1% of people, and even then it only kills old people!" line. I'm astounded anybody can be this fucking dense about it half a goddamn year into the US's first wave.

Before the Pandemic situation, I used to live at Ollantaytambo, a small touristic town in Cuzco (an Andean region where Machu Pichu is located) There are lots of small communities in the souroundings, that live in conditions like 80 years ago. (No medicines, no tech, etc.) This was actually worsened by the Terrorism activities in the late 80s, they rather to keep their distance from outsiders. A while ago, I heard from friends that even thought people are keeping distance a lot of them are falling ill, and the medical facilities in Ollanta are shit. Same story with all the rural regions in the country. Fortunatelly, somehow the situation have been slightly controlled by some good actions by the goverment, but since the country is currently facing a politic turmoil most of it has stopped...

Currently we have an "provisional" president who stepped in a couple of years a go (The last elected president was an way too old corrupt fuck, who is remembered by getting his "nuts weighted" https://images.app.goo.gl/nAfm7KsbFArZg1Vt6
This provisional President have displayed a better performance than most of people would think, we could have a better situation perhaps, but there are lots of political, social and economical factors that were against our own odds even from before the pandemic happened. But still since he had acted aginst the congress, they tried to frame him for some "light" corrupt procedures.
I woudnt say he is the best nor that he is clean from all, but right now I can think of a fairly decent leader who could take in command.

The "pre-existing factors" thing really pisses me off. "Oh that person had asthma, OF COURSE she died from COVID, but that doesn't count!" "Oh that person was 70, he doesn't count!" I hate that. It's extremely selfish. Oh, and the associated "I'm not responsible for other's health", we're ALL responsible for everyone's health! Like, what do these people think regulations like speed limits, non-smoking areas, and so on, are even for?

To paraphrase something dd said a while back, if the first wave never ends you don't need to worry about a second wave.


At this point it's not even accurate to call what we have here a wave, it's more like the COVID equivalent of the Higgs field. It's an ocean permeating the country.

The pre-existing stuff has been in a big factor in the government fudging stats; they also got some hyperbole into the sillier newspapers (Daily Mail, Guardian) along the lines of 'NHS records people hit by bus as dying of COVID !!!!!', so that them fiddling the numbers wasn't challenged.

The thing about arguing about such inaccuracies months into the crisis is that its no fucking excuse. They either knew the fudge was occurring but waited to strategically deploy that as a defense or ministers had no idea where their numbers were coming from for months. Its either malice or gross incompetence but honestly I can't be sure which.

Preaching to the choir and to the bishop my friend. I think they started off useless, realised how bad it was making them look (and the damage it was all doing to holy mother FTSE), and then that good old fashioned political maliciousness kicked in. That they're now reversing in disarray suggests we're back to useless.

They never stood a chance because they were selected for ideological reasons (Brexit) rather than experience or competence. It is our great misfortune to be saddled with a government uniquely ill-equipped to dealing with any crisis.

Of course the "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" bullshit once again rears its ugly fucking head.

I've had basically nothing going for me as a white male, who grew up in an above average neighborhood with two parents who never divorced and practically dragged my sorry ass through college and I made it. It's time we stop making excuses for the poor!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, you think your government is uniquely unqualified to deal with a crisis? If only us yanks had never seceded, we could have taught you how to fail more spectacularly.

Hah, unique for the UK that is! Doubt they could teach the Donald anything about failing in times of crisis.
The cabinet consists of several people previously fired from cabinet posts for incompetence, breach of ministerial code and the like and the PM has been removed from past jobs for lying and is such a liar that no-one is sure how many children he even has. Many of the other cabinet members have never held senior ministerial positions before, including my local MP who is the business secretary and probably a cure for insomnia. The only thing in common? Brexit. Brexit is preferable to ability apparently.

Every time I hear Priti Patel on the radio telling some new fib, the only consolation I have is that 'at least it's not Dianne Abbott or John McDonnell'.

Next time around I'm hoping we get Starmer in, and restore some semblance of decency to the whole show. Might even get the COVID recovery managed by someone sensible, rather than whoever Boris is hanging out with that week.

We've got this until 2024. Boris may not last that long and will be saddled with the blame for corona and Brexit economy in absentia. Presumably, Covid will be a distant memory by then even if the repercussions still remain.

Hey, UK guys, why are you complaining?!?! As mighty Boris said, you clearly LOVE your FREEDOM, not like we Italians that enjoyed to be confined on our houses for months by a dispotic and tyrannic government who thought that maybe too many elderly were dying!

The same Boris that just told us that he's instituting a Corona-Stasi to spy on gatherings of people. He's going to find it hard to keep up his nonsense when the arrests and fines start filling up the newspapers.

In other news, the panicked masses have started bulk-buying pasta and toilet paper again.

It's extra funny when you see a shopping trolley filled with ready meals, microwave filth, canned horrors, and that same person has also bought ten big sacks of pasta and several sacks of flour. Not sure what they're going to eat that pasta and flour with, no veg or anything being in evidence. Good for the bottom line of Tesco, Sainsbury's, etc etc.

As is standard for a right wing play book, a love for freedom is generally implied to mean a small government solution. If the state does not wish to enforce restrictions or otherwise face up to obligations regarding safety, hide behind freedom rhetoric and hope citizens do the state's work for it. I doubt getting people to "spy" on their neighbours will be remotely effective since good neighbours won't and bad neighbours are biased but it enables the government to blame individuals for state failings. See also rising cases being blamed on the young.

The worldwide casualties as documented by Worldometer are about to reach one million. I guess that's a megadeath.

I saw a billboard in Michigan last night that showed Trump's face and under it the number of people that have died from Corona and then in quotations, "It is what it is".

I'm sure that billboard is angering up the blood of a lot of trumpers on their daily drive.

Still no results on my covid test after like almost two weeks. By the time I get it back, I'd have to get a second test to ensure nothing had changed from the first time. It's insane how badly managed this all was.

The hilarious ineptitude of the various British governments (thanks for that, Mr Blair) continues apace - they've gotten the maths so arse-backwards over the last few days, that we no longer have a "U" graph, we now have this;

Damn. It's been interesting watching the numbers resurge in Europe. The death rate thankfully hasn't come back to the levels it was at, at least not yet. Probably is indicative of who is getting infected and the treatments at the ER, not the virus itself.

The knowledge has increased in terms of how to treat the virus properly. This is one of the reasons the fatalities remain on a low level. Old people over 70 years of age are still at a massive risk, though.

They've also stopped sending old people back to care homes without a care or a test here, that certainly helps. It may also be the case that testing was really rubbish early in the pandemic and therefore numbers then should have been logged as considerably higher, with a higher death rate to match. In theory we're better prepared this time, or should be. Then again I'm not particularly hopeful given that 16000 cases were "lost" because the NHS was using an Excel spreadsheet to log them and ran out of columns. Nice to see they've upgraded their systems since I worked there 10 years ago.

Also indicative of the changes in testing. First wave there was a severe shortage of tests, which lead to folks only getting tested after they already displayed severe symptoms, plus direct family of the infected (and even then sometimes only if they actually displayed symptoms). This wave we're seeing the effects of things like tracking down folks that have come in contact with someone who tested positive (e.g. by being in the same restaurant at the same time) and testing those.

I read the article on the excel line limit thing vs. a .csv file too. I mean, that's not a bug or a new limitation - excel has always had a line limit, if you're doing basic databases with MS Office you use Access. Who do the NHS have doing their data analysis & tracking exactly ?! They have enough money thrown at their IT to do better than that, it's a total joke.

Excel also throws an alert when a document import hits the line limit (and would go over otherwise) - so the computer also definitely TOLD the moron processing that information that their dataset was incomplete. Fancy having what must have been a 2-300mb sheet of nationally important health data, and not thinking that the alert messages & so forth might have been important.

Honestly

NHS systems are deeply archaic in places so I can believe that somehow an excel spreadsheet was the best they had available. The medical records system for example resembles DOS, its certainly some kind of proprietary command line based program and the records themselves were not digitized back then either but were physical a5 sleeves filled with incomprehensible doctor scribblings. The training budget is similarly constrained so if I had to guess, not using Access is probably because not many staff knew how to use it. To put it into context, when I worked there, I was doing Choose and Book on behalf of GPs - as I had no medical training whatsoever, this mostly involved googling medical symptoms and then matching them to the appropriate clinic in a hospital basically by finding common keywords.

Fun bonus fact - between me and a housemate, we persuaded them to use email in my region. Yes, before that all referrals were done by post, from GP to us, then from us back to the patient. The sticking point was logical enough, except that no-one had seriously looked into it properly - data security. It was just a case of finding a service with appropriate encryption. I like to think we got many patients referred and dealt with quicker as a result but who knows if they even kept it up after my department was closed.

Latest from the UK

Our own special brand of party-political nonesense rears it's ugly head again - with a massive spike in cases (see graph below), the government are putting in place new lockdowns in the worst-hit areas. This naturally displeases members of the opposition -

The (Labour) Mayor of Greater Manchester (jobs-for-the-boys), has decided that enough is enough and wants to waste time and the taxpayer's money with 'legal action' against COVID lockdowns. It won't be the aristos that we eventually guillotine in Britain, it'll be these chair-warming oxygen thieves. Idiot

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-greater-manchester-mayor-andy-burnham-vows-to-consider-legal-action-over-tier-3-lockdown-12104068

Graphs - scroll down a bit

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-greater-manchester-mayor-andy-burnham-vows-to-consider-legal-action-over-tier-3-lockdown-12104068

Cases meaning positive PCR tests?

Isn't the main issue one of mandating shutdown without providing a sufficient safety net? It's perhaps not the best time to start winding down furlough, people simply will ignore this and go to work, because they need to. Those that can, anyway and those that can't might find themselves in trouble. There's some other drawbacks to local schemes like complexity of varying restrictions based on arbitrary county lines especially given the low quality of government communications and that travel is not restricted for some reason (discouraged, but not banned), except to Wales now of course. Its a bit of a tightrope fighting the government on these things though, since infection rates do need dealing with; I am not sure how much sympathy they'll get more broadly.

Of course complaining about lesser furlough might not be the best issue to raise with the more international audience on these boards. Hope you all didn't spend that emergency pay-packet too quickly...

Hey, so a man in Nevada was confirmed to have gotten Covid twice, the first documented instance of such a thing happening in the United States. He had no known comorbidities or underlying health problems, and his second round of Covid put him in the hospital on oxygen. Oh, and he's also only 25 years old.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 16033.html

Positive tests, hospital admissions, and deaths - not sure on the nature of the tests though.



Absolutely a big part of it yes, unfortunately Burnham always comes across as childish which doesn't help. His most recent statements today are all about 'Manchester fighting back', I mean, really ? You want to go with sixth-form rhetoric now ? Totally agree that the arbitrary nature of the lockdown system being implemented is not helping - As you say, it's now lead to the Welsh & Scottish representatives talking about fining English people that 'cross the border'. Honestly, only a Tory government could get us into that kind of mess, it's truly ridiculous.

In reality, this shouldn't have been left a government / party issue - there should be a 'war cabinet' dealing with it. It's miles too important to be left to whatever berk lied his way into the top job this week.



That is grim - especially in someone so young. I seem to remember it happened to elderly people in Japan and Italy, but in a 25 year old ?

Staying in this winter !

I was going to bring this up when I read Schizoid's post. I think it's a reasonable position.

Now there is no reason at all to complain about wearing masks. Hormel has made one that’s bacon scented!!!
https://www.syracuse.com/coronavirus/20 ... -free.html

Berk - I love that word.

Having followed UK politics to some extent in the last 5 years, I've learned that whenever Tories get themselves into deep shit, Labour can absolutely be trusted to stumble over their own feet in the most ridiculous way possible, and usually land with a loud, sickening snap. That said, the idiocy of the constituents cannot be blamed entirely on the people whose job it is to hold on into elected power by any means necessary.

Yesterday I was having a chat with some people, some of them are from UK and one is from Manchester, and they were saying things like:
"they're making us go in lockdown again!" Really?? How come?
"It's all bullshit anyway"
"People are afraid of a thing with 99% recovery rate" 1% mortality rate is horrible for a disease that can spread like covid...
"There was a <very small sample of> college students that got sick and none of them died!" Good for the college students