Current Affairs Coronavirus Thread - Serious stuff !!!

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Toast said:
We got 5000 face masks in to sell today.
Hardly sold any.
A month ago if we had them they would have gone within minutes.
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Most people still have them mate because they haven't used them. We bought some in case supermarkets got a bit manic but people down here still taking it seriously. We haven't even opened the packet but have them in the car just in case
 
davek said:
They're trying to kill us all AND make cash from it.
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We should just get back to Ciggies sponsoring events as well.
The Benson and Hedges cricket tournament was boss, and the Marlboro sponsored McLaren F1 car looked boss as well.
The Embassy snooker and darts too.

Might as well make a few bob out of death might we not.
 
Toast said:
We should just get back to Ciggies sponsoring events as well.
The Benson and Hedges cricket tournament was boss, and the Marlboro sponsored McLaren F1 car looked boss as well.
The Embassy snooker and darts too.

Might as well make a few bob out of death might we not.
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Indeed, and that has always been the case. Money for the already rich.
 
'In its most optimistic pronouncement since the start of the crisis, France’s scientific advisory panel has said the Covid-19 epidemic is now “under control”.

The panel’s president, Jean-François Delfraissy, told France-Inter radio that though the virus was still circulating, it was now doing so “at low speed”.

“We reckon we are now on about 1,000 new cases a day,” he said, comparing this to the high-point of the epidemic when there were “around 80,000 new daily cases”.

Officially there have been, until today, 152,000 confirmed (ie tested) cases of coronavirus in France, and just over 29,000 deaths. The 80,000-a-day figure is an estimate of the real number of cases – including those undetected or with mild symptoms – in early March.

The number of dead from French hospitals on Thursday fell to 44.

Delfraissy said there were still clusters appearing, but these were easily circumscribed, thanks to testing, contact-tracing and self-isolation.'



The UK remains a basket case with hundreds of deaths, having had more time than the French to prepare for the virus. WTF form of governance is this?

Murderers.
 
mellowblue said:
www.theguardian.com

NHS test-and-trace system 'not fully operational until September'

Exclusive: chief operating officer told staff programme would be imperfect at launch
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

Serco eh? Useless and inefficient company...but many tory ministers have an "interest" in it. Disgusting outsourcing of public money.
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It used to be a good company which was run ethically by people who truly believed in the ethos behind it ( I did some work with them many years ago, and, very occassionally, still do a bit. ). Sadly those days are long gone, and they badly lost their way when Chris Hyman was in charge, fell in love with the city boys and was determined to grow them into a FTSE100 company, with disastrous results.

There's still a lot of good people working there like, but the whole rational behind the company's existence has disappeared down the plughole.
 
www.newstatesman.com

Few countries have eased lockdown with such high rates of new infection as in the UK

The government appears content to keep the NHS from being overwhelmed, not to prevent people dying.
www.newstatesman.com www.newstatesman.com

Few countries have eased lockdown with such high rates of new infection as in the UK

Dr Phil Whittaker


I spent the first part of the evening doing triage calls, but then a nurse phoned from St Michael’s, one of the community hospitals I cover out-of-hours. Derrick, in his eighties and recently discharged from the district general to continue his gradual recovery from Covid-19, had taken a sudden downward turn – high fever, vomiting, rapid pulse. His NEWS score – a tool for helping assess how acutely ill someone is – had risen to six. He needed a prompt review. I told her I would be over right away.

I work with a fantastic driver, Shirley, who swiftly gathered the laptop and the controlled drugs, stowing the latter in the safe bolted into the boot of the visiting car. She shut the door and checked her watch. “We’re going to hit the clap,” she said.

I always work Thursday evenings. The out-of-hours base is in a triple-glazed, purpose-built health centre. For the first six weeks of Clap for Carers I didn’t hear a thing. I saw clips on social media later, which were moving, but it felt like it was happening elsewhere, to other people.

In week seven, the weather had warmed considerably and I had the windows open in my consulting room. I shall never forget the din that erupted at eight o’clock: cheering, pans banging, horns and whistles, drums pounding. I couldn’t see a soul – my room looks out on the car park – yet from every direction was coming this sustained, ebullient appreciation from the community living around us.

Shirley and I put on our gloves and masks – social distancing is impossible inside a vehicle – and got in the car. We must have reached the first residential street just as the hour turned. Dozens of people were at their front gates, clapping and banging saucepans; wearing smiles and summer clothing. The visiting car is done out in unmistakable emergency service livery. Every group we approached started to wave and cheer.

I waved back, especially to the kids holding up NHS rainbow pictures. But even though I was on my way to attend a Covid-19 positive patient, I felt embarrassed and a fraud. The people who deserve this outpouring of gratitude are the intensive care nurses, doctors and allied hospital staff who have borne the brunt of the first wave, and been stretched beyond all reasonable endurance, as so powerfully described by Edward Docx in this magazine last week. And the care home staff, defenceless in DIY PPE as coronavirus felled resident after resident in their neglected facilities. And the paramedics, overrun in their first-response role. Their exhaustion and sense of disconnection from the rest of society – where the majority have no direct experience of severe Covid-19, and where lockdown hardships are usually measured on a different, mundane scale – have exacted an enormous toll.

The “moral injuries” – the emotional trauma – sustained by those on the true front line have yet to be reckoned. And for some, there will be no recovery. Again and again throughout the first wave, faces of nurses, carers and doctors killed by Covid-19 have appeared on my social media, so many of them from minority ethnic groups. On many occasions, I have wept for them – strangers to me, but people whose values and vocation I know and understand intimately.

Shirley drove us on towards St Michael’s, passing more and more groups of applauding people. Everyone looked happy. The weather was great, lockdown was being eased, we were well and truly past the peak.

This was the tenth and final Clap for Carers; more corroboration for wider society that the job must have been done. It is right that the Clap has ended: it had become a weekly obligation. It has also provided a cloak that the politicians who were suppos ed to lead us through this crisis could drape over themselves: solidarity-shouldering sherpas, rather than incompetents whose serial mismanagement has caused the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands.

As we drove past numerous well-wishers, I wondered what they truly know and understand. The government appears content to keep the NHS from being overwhelmed – not to prevent people dying.

The Office for National Statistics estimates that there are still as many as 54,000 new Covid-19 cases in England each week, and easing of lockdown means efforts to suppress the virus further have been judged economically unaffordable. The infection-fatality rate for Covid-19 lies between 0.5 and 1 per cent, which suggests the government considers 270-540 deaths a week a price worth paying to reopen society.

That we have such high infection rates after ten weeks of lockdown is attributable to ministers’ poor decision-making in February and March, which allowed the first wave to climb so high. Few other countries – the US is an obvious exception – have eased lockdown with such rates of new infection.

And we risk even worse. Our testing regime is erratic and disjoined. Track and trace hasn’t even taxied to the runway, let alone taken off. The bonhomie of ministerial announcements – horse racing is coming back! The shielded can now venture out! – conveys the same message: we’re over it.

No fewer than four Sage advisers have broken ranks publicly to voice their disquiet over risks of a second wave, particularly in regions where the R number is hovering around one. Their misgivings have been echoed in statements from the Association of Directors of Public Health and the Royal College of Nursing.

Derrick had done well to survive Covid-19 given his age. He was even sicker by the time I got to him. Urgent bloods confirmed secondary bacterial pneumonia. He went back to the district general, where IV antibiotics have now rescued him from the brink a second time. We may have clapped our last for the carers, but coronavirus has a very long way to run.
 
arminisgod said:
you simply can't shut down an economy for 1500 new cases a day. People need to get real
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It's more than that (and that is bad enough).

We are still not out of the first wave by the standards of other European nations. To open up society and the econony at this rate of infection is laying the basis for a huge second wave.

This is irresponsible and the call needs to be made to abandon opening up plans for shops and pubs / restaurants.

Lockdown and get face coverings made mandatory. That's what a well run government caring for its people would do. Unfortunately we have the Tories
 


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The World Health Organization (WHO) says it is now “advising governments” to encourage its citizens to wear fabric face masks in public areas to help stop the spread of virus.

The WHO had previously said there was not enough evidence to support the use of masks by healthy people in public but that medical masks should be worn by those who were sick and those caring for them.

"We have evidence now that if this is done properly it can provide a barrier for potentially infectious droplets,” Dr Maria van Kerkhove told Reuters in an interview.

“And we specify a fabric mask - that is, a non-medical mask."

In its new guidance, which has been prompted by studies over recent weeks, the WHO stressed that face masks are just one of a range of tools that can be used to reduce the risk of transmission and that they should not give people a false sense of protection.


Get a mask on.
 
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