Cloudane wrote:What can you do? Delivery slots are rare as rocking horse shit, and we need to eat, and need to be able to afford it.
Tesco seem to reset their delivery slots 'on mass'.
For instance:
Thursday not a vacant slot in sight. Even checked before bed at around 01:00.
Friday 07:30 in the morning, every slot available to book. (they do go fast though).
Cloudane wrote: I had a home made mask on for what good it does (primarily they help protect others in case you have it and don't realise as you're asymptomatic, rather than being a protection for yourself)
That's bullshit made up to stop people panic-buying masks the NHS needs. Of course any barrier between the lungs of the infected and the lungs of the susceptible will help to some extent.
Watch the advice change as we get tooled up to produce enough for everybody.
The advice already has changed. To that which Cloudane expressed above.
Emoticon and contraction free since... quite a while ago.
It was just a footnote at the end of paragraph in reply to someone else, that you've taken out of context.
Not had any major difficulties getting home deliveries here. Did have this situation the other day, but I like wild garlic!
Tesco came Thursday - only one substitution - Ocado next Tuesday.
Same day beer drops any day of the week from the local tap bar.
Addicted to Oatley Barista and I've put in Amazon orders for it when it's out of stock & "Expected 8 weeks from now". Usually turns up within a week - I think it's standard policy they are doing on many items.
gilesgoat wrote:@Klaxoncow : ok they did not start early, they started late, ok they done something, maybe not the best but they done/are doing something.
The question still remains "how/when all this is going to end ?".
Yes, indeed, accepting that they did already fuck this up very badly by starting far too late, how / when is this going to end now?
Swedish epidemiologist Prof Johan Giesecke thinks the UK government's initial approach was the correct one and changing our approach, in line with other countries - but not Sweden - was the wrong thing to do. Who to believe, KlaxonCow or someone who knows what they're talking about.
Definitely an interview worth listening to.
Isn’t Sweden following that advice and has an infection / death rate way above their neighboring Scandinavian countries? (Norway has half the population of Sweden but a tenth of the deaths) I thought that disparity had completely discredited the herd immunity approach
gravy wrote:Isn’t Sweden following that advice and has an infection / death rate way above their neighboring Scandinavian countries? (Norway has half the population of Sweden but a tenth of the deaths) I thought that disparity had completely discredited the herd immunity approach
Not for someone who wants to make a party political issue of it.
"massive retard™", "full of shit™", "tiny bitch™", "retarted™", "a bit of a one trick pony™", "petty™", "simple minded idealistic twat™", "miserable humourless fucker™"
It should also be noted that any "herd immunity" plan, where you order the "cannon fodder" over the top to "take one for the team", depends on the troops having sufficient loyalty to "King and country" to not, you know, tell you to fuck off and refuse.
Specifically, King Boris initially wouldn't ban mass gatherings nor close schools.
The next day, pretty much every single sporting institution, entertainment institution and event organiser all cancelled / postponed it all, taking the decision out of Boris's hands. Mass gatherings banned themselves anyway. Because - use your loaf - you can't commercially operate that sort of thing in the midst of all this.
Schools are, of course, a bit different because, legally, as schools are compulsory, the government controls whether they stay open or not - but I know, as a mate of mine works at a university, that all of them were already sorting out "distance learning" and everything, in anticipation of closure and, when Boris didn't fire the gun that week, all the various teachers unions and such were already gearing up for strike action - to walk out on them anyway - and suing the government. If he'd continued to force it and it had gone to court then, come on, with hospital admissions and death tolls rising, how could they lose such a case? Particularly because, you know, the justice system itself is also legally unable to cease operations, so every judge in the land has perfect sympathy with their plight.
Parents were keeping their children home. And, sure, you legally send the cops around and enforce it. But, really, you're going to waste police resources, right now, on trying to force every single child back into the classroom?
Same concept with the mass gatherings. Or the tourism industry. You have to cancel / postpone / mothball things because not enough people are going to show up anyway. You can open the stadiums and play the matches, but if only a few hundred show up to fill the terraces then you're not going to take enough cash at the ticket office to pay for any of this.
Go on, reopen the travel agents. Let's see how many bookings they'll actually get right now. I mean, internationally, you can't go anywhere, as borders have been closed and all flights banned.
So, sure, as their commanding officer, you have every right to order them "over the top" and into a hail of machine gun bullets. But, simply, no-one listened to the order. There were no "mass gatherings" left for Boris to ban by the time he got around to officially banning them. I was reading all the articles with all the teachers unions demanding explanations, reassurances, scientific proof that their members were fundamentally safe and they were all clearly gearing up and threatening strike action and taking legal action over this.
You see, when talking about "herd immunity" with a literal herd of cows or some other animal, you don't have to take into account that said animal is intelligent enough to understand the situation and take autonomous action to "socially distance" unto themselves, due to a thing called "self-preservation" (which is evolutionarily the top priority of every single living thing on this planet - and even some non-living things, like viruses - so, sorry, if you think your authority outranks that, you're simply wrong).
I mean, by all means, put your money where your mouth is and prove me wrong.
Go out there right now and deliberately infect yourself. If you want to roll the dice - and, hey, statistically, the odds are very much in your favour, as the vast majority of people only suffer "mild symptoms" only - then that would absolutely prove, to my satisfaction, that you genuinely believe in the "herd immunity" plan, because no-one jeopardises their "self-preservation" lightly.
Has the Prof had coronavirus yet? Perhaps he could lead by example.
Fair play to Boris and Hancock, they actually did - unintentionally - do that. The bloody idiots.
Yeah, when you mentally exclude yourself as a "special case" and don't consider yourself to be one of the "herd" - you're more important than those other nameless people, right? - then it's easy to advise everyone else to jump off the cliff like lemmings. But, very simply, the response has to be "okay, you first".
The "herd immunity" plan is a non-plan.
Because you can order it as much as you like - people will, to the degree they're financially and legally able to, simply not obey. You can order the economy to be re-opened, but what's the point of opening all the shops or opening all the stadiums, if pretty much no paying customers actually show up?
(The government has, so far, advised against face masks. I don't know about you, but when I do my infrequent shopping at the supermarket, there have been people clearly ignoring that advice all along, as there's plenty of folks wandering about my local store with surgical face masks, dust masks, home-made masks, scarves and everything else. And I saw that before the lockdown was even officially ordered. You see, this is why I always believe in EXPLAINING things - even if it's a bit long-winded - so that you can follow the logic and choose for yourself what to believe, because barking orders without obtaining implicit consent ultimately never works. People will rightly tell you to fuck off, as they should. I mention the supermarket here because we've all seen that, and we can all verify that, yes, what I'm saying here seems to be empirically backed up by the reality we all see for ourselves. Those mass gatherings all banned themselves anyway - that's on public record and we all know that happened. I'm not asking you to believe anything that you can't, of your own accord, derive for yourself from the facts.)
This non-plan cannot work.
You can't run an economy full tilt in the midst of a global plague. Go on, order your workers back into the office - and then when one of them brings covid-19 into the middle of your operations and knocks out all of your employees into "self-isolation" for a few weeks, then tell what's the fucking difference between that and having just waited a few more weeks in quarantine anyway? Actually, I'll tell you what the difference is - you don't get the government paying 80% of your employees wages is the difference. And while in quarantine, your employees can at least, to the degree that it's possible, work from home and earn you at least something. So that wasn't very economically wise of you, was it? "More haste, less speed" as the fable tells us.
It's the old joke: "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is".
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
gravy wrote:
Isn’t Sweden following that advice and has an infection / death rate way above their neighboring Scandinavian countries? (Norway has half the population of Sweden but a tenth of the deaths) I thought that disparity had completely discredited the herd immunity approach
So far, there is no lock-down here in Sweden. People are advised to work from home if they can, avoid unnecessary travel and to keep their distance to other people. But you can do as you like. However, gatherings of more than 50 people are not allowed. Elementary schools are still open, but all higher education is done remotely now.
This is how Sweden (Sverige) is doing compared to Norway (Norge), Germany (Tyskland) and UK (Storbritannien).
Deaths per 1 million people on Y, and days on X. Data from John Hopkins.
Please note, that UK is not reporting COVID related deaths in elderly care, but all other countries in this plot are, so you should probably double the UK numbers.
Norway and Germany is obviously doing a better job of keeping down the number of deaths.
I am not sure what I think of the Swedish strategy myself. But when I read this thread I get the impression that people are more scared in the UK than in Sweden.
Last edited by Daniel on Sat Apr 18, 2020 12:45 pm 0, edited 1 time in total.
KlaxonCow wrote:Has the Prof had coronavirus yet? Perhaps he could lead by example.
Well, I meant the Swedish Professor, as that's who Space Cowboy was referring to.
But, yeah, that photo is a perfect illustration of "leading by example" regarding the "herd immunity" plan, even if they didn't exactly intend that to be the case.
Also, one last comment on the "herd immunity" plan: It depends on something that is, as yet, unproven.
That, for those who've had it, they have strong and somewhat lasting immunity to the disease.
Because if the immunity is not lasting, then you simply might not be able to get to "herd immunity" levels. Some lose their immunity over time, whilst others are gaining it, and you can't get to 60-80% of the population having immunity simultaneously. So the "herd immunity" block - that you have so many people with immunity that the virus can't get a foothold in the population - might not, in fact, be practically possible to achieve.
And if the immunity is not strong, then folks might still be able to get re-infected. Possibly with much milder symptoms, as this is not a "novel" coronavirus to their immune systems anymore. But if the immune system is not getting rid of it fast and strongly, they've got it and they could be coughing it all over those who haven't. And they could, in fact, end up acting as "typhoid Mary"s amongst us, for all we know (if there really are people who get this 100% asymptomatically, we've potentially already got that right now - and the ONLY method that can deal with that is, unfortunately, treating everyone as a potential carrier with a continued lockdown).
So "herd immunity" bets the bank on things we don't even yet know for certain are even true. If you go with "herd immunity" and the immunity isn't long-lasting or strong, then you're pursuing a strategy that actually cannot fundamentally work.
To be clear, I've actually been here in the thread saying that, if this coronavirus doesn't provide at least reasonable immunity for, say, a year, then it would be deeply unusual, as other coronaviruses are at least that good. So I don't think that this is the case. But, bottom line, we don't know yet. It's not been around long enough to know that for sure. Maybe we're all wrong in our expectations.
It might simply be that "herd immunity" is, in fact, impossible to achieve in practice, if the immunity people get from this ain't that strong and / or ain't that long-lasting.
And, again, if the virus mutates sufficiently that previous antibodies don't actually work to block it anymore, then all "herd immunity" goes out the window straight away - as "the herd" is immune to a previous strain, not what it has mutated to become now. And mutations are random, so it's impossible to say if this will or won't happen in any particular time frame. Maybe. Maybe not. It's intrinsically unpredictable.
So, the strategy depends - bets the bank - on something that is, in fact, very much a "known unknown" right now.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
gravy wrote:
Isn’t Sweden following that advice and has an infection / death rate way above their neighboring Scandinavian countries? (Norway has half the population of Sweden but a tenth of the deaths) I thought that disparity had completely discredited the herd immunity approach
So far, there is no lock-down here in Sweden. People are advised to work from home if they can, avoid unnecessary travel and to keep their distance to other people. But you can do as you like. However, gatherings of more than 50 people are not allowed. Elementary schools are still open, but all higher education is done remotely now.
This is how Sweden (Sverige) is doing compared to Norway (Norge), Germany (Tyskland) and UK (Storbritannien).
Deaths per 1 million people on Y, and days on X. Data from John Hopkins.
Please note, that UK is not reporting COVID related deaths in elderly care, but all other countries in this plot are, so you should probably double the UK numbers.
Norway and Germany is obviously doing a better job of keeping down the number of deaths.
I am not sure what I think of the Swedish strategy myself. But when I read this thread I get the impression that people are more scared in the UK than in Sweden.
We had our first fatalities a week earlier than Sweden. Since there's exponential growth a small time shift like that can have a big difference. A week ago we had 154 deaths per million vs 228 now. Sweden is at 150 today.
It's worth taking into consideration but yeah, even if you do the death rates are that disimiliar right now though that may not be true further on down the line.
I wouldn't say that was a validation of lack of social distancing though. We're doing a shit job and if your curve doesn't flatten you'll be in the pool of hardest hit countries just like us.
I don't get all the constant questions regarding PPE. I mean I get people want and need it and haven't got it, but are they insinuating that someone has a big stash somewhere and they are just not lettng people have it to be akward or something?
Whiteball wrote:I don't get all the constant questions regarding PPE. I mean I get people want and need it and haven't got it, but are they insinuating that someone has a big stash somewhere and they are just not lettng people have it to be akward or something?
I think it is more about asking the Government to hurry up buying the stuff and/or getting it made.
Emoticon and contraction free since... quite a while ago.
Whiteball wrote:I don't get all the constant questions regarding PPE. I mean I get people want and need it and haven't got it, but are they insinuating that someone has a big stash somewhere and they are just not lettng people have it to be akward or something?
I think it is more about asking the Government to hurry up buying the stuff and/or getting it made.
...as a publicity stunt in order to promote their lobbying group.
