That is a weird way for WHO to word it. Persons with antibodies are "infected" all the time, they are just able to fight the infection better, because of the antibodies, and won't develop the disease. (or rather are much less likely to get the disease)

Sorry, I don't understand the highlighted reference.

It means the girlfriend is fake, made up, doesn't exist. This is done to score some social acceptability points to their peers while never having to produce any evidence of said girlfriend. Because she 'lives in Canada!"

It's a dated reference that doesn't work if you actually live in Canada. :D

No, just a non sequitur by WHO.

There's no evidence it doesn't confer immunity either.

This. And seeing as I'm British I didn't think it was a particularly obscure reference.

Heh! It confused this Canadian. Pretty much all the guys I know have Canadian girlfriends (and occasionally boyfriends.)

Covid solves social ills. Tourists out, homeless into accommodation.

The housing minister explains in this sparsely populated land flowing with milk and honey.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/a...ectid=12327634

No, a crack team of highly motivated Bilbies...

Greater_bilby^WP

I shudder to think what the clean-up when they leave will cost.

Are they serving breakfasts?

It is a huge earn for motels with government paying near retail or were prior.
Motels will be HODLing their new best friends.
Dont expect them to leave for months.

UK had more Coronavirus deaths yesterday than any two other European nations added together. That one week where Boris dabbled in Herd Immunity without any real opposition in Parliament is still haunting us.

The front page of the Telegraph is trumpeting the government thinking about quarantining anyone coming in to the UK. Too late, it's something it should have done weeks ago

Perhaps we should quarantine anyone leaving instead.

Given that the homeless people being housed will presumably have access to the same sanitation facilities that the rest of us take for granted I doubt it will be much different than they're used to. Poor personal hygiene among the homeless isn't normally by choice after all, and frankly not everyone who stays in hotels under normal circumstances floats along in a cloud of orange blossoms. For that matter when travelling for business I've slept in a couple of places where I kept my clothes on and slept on top of the sheets because I wanted as little contact between my body and their bed as possible.

Could we just quarantine the government?

Priti Patel bragging about the drop in shoplifting; I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say there’s probably also been a bit of a dip in car crashes, accidental drownings and people tripping over uneven paving stones.

Scottish crime figures have been interesting:

• Overall crime down 25%
• Serious assault down 40%
• Break-ins down 30%
• "Public nuisance" incidents - generally related to people reporting others for breaking lockdown rules - have more than doubled
• Fraud up 10%
• A slight decrease in domestic violence, but police say that this might not reflect what is actually happening

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-52424893

But well done Priti, your policies on shoplifting are clearly working :rolleyes:

Dominic Raab was a member of a Facebook group called 'The Ultras'
They stated that 'selling off council housing, ending free healthcare, and bringing back workhouses for debtors are policies that "have found their time to enter Britain".

He is now running the country!

The government is “reviewing” the surcharge that some migrant doctors and nurses working in the NHS must pay to access the health service, the home secretary Priti Patel has said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...migrant-medics

I still can't get past "Health minister Nadine Dorries"... :(

An of course were getting the newspapers headlines about Johnson returning to take the reins, conveniently glossing over the shambles of his handling of events before he fell ill.

Boris Johnson's return to work on Monday after more than three weeks out of action will be a "boost for the country", his deputy has said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52431913

Sorry, it was a bit of a private joke between a couple of Kiwis.

These aren't homeless people in the sense of street people - they're still being cared for by City Mission and other charitable groups.

The "homeless" being put up in motels are - with some exceptions* - the absolute dregs of society: people who have destroyed rentals and been evicted, gang members, serial non-payers of rent, and other filth.

Thanks to a tight housing market, those people can't get places to rent, so live in garages and cars and now they're wrecking motels at our expense.

Not actually that funny.

*I pity these poor bastards - some of them are just on a bad run of luck and now they're sharing motels with people they would normally cross the street to avoid.

I think Covid has allowed the streets to be cleared by law. There has never been a rational defence for homeless to allow to freely congregate around shop entrances and impede commerce. Rates and rents are usually unaffordable before these obstructions wreck the balance of the operation.
New Zealand flows with milk and honey, and the coalition failed/refused to honour their pledge to fix the ills.
Pathetic, the international community is blind to the total illusion created by Saint bl**** Mother Theresa Jacinda Ardern.
Hopefully people on this thread are not fooled.
Motels should not be paid retail rates, I know after meeting a motelier in Te Awamutu who cited the 6 units of homeless at 1000 a week as his superannuation scheme. The units were leased for 3 years by you and me with a right to renew. Yield of say 30%?

Have you seen the price of honey?

Our local supermarket has it behind locked doors, with the cigarettes.

Look, I've been critical of Plastic Fantastic, but I have to give her 10/10 during Covid.

Yes, they haven't delivered on promises, but let me know when you find a government that ever has. We could be doing a lot worse.

On the flip side, they're not throwing them on the streets, as that dick Bridges would do.

Covid will be the saviour of this Labour government. They were shaky beforehand, but Ardern's popularity is now about 9000%, so they'll bolt in.

Dimwit Judith Collins supporting Bridges means the opposition is completely out of touch with their own voters, and outside the Northern Club's couple of thousand members, I see National winning dick in Auckland.

An interesting question is if those handful of huge clusters generated unnecessarily by delaying the lockdown were a necessary evil to focus the public mind and explain the crisis.
If answer is yes, was it lucky, smart or wicked?

No, I think they were hoping the half-arsed measures prior to lockdown would work.

Ardern was listening to Bloomfield the entire time, so I'd say he got it wrong.

A good account of New Zealand cluster cases here not paywalled. Note the dates. There were vociferous calls to lockdown that would have prevented all but the Hereford cluster. No point in glossing over this and praising New Zealand for going early. Powerful business and medical advisors were ignored by Ardern.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/a...ectid=12326990

Boris Johnson is Churchillian in the sense of his debacle at Gallipoli or the Indian famine

Your facts are wrong. They have not stopped development, James Dyson will fund the the project out of his own pocket to a sum of £20,000,000. The intent being to potentially supply ventilators to the developing world. The approval process is under way.
https://www.med-technews.com/news/dy...equired-in-uk/

Perhaps he was busy reading reports on a real pandemic? It may be that given he was the foreign secretary that his civil servants might not have been familiar with the exercise either. It may never have come up in his briefing pile. Or if an executive summary did appear in his in box he may not remember the name attached to it. My guess is that putting up a large document on a UK response to a pandemic exercise was not where the foreign secretary was expected to focus his attention.

Thanks - that wasn't in the original reports.

ETA: Just a note that Dyson does not say what you say he does - his statement in full https://www.dyson.co.uk/newsroom/ove...or-update.html

1) Good of him to not accept the non-existent public money
2) No mention of approval under way - where have you got that from?
3) No mention of "developing countries"

Being a bit nit-picking, I think.

Article has been moved/taken down.

Substitute with "you wouldn't know her, she goes to a different school"

Also how the hell has he spent 20 million!?!

I have followed up on this. there is reasonable evidence that this is fake news.
https://fullfact.org/online/evidence...ke-nhs-tweets/
The twitter account seems to make numerous dubious claims. E.g. that
There is no doubt that this is fake news, it is impossible even if you have clinical need to get unfettered access to ALL NHS data on an individual, and knowing some of the data guardians, they very strictly limit access to what is needed and usually anonymised.

I think people posting on this site should due some due diligence before posting what are essentially CT to this thread.

There is a separate thread where twitter fake news can be posted.

- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52441428

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Several sites mention that the approval process is in process.
E.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...treat-covid-19

I know several people here think that James Dyson must be an evil person because he is a member of the conservative party. But I think we have established that claims by some posters here that he bribed the government or was involved in some for of corrupt relationship were shown to be untrue when it became apparent that despite some posters claiming that he had donated millions to the conservative party that turned out to be untrue.

I think that it should be applauded that Dyson tried to help at a time of need by designing and setting up manufacturing for ventilators at a cost of millions to himself. Even conservatives can sometimes stand up and do the right thing. I think Dyson did so. Whilst it is obviously good that the ventilators aren't needed in the UK there are large parts of the world that would benefit from a cheap and basic ICU ventilator.

ETA
I know some people think that my challenging the veracity of some claims here means I must be a shill for the government, but on this site seeking to verify facts should not be seen as political.

Thanks, but I'd rather go from what Dyson himself has said, one presumes he knows what he has been and what he is doing better than a journalist... Apart from keeping control of costs, amazing it's cost such a round figure.....