A premiership footballer who grew up relying on free school meals.

Boris says he did not know about the ⁦Marcus Rashford⁩ campaign on school meals until today.
Either he has terrible advisors not telling him about something like this, or he just makes it all up as he goes along and doesn’t even care that we all know it’s rubbish.

Oh, I know this one! Pick me! Pick me!

So the line’s changed again. No.10 now claiming Boris was aware of the Rashford campaign before today. They’re just making this up as they go along now. It’s embarrassing.

Well I don't think he's at trumpian levels, one would assume that's down to the audience..

I guess people would expect those leaving 14 day quarantine in New Zealand would first test negative.
No, testing is voluntary and hundreds refused testing.
Testing has been by request generally.
New Zealand politicians have been lucky but there is a vicious backlash as people learn this.
I just heard on talkback a woman who was interviewing an Australian man with a bad cold for a chef's job.
He had just been released from quarantine and never tested.
This account sounded correct, she said get outta here!

The two women with covid got lost on the way to the funeral and gave a kiss and cuddle to a woman who helped with directions.

The prime minister and minister of health say they have no responsibility for failings by those operatives.
This is confirming countless stories of porous borders assumed secure as fort knox.

UK Tabloids hailing Boris for discovering the 'NHS Wonder Drug' that cures Covid.
It's a breakthrough that will transform Covid and let us all go back to the pub.

Well, that's how the front pages read.

PMQs - Did my ears play tricks or did Johnson just describe using forecasts to plan for anticipated problems as "introducing a new concept"?

I’m prepared to believe that it’s new to him.

Believe it? Yes, admit to it? More suprised.

UK Track and trace app won't be working until the winter (meaning never).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53083340

It used to be a prerequisite for lockdown restrictions being lifted.

Premiership Football is back so all is well :mad:

Matt Hancock says the govt is protecting the UK from countries where the "rate of infection is higher" but is unable to name which ones, other than Brazil.

There seemed to be problems with the technology there as well.

Texas?

Let me get this straight, there are people out there defending Boris spending £900,000 to paint his plane but angry that over a million children won’t go hungry this summer?

Tinned Kangaroo ********* in exchange for Uncle Joes Mint Balls is a non-starter as far as I'm concerned. A deal too far.

Between this and the no-deal Brexit, the Conservatives may want to rethink their promises to the electorate.

It was "It won't be worse than the Battle for Britain" and that may become undeliverable by this time next year.

McHrozni

Covid-19 has already killed more British civilians than the Luftwaffe. :mad:

We're already there and yet Boris Johnson, his cronies and his government aren't getting the kicking they deserve. Instead we have headlines about miracle cures (as if Boris Johnson himself did the research), Premier League Football being back and the pubs being open soon.

USA is already at 25% of total WW2 deaths and is losing 800 people a day. By way of comparison, they lost about 100 men/day during Siege of Bastogne.

The upside for Russia is they probably won't be anywhere near their grim mark.

McHrozni

I think you misinterpret what the article says,

So the article does not say that the app does not work (as an app), but that humans do the job better. Whilst there is the wetware resource available and this is empirically the best tool for the job, then it seems sensible to go with the wetware and reserve the software for a possible surge when further resources are needed. (From an economic PoV employing people rather than electrons to do the job is probably better.)

Is this true, good sound bite, but can I trust what you post?

Current UK deaths from covid-19 about 40,000. Total UK civilian deaths from bombing 60,000.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...covid-19-cases
https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/hist...mbing/britain/
You may be correct if you are limiting it to the 'Blitz'.

Not at all. Originally the government said that a track and trace app was a prerequisite for lifting lockdown restriction. Here we are with lockdown restrictions being lifted and no track and trace app.

The government may claim that its down to personal preference but the weasel words used don't pass the sniff test IMO:

"Some" people's preference causing the rollout to be postponed ? Pull the other one. I've been involved with enough large UK government IT projects to recognise the pattern. Some people (rather a lot actually) didn't want to move to Universal Credit but that didn't stop the government pressing ahead (despite the issues with the pilot).

Of course another important part of the puzzle is how well the human tracers are faring. The latest edition of Private Eye has some very interesting content about who is doing the tracing, how effective the scripts for the non-medically trained staff are and how busy the tracers are. It's dispiriting reading :(.

You're talking about the headline daily number which has specific exclusions.

An extrapolation of the number released by the ONS in the last couple of days was 53,000 and the number of excess deaths is a further 12,000+ so I'm pretty happy saying that Coronavirus has killed more people in the UK UK civilians than the Luftwaffe (not least because a significant proportion of the 60,000 killed will have been service personnel).

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-16/...t-ons-figures/

That's deaths with positive result. Excess deaths are now over 64,000. So it depends how you count them.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51768274

Actually maybe I should falsely concede the point and suggest that the government should proudly announce:

"The UK's Coronavirus response - not quite as effective as the Luftwaffe" :rolleyes:

Plenty of time though, the war lasted for years.

"UK's Coronavirus response - worse than the Luftwaffe, but at least it didn't last as long".

McHrozni

What a snappy turn of phrase. You should expect a job offer from Mr Cummings any time now. :D

Given Johnson's desire to be like Churchill, forum members located in Coventry may wish to stay with friends for a while.

There was significant under-counting at the peak of the epidemic in the UK.

I got into a Twitter argument with someone who was claiming that the number of deaths was no worse than a bad flu season, for example the winter of 2017-2018, so I looked at the ONS weekly deaths data for England and Wales only for 2017, 2018, and 2020 and compared them with the 2018 5-year average and the number of deaths where COVID-19 was shown on the death certificate.

You can clearly see the undercounting of 2-4 thousand a week during the main peak of the epidemic.

It also gives you an idea of the expected variation in death numbers.

Remember this is only for England and Wales as that's an easy set of numbers to get.

The numbers are week numbers and this is to week 22
Attachment 42420

ETA: you can also see the impact of the bank holiday on the death registrations in weeks 19 and 20

I wonder if the people have received any training yet?

Ten US states are seeing resurgance and the Second Coming: Alabama, Arizona, California, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina and Texas.

I'm remindied of the Battleship row for some reason.

McHrozni

I'm not sure California ever finished it's first wave

And no Vera Lynn to get you through this one :(

The government strongly suggested that the decision not to roll out the track and trace application wasn't due to the fact that the application was a complete failure and was instead because "some people" expressed a preference in dealing with human trackers.

That explanation has been undermined somewhat by this annoucement:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53095336

There's no problem with the technology, but in a completely unrelated move, the government has decided to change to a different technology. :rolleyes:

I've been involved with a number of large government IT projects and sooner or later the idea of a Version 0 comes up, a face-saving, low functionality release to spare blushes - all this has the whiff of a Version 0 in the offing:

In other words, none of the actual difficult functionality. I've had a Covid-19 symptom tracking app on my phone for months as part of a large study. The much vaunted government application which is still months away doesn't provide much more functionality than that.

What a complete shambles :mad:

This new "miracle treatment".
Um...it would have saved 4000 lives.

OK, not to be sneezed at (if you'll pardon the expression), but that's only 1 in 10.
It's hardly the discovery of penicillin.

I expect every idiot will now go "yay, we can all get back to normal".

Looking at the UK's numbers they look rather bleak. We have 300,000 positive tests and 42,000 deaths. Even if each positive test were a unique person, that's a death rate of 14%.

Now I realise that comparatively few people have been tested and so the number of people who have, or who have had Coronavirus is likely to be many times the 300,000 who have tested positive but dayumm them's some high numbers.

If we can get a grip on chemical prevention (maybe if no-one were vitamin D deficient then the number of deaths would be lower) and get to treating with steroids and anti-coagulants early then maybe a positive diagnosis isn't quite the death sentence that it currently seems to be. :o

None of them did.
Nearly 6000 new cases in Florida between yesterday and today, and today's not over.

That’s Soccer to you now that BJ is adopting US standards to get a trade agreement. :p