I picked it because we have to talk about some timescale. I assumed you thought some number of months of social distancing would likely be necessary. Pick a different figure if you like.

So long as people are social distancing, it surely doesn't matter too much whether they are social distancing in the street near me, or on a hill near you.

By all means, suggest an amount of time that you think social distancing may be needed.

Worrying about the economy has nothing to do with whether they are worried about the welfare of workers. One would have to be ideologically possessed to insist on only factoring one of those into the calculation.

We are going to have to go back to work at some point and the longer we wait the more lives will be ruined from the cost of it. Without a lot of cost benefit analysis that we probably lack the data for, we are just throwing ideological positions back and forth.

There is no panacea short of welding everybodies door shut and posting sterilized food rations through our letter boxes. Anything that involves us going outside is a compromise. If we accept that we are going to have some degree of going outside, then we have accepted that some degree of freedom is worth some increased spread of the virus, we are just haggling over how much.

What do you mean by "not good enough"? Why is going outside acceptable at all if we are that afraid? Bring in the army and lock things down like it was 1970s Belfast.

If those welsh people are social distancing then it seems unlikely there will be much infection. The virus is clearly out there, and I'm not saying it's zero risk, but the corner shops near me in North London seem to have avoided being infected despite dealing with plague riddled English all day long. Doubtless some shopkeepers have, but again... it's not as bad as you're making out.

yes, but people weren't social distancing then, were they? If people in Wales are social distancing then a few days of the Welsh police telling the English to go away isn't going to do much of anything.

Now we should wear masks on public transport and in some shops but not at work in offices or retail.
Also a face covering is not the same as face masks, such as those worn by healthcare workers which "must continue to be reserved for those who need it".

You can meet one person from outside your household a day but keep social distancing.

Keep your windows open.


So that's all clear.

Well I drive so I would be fine, and I could sort of work from home, though given space and hardware issues its far from ideal. However I've got colleagues who can't work from home and use public transport, including a shuttle bus that ferries people to the commercial estate where we work. Basically my company had to furlough people because the clients they work with had shutdown, so until those clients gear back up they aren't going to voluntarily reactivate people. All I really want is some clarity on what the next step is.

Boris has just been asked when the public can expect some sort of clarity in what they’re being told. He responded by waffling.

And they will only be able to play with one other person not from their household.

Make it vague, then the subsequent covid outbreaks aren't the governments fault, but the fault of those not following the rules. The economy is important.

I kind of get why the Tories wanted rid of immigrants. But they now appear to be going after the elderly, who usually vote for them and the working class, who recently started to vote for them again.

Yes, they shouldn’t be interfering with each other’s.

Well be fair, they pretty much knew they might have conned the working class once but there was no way Johnson could get through five years without showing his true colours, and with Labour having a leader who can apparently go five minutes without putting his foot in his mouth ,the Tories have clearly decided they might as well try and save some of that money they're spending on workers wages regardless of whether it kills off working class voters.

That makes no sense.
R for covid is 3 (apparently), the goal is to get R to less than 1.

R + new infections breaks the **** out of the equation. Even if you swap out the plus sign for some other operator like maybe it's an exponent, it still doesn't work. There's no way you are getting to less than 1 that reflects reality with that equation. The covid-19 alert level would be 1 + lots of people.

Unfortunately I find it all too easy to imagine.

I have been told I'm a bit of a "glass half empty" guy, mind you.

All they have to do is switch out BoJo with someone else. They can then say that it's a completely new party, one which has no responsibility for anything previous Tories has done. Unless they were good things.

What is it about security guards that makes that the highest mortality job?

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulat...ing20april2020

"Compared with the rate among people of the same sex and age in England and Wales, men working in the lowest skilled occupations had the highest rate of death involving COVID-19, with 21.4 deaths per 100,000 males (225 deaths); men working as security guards had one of the highest rates, with 45.7 deaths per 100,000 (63 deaths)."

Is it the job, or the men who do the job why the rate is so high?

The scary thing is Johnson is actually preferable to any of the alternatives. He may be a lazy lying bully, but he has no ideology apart from "whatever is best for Boris Johnson". The rest of them are far right crackpots.

It could be a simple coincidence. Those two samples are both quite small.

It could also be other things - how are smoking rates among security guards? Do they feel pressured to come to work while sick?
Another thing is viral load, there is a strong dose-dependent response for Covid-19, the more viral particles you come into contact with the more likely more adverse outcomes are (this is not uncommon, by itself).

Another possibility is that security guards, by the virtue of their exposure to many more people, are also tested more often. They don't die any more often than the general public but Covid-19 is more likely to be diagnosed if they do die.

It's probably a combination of all of those of course.

McHrozni

When told workers were left confused thinking they had to go back on Monday, only to be told it was Wednesday after many already crammed into Tubes, Matt Hancock tells the BBC: “I think if that’s the biggest complaint the Today programme has, then I think things are fine”.
He sounds like he's just about had enough, he's about 8 seconds from shouting ‘you don’t even understand anything’, slamming the door and stomping off to go and see his friends.

Both Dominic Cummings and Stanley Johnson took advantage of the good weather at the weekend to cross the country to visit relatives.
In Cummings case this involved traveling from London to Durham and back.
Both journeys against the explicit advice given by the govt.

If anything, security guards standing outside shops or checking now empty premises are less exposed. None work at clubs and bars any more and that was the highest risk of exposure.

It will take years to unravel this.

How the virus arrived in Scotland;

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/new...box=1589229055

"CORONAVIRUS was brought to Scotland at a global Nike conference in February but the Scottish Government failed to tell the public, a new report claims.
It's claimed the deadly bug was brought to Scottish soil after an event held in Edinburgh with over 70 Nike employees from around the world in attendance on February 26 and 27 at the Hilton Carlton Hotel.
A BBC investigation has found that at least 25 people linked to this one event are confirmed to have been infected, with eight living in Scotland"

So on the one hand it appears the go back to work message was aimed at construction and engineering, on the other hand it is being reported the Chancellor is going to announce that the furlough payments will be cut to 60% when the current scheme runs out in June. My employer currently tops up the 80% figure to 90% so it will be interesting to see what happens next. Obvious point is that even at say 70% its still vastly more than I would get from unemployment benefits.

Or what if you don't think your employer has done enough to make your working environment safe and you refuse to go back to work? Can they fire you then?

Don't get me wrong - I can still imagine it. It just seems less likely the more Starmer actually acts like a real leader of a real political party, and the more Johnson and the Tories act like, well, Johnson and the Tories.

And, I mean, "second-worst death toll in the world under the Tories" is one hell of a campaign slogan.

FTFY - your age is showing! :D

True I can see the campaign materials:

"Second-worst death toll in the world under the Tories, there's still more to do!"

Of the Tory party.......

Given the chronic under funding of the H&S exec for over a decade it is not as if you can even report your employers and expect them to be inspected.

In the last 24 hours government ministers have:

Made it illegal to drive to Wales
Stated, wrongly, that Covid-19 is in the water supply
Made it easier to see other people's parents than your own
Issued guidance about business that the London Chamber of Commerce have instructed us to ignore
Issued guidance about lockdown that 3 of the 4 nations in the Union have instructed us to ignore
Released advice experts were not given a chance to review and approve
Said the announcement had to be on Sunday so it could start Monday then said they meant Wednesday
Said we must go to work then said we must not travel to work
Blamed the public for not understanding them
Appeared on TV to explain the rules, got them wrong, and had to be corrected by Piers Morgan
Appeared in Parliament to explain the rules, got them wrong, and had to be corrected by the opposition

Don’t forget, you can spend all day with your work colleagues, but can’t sit in the park with them afterwards

It wasn’t very long ago we were told only masks with a filter would be of any use, now a cut up sock is just fine
Make sure you wash them first

I'm sure Cummings will be offering his resignation....

In a shocking development the Chancellor has announced the future of the furlough scheme in clear easy to understand terms:

UK furlough scheme extended by four months

He will have to go, there's no place in the Johnson government for a minister going around announcing clear, rational policies...

They had to do this or they'd have to have changed legislation regarding insolvency etc. if they didn't want a huge wave of companies going into liquidation*. But I was starting to think they could be so utterly stupid as to do neither. And of course the move to be able to maintain salary but have employees work part time is very good news. At the moment any one furloughed is pretty much 100% stopped from doing any work for the company.


(*To put it plainly without all the legal and business speak - at the moment many companies are trading at a significant loss, cash flow has almost become entirely one way for many, if he didn't announce that this scheme would continue for such a period of time many boards would have had a legal obligation to declare their company insolvent as they'd no longer be able to say they had reasonable expectations to cover anticipated and already owed debts... eventually.)

Yeah - he really does seem to stick out like a sore thumb doesn't he? I have to say I have been very impressed with him throughout this, literally the only member of the senior government that seems to be at all competent.

That said it's when he's got to start to make expenditure balance with income again that we will see his real ability.

Quite true, but I think he said at some point that austerity can't feature in the recovery of the economy. Whatever does happen I will take some small crumb of comfort in that I know where I stand financially ATM, while I try to figure out of its okay for me to meet my elderly mother in a garden centre so long as she's carrying a set of golf clubs...

I assume that the slogan was decided on before anyone had decided what the advice was going to be. “Stay alert” sounds nice and WWII-ish to tie in with the VE Day anniversary celebrations. I don’t think there was too much worry about what it might be supposed to mean.

Made free to read, probably because it needs to be shared as much as possible. Excess deaths;

https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-...3-955839e06441

UK 50,000 (of which 9000 in London)
USA 30,800 (of which 17,800 in NY)
Spain 32,000
Italy 24,500
France 22,100
Germany 4,800

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov has been hospitalized for coronavirus.

Also A BBC article detailing the various numbers being used in the UK:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52623141

BMJ not impressed with government:
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/05/11...mlpZhMYxVTjv7I

Yeah, it worked last time. I have literally been told by someone that they voted for Boris (not Uxbridge so they voted for the local Tory) as a protest vote against the last government...:mad::mad::eek:

I don't want to jump to conclusions, but I'm starting to think that maybe putting the country in the hands of an incredibly lazy after dinner speaker with a history of lies and spectacularly expensive failures might not have been fantastically smart after all.