Marston's boss says their pubs won't be collecting contact details, stopping people 'propping up the bar' or making his staff wear masks when the pubs re-open.

I hope that their customers bear this in mind when the decide which, if any, pubs they decide to frequent.

Contrast that with the approach adopted by a Bristol pub I know:

.....and so it goes on

https://www.facebook.com/AlmaTavernAndTheatre/

That's rather better researched than the mince in that earlier article I linked to last night in which Stirling was highlighted as being a red zone because its infection rate had tripled - I checked the data and a week with one case was followed by a week with three cases. In the entire region. They named Dumfries and Galloway as heading for a lockdown, probably based on the fact that after a week of no cases at all the region recorded ten cases the following week - due to old data from April being added to the system on the Friday of that week. (D&G may be having a small cluster at the moment, one case then suddenly five cases, but still penny numbers. You do not lock down because six cases appeared in a very rural area.)

Maybe they found someone on the staff who isn't entirely innumerate.

And there was and indeed still is the infrastructure that has been used successfully in other outbreaks for contact tracing. Namely environmental health officers. But they have generally been ignored.

Doing something quietly using existing public sector resources would be something someone who wanted to address an issue quickly and cost effectively would do.

If you wanted instead to make a grand statement and then line the pockets of your friends then you'd build something complicated from scratch and contract out the whole thing. :mad:

This is an interesting article about the divergence between Scotland and England and notes that Scotland has always used the local authority infrastructure and it still is. The numbers of contacts traced per case are quite low so I'm still a bit dubious about this (but having said that we've only just started to come out of lockdown) but they do seem to be having some success.

Scotland could eliminate the coronavirus – if it weren't for England

The cluster that has emerged in the south-west of Scotland is apparently a cross-border issue centred in Annan and Gretna. Only nine cases so far, all in isolation and contacts being traced. This sort of thing is inevitable and it doesn't need to involve England at all - there's still virus present in Scotland. However bandying around words like despicable, astonishing, shameful and racist when a political leader merely doesn't rule out some border controls if the situation worsens is absolutely sickening.

Every country larger than a tennis court is operating some internal border controls to combat this virus, but apparently Scotland, the supposedly valued equal partner in this cherished union (remember "lead us, dont leave us"?) has to allow English tourists to re-seed virus all over the country.

A number of councils including Tory run ones now complaining to UK health ministry they do not have access to credible local Coronavirus stats in order to make decisions regarding mitigating action even tho they know these stats exist within central govt.

I'm just surprised it took them so long to notice. This problem has been evident for weeks if not months.

It's pretty frightening. If you go back to The Hammer and the Dance, the point of the Hammer is not that this alone will solve your coronavirus problem, it's to give a country that was unprepared and hence overwhelmed a second chance. The hammer both brings viral prevalence back down to a level where it can realistically be contained and gives time for the country to prepare, and most specifically to prepare what is needed for the Dance.

What is needed for the Dance is a robust, rapid and reliable find, test, contact-trace, isolate and support operation. Which England quite clearly does not have.

For weeks during lockdown Johnson did nothing at all, leading to many people assuming that he had only locked down to give the NHS a bit of a breather before embarking on the second wave in the futile pursuit of the mis-named "herd immunity". Although the WHO criteria for lifting lockdown included having sufficient TTI capability, England's did not. Instead all that was required was that there was room in the hospitals for more sick and dying people. "Off you go to the pub then, there's room for you now in intensive care" was the quip. But as this time wore on it became more and more obvious from events abroad that a TTI system was really essential. So Johnson did his usual thing of announcing that England was going to have the best one in the world, ignored the LA public health experts who are the nucleus of building such a system, contracted it out to his mates, and opened up anyway before it was even ready never mind tested to see if it could cope.

Reading accounts of how TTI works in countries that are actually beating the virus, we see a number of essential components. One is getting people with clinical signs tested within hours, and another is interviewing them about their contacts as soon as possible and identifying and isolating these contacts within about 24 hours. And above all, getting everyone. There's no point in doing a stellar job of contact tracing on ten new cases if there are actually several hundred new cases you don't know about.

This is what has been going on. I said the other day that there must have been a superspreader event in Leicester to have caused these numbers of cases, but apparently this is thought not to have been the case. There was simply so much virus already in circulation when restrictions were eased that it more or less picked up right where it had left off. It's been known for four weeks that virus was freely circulating there, but nothing has been done. The people doing the contact tracing have not even been told who has tested positive so they can start to do their job.

Leicester is by far the worst, but there are numerous other large towns in England in a similar situation. The way this is going these places are simply a bit earlier on the same curve as Leicester. There doesn't seem to be a hope in hell of contact-tracing in these places, so cases are bound to increase. The R number is probably well above 1 already.

We've also seen from experience abroad that even countries that have well and truly crushed the virus with military-grade testing and tracing systems that pay scant regard to civil liberties have experienced spreading new clusters of disease that they're struggled to contain even with these super-efficient systems.

The point about the Dance is that if infection starts to spread again you have to re-impose some restrictions to get R back down below 1. I can't see Johnson doing that. First he opens the country when infection is widespread meaning that it's going to be far harder to contain spread to R~1 than if it was more contained, then he does it without a functioning TTI operation, then he pretty much paints himself into a corner on not reintroducing restrictions. That isn't dancing, that's Texas. Meanwhile Scotland seems to be successfully dancing for now, and with a much lower viral prevalence and contact tracing teams under local authority control, has a significantly better chance of making it work.

This is going to get very ugly indeed in a few weeks time, and I don't think it's either deplorable, or shameful, or astonishing, or racist, to want to keep options open as regards border controls with a country that's heading where England is heading.

I'm so glad I'm not in the pub game anymore. Reopening on a Saturday is insane. The forecast is for showers, which, while it may mean less demand could also mean that all the people who agree to sit in pub gardens will make a rush for the bar when the rain starts. I wouldn't want to be the bar staff tasked with stopping them, especially if it holds off long enough for a few pints first...

Some analysis of the cases in Leicester - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...ays-phe-report

Schools in England are going to reopen full time in September.

Apparently the combination of relaxing social distancing, treating individual years as bubbles in school (but clearly that's impossible at home as soon as siblings return from school), different start times and so on will magically stop the spread of Coronavirus.

The Government needs positive headlines and they don't care whose lives (apart from their own) they have to risk to get them. :mad:

Quelle surprise :rolleyes:

Kids going back to school and people returning to work resulted in a spike in infections among those two populations.

The government hasn't given sufficiently good guidance on how to make schools and workplaces safe. The idea that just staying 2 metres apart will somehow protect people if they're sharing the same indoor workspace is, IMO, laughable.

Dozens of countries will be exempt from a travel quarantine from Monday, UK government sources have indicated.

Now government sources have indicated that a very long list of countries is likely to be published by the end of this week.

It is possible that up to 75 countries deemed low or very low risk will be exempt from the UK's quarantine from Monday, 6 July.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53261752

That's interesting. And worrying. It's clear the virus has been circulating pretty freely in Leicester for weeks, and who knows about other towns. This is not the place to be when you're opening up. The place to be is that you're poised to jump on every new case and contact-trace it into oblivion. To contain any clusters that pop up so that the virus doesn't get a hold in the wider community. Opening up when the virus already has a hold in the wider community is suicidal.

Contrast the cluster in Annan and Gretna. Nine cases. (Only seven in the reported stats so two must only have been identified yesterday.) The first of these cases was reported on Monday of this week. Three days ago. They're on it. Everyone is at home isolating and the contacts are being tracked down. I imagine the people involved in the English side of the cluster (Longtown?) are being treated the same way. That's how you try to do it. I don't think they have a hope in hell in Leicester unless they lock down a lot harder, and how are they going to do that unless they put a police cordon round the area 24/7?

And by the way let's not blame English visitors for the Annan/Gretna cluster. I'd bet very heavily on this being caused by Scots travelling south to visit the flesh-pots of Carlisle, given that Carlisle is open and Annan and Dumfries are still closed - or were until Monday. Yes we need some sort of control on the border, but it's as much to keep Scots living in virus-free areas from going to the pub in an infected area as it is to control virus introduction by tourists coming north.

But will they exempt the UK from their quarantine list?

Not needing to quarantine when I get back doesn't help me to go on holiday if I have to quarantine for the entire 14 days I'm away.

How is this supposed to be possible? Children will move around, interact with each other, share teachers, use common spaces like libraries, gymnasiums, canteens, corridors....

If Eton can do it....

As I understand it, the intention is that they use shared spaces at the same time and in the cases of libraries, gyms and canteens perhaps not at all. The school will be turned on its head and instead of students going to different rooms, they will stay in the same room - potentially with the same teacher.

Of course that doesn't help for some subjects which require specialist equipment and doesn't acknowledge teaching specialities but I expect that most of the people making these proposals and the decisions read Classics, PPE or some other subject where you didn't need a lab. :rolleyes:

But will they reciprocate?

From that linked BBC story:

I guess the answer is "not necessarily".

If I was a country, like New Zealand, with a low to zero incidence of Coronavirus, I wouldn't want Brits wandering round unless they had been through quarantine - not least because they'd have just spent the best part of 24 hours sharing air with a few hundred fellow disease vectors travellers.

OTOH, I'd be fine with some kiwis entering the UK without quarantine though with the pubs not needing too many staff and Premiership Rugby reducing the salary cap, I'm not sure why they'd want to come here :p

Boris' Dad flew to his Villa in greece via Bulgaria to get round the travel ban from Greece to the UK.

A few people are being critical. (to say the least)

I wondering if he was checking his hearing or something :rolleyes:

If you've signed up to the Covidzoe app, they show some extra data from their own analyses.

This is from their latest report to the government on people reporting not feeling well.

Attachment 42503

I see the Bouffant Buffoon's father has travelled to Greece.
:rolleyes:

ETA: oops, already mentioned. Sorry.

That's interesting, but of course there could be any number of reasons for people not feeling well. The modellers in Scotland, who are not known for their over-optimistic forecasts shall we say, think there are only about 1,500 people in the country in the infectious stage of the virus at the moment.

This map is interesting.



I wonder if Wales is going to have to lock down Merthyr Tydfil. Some other bits of England are looking a bit dodgy too. Is that Bradford, Sheffield and Manchester standing out?

Duplicate. Silly me.

Would this be the same "Boris' Dad" who's applied for a French passport?

Yes, that's consistent with the data from that app.


https://covid.joinzoe.com/data

Blackpool looks potentially concerning

Here's an interesting article from a Welsh newspaper.

https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/nor...virus-18517404

It points out that of the 12 councils with the highest number of recorded coronavirus cases overall in Britain, almost all are in Wales and two are in Scotland. There isn't a single English local authority in there at all. However if you look at the recorded death statistics these councils are nowhere to be seen. Because England has never published true figures on infections detected. It's harder to hide the deaths (though they tried that too for a while by only counting people who had died in hospital).

(Midlothian is the real surprise there for me. It's the next LA to where I live, the county boundary is only three miles away, and it's where I do any shopping I can't do in the village. It's never been a problem area at all in Scotland terms, unless they're including Edinburgh city in there which I suppose they might be, and last week it had no new cases at all.)

Is the under-testing and under-reporting in England just incompetence, or are they actively trying to mislead and make England look good when it's not, I wonder.

Given who's in charge a mix; incompetence that they're happy with.

I suspect you're right. At the beginning Sturgeon said one thing I agreed with (probably the only one at that point), that she was determined to get honest recording of cases and deaths. By and large she seems to have succeeded in that, although now the natural noise in the reporting as odd cases are added and subtracted is actually swamping the real results, as the prevalence is so low.

Ironically we periodically got pelters from Tory politicians about how bad Scotland was compared to England by this or that metric, when in fact the truth was that England was hiding at least half its care home deaths, and a huge slice of its positive test results. The true statistics as they come through show that Scotland's death and infection rates have been catastrophic, just not as catastrophic as England's.

No figures on deaths or infections today?

Is this the place to talk about so-called lockdown sceptics?

Lots of cherrypicking and messing of data to claim it's no worse than a bad flu season and that deaths are mostly due to the lockdown (yes, really claiming that!)

Anyway the ONS data doesn't support that - especially for England and Wales ( Scotland is recorded separately).

It's probably relevant because you can see the undercounting by 2000 to 4000 per weeek for the 5 weeks of the peak.

Attachment 42511

ETA you can see that now, we at least look to be accounting for the COVID-19 deaths

I ended up making a a Twitter thread about this, and unsurprisingly getting blocked by one prominent advocate when I asked how he made his graphs.

This graph was in reply to one claim that winter 2017-2018 was equivalent

I haven't been able to find the figures for yesterday. Even the BBC's summary page, updated daily, doesn't include them for the first time ever AFAIK, though it looks like they've added them to the graphs. By eye, yesterday's deaths seem to be slighter higher than Wednesday's, which was 176.

ETA: Actually I'm not sure they have had added Thursday's figure to the graphs. They repeat that Wednesday's figure was 176 but even that's buried in the text. In previous updates there's been a graphic near the top of the page giving, aot, the previous day's number of deaths and new infections. That graphic seems to have been removed entirely.

E again TA: The global Covid tracker I use doesn't have any UK numbers for yesterday either, only the cumulative numbers.

seems the govt hasn't released them, I wonder if that's anything to do with the pubs opening on Saturday?
It's being pushed by the govt as 'Super Saturday'
Don't want to worry people.

Remember, if you get sick because of the government rushing through lifting lockdown restrictions in the middle of an uptick in infections during a pandemic, it's your fault for being insufficiently alert. :rolleyes:

This site says 89 for yesterday.

It does have this note, which might explain any delays:

A Facebook friend was trying to claim it was no worse than flu, pointing at the ONS figures, but that was before Covid-19 deaths were actually showing up in the published figures.

Ah.. I'm talking a lot later... like now.

Anyway here's my thread on it as Alistair Haimes seems to be a goto person for such spurious analyses.

https://twitter.com/ParkinJim/status...778314240?s=20

Basically, this graph, if not completely "fiction", is about as true as a John Wayne war film "based on real events"

Attachment 42512

Scotland announced five new infections and one further death yesterday at the usual time (12.30). The local authority area new infections added up to ten though. With the numbers so low the noise in the data sometimes overwhelms the actual numbers!

England apparently decided to sort out its data recording yesterday and incorporate the pillar 2 tests they'd been concealing for months to make themselves look better. By all accounts they have been doing a thorough job of it, by allocating the newly-disclosed results to the correct days and also removing duplicate counting (some people were tested by both pillar 1 and pillar 2 and had been counted twice). So this explains the delay in the England figures I think and anyone looking at them now should be able to get a much better idea not just of what's going on but of what was going on. Just a pity they didn't do it sooner and it took Leicester to bring it to a head.

I also saw a report that they were going to start issuing the results, in public, by postcode area. If this is true it will be absolutely great and will allow people to get a real idea of what's going on in their local area. I've been howling about this for weeks, because the LA region where I live is about 100 miles wide and rumour had it that the grumbling viral activity being reported was all centred on a care home in Eyemouth which is genuinely getting on for 100 miles from me. So if England starts producing postcode area data hopefully Scotland will have to do the same. I can't wait!

One thing that's coming out is that Leicester really is the worst area in England by a fair margin and other towns that have been mentioned do not have problems to nearly the same extent. The only other comparable area is Merthyr in Wales where there was a big meat packing plant cluster which bumped the numbers up really high but which the authorities say they have under control by contact tracing. So maybe Leicester will be an isolated incident at least for now.

The very high infection numbers for many places in England are still a worry though, considering the opening up that's happening. The cases occurring at the moment aren't being contact-traced and isolated so how will they manage when people are going to the pub?

I have been hearing more about the Annan-Gretna cluster, although it's been difficult to verify this from press reports.

I'm told that the problem started with a healthcare worker who works in England but lives in Scotland and brought the virus back from work. Well no border closure would have prevented that because people would be allowed to cross the border to go to work. However (and this bit is in the press reports) "illegal gatherings" were involved, allegedly indoor house parties, and that's where the virus was spread around a number of people in the community in Scotland.

Who is this genius, working in a hospital in a relatively high-prevalence area, who then goes home to a low-prevalence area and illegally mixes with people indoors? I don't suppose he or she will be prosecuted for this, but dammit if it was up to me there would be charges brought.

So they changed the method to make the figures look lower to reassure the party goers?

If so, it wouldn't be the first time that the government has done something similar.

Well, the timing is convenient.

As I understand it the opposite is the case. The outcry over the previous deceptive reporting method caused by the Leicester outbreak (which didn't show at all in the published figures, only in the ones they weren't publishing) has prompted a wholesale overhaul and they're not only going to do it right from now on, they're allocating all the historical unreported cases to their correct dates so that the historical figures are also correct.

Nor does the ECDC data

Just a negative 29726 cases

I think the negative number is the result of the elimination of the double counting I mentioned earlier. Some people had tests on both pillar 1 and pillar 2 and because of the shambolic recording and reporting system they were double-counted when the two groups were combined. That has now been corrected.

Shambolic from start to finish.

Have you been listening to BBC More or Less?

It's been utterly damning every week.

About the testing, and the lateness of the lockdown, indeed.

The most recent (the 14th in the 7 episode series :) ) seemed fairly optimistic about the current situation in terms of dealing with the disease.

I do hope so. The situation in England scares me. Opening pubs while there's still free circulation of virus and no effective contact tracing in operation. I do not want that on our southern border and the very mention of the border controls necessary to protect us from it are causing British nationalists to go into meltdown. The obvious way out is for England to suppress the virus too, it just doesn't look all that likely from where I'm sitting right now.