With the clapping, minute's silence, and medals to be handed out at some future date, the NHS staff must be delighted and not at all concerned about the lack of PPE, lack of testing, high risk of catching a deadly disease, poor pay, and few other minor inconveniences. :rolleyes:

Yes thank you.

I find this creepy, and not at all reassuring or moral raising. They could at least wait until this is all over to do this or have the minutes silence for all those who have died.

It will be in leu of pay

You seem to have a fantasy that the anyone in government was needed to instruct health protection units to do their job. They contact trace all the time for TB or meningitis or norovirus. Every winter they deal with outbreaks of flu or diarrhoea in nursing homes. Periodically they need to deal with imported illnesses such as SARS, MERS, Ebola, or HPAI. They needed no government instruction to do what they do every day. If you want a military analogy they are like recon platoons if things go well they detect probing from the enemy and close it down, if they are overwhelmed they hope to slow things down allowing time for the next stage of pandemic response to be activated. No one expects the President or Prime Minister to be instructing platoon commanders.

To quote from the Guardian article above,
So contrary to Darat's opinion contact tracing was doing well in containing the outbreak. The reason the decision was made to stop was because the outbreak had reached scenario 3 in the ECDC pandemic response plan with sustained multi centre in country transmission. This was a predetermined stop point when a different approach was to be taken. This was not a governmental decision this was essentially a medical decision.

It looks as if (reviewing the current literature) that simple contact tracing will not be effective at controlling SARS-CoV-2. What is needed is social distancing & contact tracing. Currently the number of cases is too great for contact tracing to be effectively done. When and if the number of cases significantly falls contact tracing with social distancing may be effective. The reason I think that South Korea was effective is because their contact tracing occurred in parallel with social distancing.

Edited because my OCDC nature prevents me not doing so.

Some people are making money out of this by being paid quite a lot to do extra shifts, not surprisingly these are people who do quite a lot of private practice that has now folded. Our unit struck a deal that we wouldn't ask for extra pay if management would leave us alone to organise ourselves.

I appreciate that cleaners and porters are on fairly low wages and I hope are benefitting from opportunities for overtime. The rest of us are grateful to be employed when so many are losing their jobs.

They set their own budgets do they? The answer by the way is no.

For some reason you really seem to need the senior government leaders to be held not responsible for what they want to govern.

The facts are quite clear, the UK government did not act in a competent manner, did not implement the right the policies at the right time.

I'd love to know how the hospital porters and cleaners, shelf fillers, delivery drivers etc feel about having gone from easily replaced and unskilled at their last pay review to vital for the running of the country and required to risk infection by keeping working in such a short period. Especially since a relatively high number of them are foreign born and don't earn enough to qualify to enter the country under the Priti Patel scale.

Apparently US oil is now worthless...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/li...latest-updates

"US oil market collapses into negative prices"

"The price of US crude oil has fallen by more than 105% on Monday as rising stockpiles of crude threaten to overwhelm oil storage facilities. It is the lowest level since futures contracts began trading in 1983.

The crash in demand caused by the pandemic has forced oil producers in Canada to start paying buyers to take the glut of oil barrels they cannot store, causing the country’s benchmark oil price to plunge into negative territory for the first time."

I have been tracking it all evening. Down to -$40 for West Texas Crude Futures for June.

All the storage is full and it's being put on to tankers moored up to use as extra storage.

Not you personally, of course, but how thick are Poms?

Our border shut three weeks ago and we had 9 new cases yesterday. We can lend you Jacinda to sort the place out if you like - her job here is nearly done.

Covid-19 and Politics
 

That’s why we pay these key workers so much. Imagine how much it would cost from the inheritance if kids had to pay for their parents care at a “key” worker salary based on MPs salary. Warehousing the old dears needs to be done as cheaply as possible!

Perhaps since people can’t go to work now we should send all old folk in care homes whose kids earn more than care workers to their kids until the lockdown is over....

We voted Johnson in with a huge majority, that should answer your question.

They could, you know, stop pumping it out of the ground for a while. Just a suggestion.

Britain will review its approach to the coronavirus pandemic to learn what it could have done better "when the time is right" says Culture Minister Oliver Dowden.

They will put it in the same drawer containing the report on Russian interference in Brexit and the election.

Sadly it's not quite that simple.

More like "They should have not overinvest in new oil wells/drills/whatever five years ago.". And yes, they can be criticized for that since there were already signs back then that oil is going to go down more or less permanently. COVID-19 only moved timeline.

This twitter thread outlines how the UK Department of Health and Social Care faked at least 128 twitter accounts of NHS staff (many using actual staff names and pictures without the person's knowledge or permission) to publish pro-government/pro-Johnson propaganda, to support the idea of "herd immunity", and then to push the idea of re-opening the country.

On being discovered, almost all of the accounts disappeared in one fell swoop. DHSC has denied involvement and refused further comment, but the accounts have been traced to an advertising firm staffed only by three ex-DHSC staff, and with just one client - DHSC.

Any policy decision would have been taken long before the outbreak occurred. Policy does not occur in a crisis. Any budget decisions would have been taken last year, allocation of budgets within the overall health budget is not a ministerial decision. You seem to imagine that ministers micro-manage the details.

I have asked you for fact but all you give is opinion. You say the government was not competent in managing contact tracing in the current outbreak but you are unable to identify in what way they were incompetent. I think the time has come for you to put up or shut up. If you can not specify the way the government was incompetent in contact tracing then my only conclusion is that you are oblivious to fact and prejudice based on 'but Brexit!'.

Vague allusions such as 'set their own budgets' just indicates that you fail to understand that these are local decisions not ministerial. That you try to blame decisions taken on the overall health budget in 2018 on the government elected in November 2019 just shows you do not understand how national budgets work. Yet alone on how local allocation is decided locally.

I have tried to explain why your obsession with blame politics is actually harmful in trying to improve and learn from the current situation. Your obsession seems to be with BoJo bad, so we would be Covid free if Corbyn had been elected? Does not explain why things are the same in France, Holland, Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Spain etc. There is no uniquely bad outcome for the UK. The European policy to a pandemic was clearly set out and was followed by the current government. What you are arguing is that they should not have followed the EU policy, but followed a separate UK policy. You can go and look at the prestated policy if you really wanted to, but you don't, you prefer a biased uninformed opinion. In retrospect would different decisions at different times have been more effective - Yes. Prospectively was a decision wrong - No. There was no clear right or wrong. My guess is you could not bring yourself to say that the current government did anything right. When you are able to give a balanced response saying these were good decisions but these were bad ones, then one could trust that there was some form of rational analysis. So long as all I hear is BoJo bad, Brexit bad, I find it difficult to think you have looked objectively at the facts.

https://assets.publishing.service.go...8_2019_web.pdf

Have you seen the picture of Johnson stuck on a zipwire holding little Union Jacks? We still made him Prime Minister. People on minimum wage, zero hour contracts can be persuaded that millionaire ex public schoolboys like Johnson, Cameron, Farage and Rees ******* Mogg are 'men of the people' and protecting them from the nasty EU.

That's how thick we are.

Scary, isn't it?

I am not hugely impressed by the factual nature of twitter comments previously posted. Do we have any support for this as more than 'gossip'?

'Re-opening' the country does not appear to be current government policy so this would appear to be pushing some non-governmental policy making it more likely it was a non-governmental body who did this.

Why is the advertising agency not identified? The picture of an alleged junior doctor on the twitter feed has a badge saying 'Staff Nurse'.

This has an aura of fake news. I would hope on a skeptic site more effort would be made to verify things before posting them. Of course if I am wrong then I will admit it, but I think this will vanish into another fake twitter rumour.

I think it is a mistake to always assume everything in a Murdoch paper is pushing his agenda. His company is the owner, not the editor of his papers. I think it’s unlikely that he is able to keep track on everything being published in his papers and broadcast on his networks.

If you are a politician and Murdoch invites you to dinner, you don't turn him down.

I saw that and searched @nhs_susan and found many confirmations that account did exist and has since disappeared.

https://twitter.com/search?q=%40nhs_...t_search_click

The nurse, called Susan whose photo is used in the account has been identified as "Mia Magklavani, 29, paediatrics staff nurse, from Greece" the photo of her is from a trade union site;

http://www.seftonunison.co.uk/news/post/meet-our-nhs

There is no doubt the account is fake. The issue is tracing it back to the Department of Health & Social care.

There's more evidence than just "gossip" in the thread posted.

We should, of course, always be sceptical and I never post anything with the claim that it's the absolute truth (seriously, the number of times I have to actually write this out on a site ostensibly dedicated to critical thinking is depressing), but we shouldn't just dismiss the evidence that exists out of hand.

This again indicates that you've not actually bothered to read what you're criticising.

Read the actual thread.

Yes. That's part of the point. She's also got a different name (as you can see on her badge), and is at a different hospital than was claimed in her profile.

If you'd actually read the thread you'd see that she's not a doctor called Susan at all, but rather immigrant paediatrics nurse Mia Magklavani: https://www.unison.org.uk/news/magaz.../meet-our-nhs/

I would hope on a sceptic site people would understand that scepticism from everybody of anything posted should be assumed by the person posting it, and that they can safely assume that they're posting for intelligent, informed adults who don't need their hands held by having absolutely everything labelled with "but, of course, we should be sceptical". I'm honestly starting to despair of how often I have to point this out on here these days.

I'd also have thought that people on a sceptic site should be expected to actually read a given source before dismissing it as "gossip".

Why is anyone surprised. Remember Tory press office renamed it's twitter account to 'Fact Check UK' in the run up to the election and tweeted falsehoods about Jeremy Corbin and Labour.

More interesting statistics this morning:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52361519

The snipped quote pretty much says it all IMO. I'm encouraged that the number of Coronavirus deaths outside hospital is relatively low.

Wow ... the Modi fanboys in India are going to have orgasms. There is going to be a huge campaign about how Modi is "showing the world the way". Here had his acolytes lighting candles and banging on plates.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1252362012845207552

Article embedded in tweet, and more information and relevant links in subsequent tweets.

A really good point. Thanks, I'd forgotten about that in the deluge of other things this party of government has done.

When it comes to politics and the government/PM I think it's safe to assume he sets the agenda and his editors enforce that agenda. He doesn't need to micromanage every story to still be setting rules. Of course the tipping point at which you want to stop backing a PM and start endorsing the successor is going to vary for the readerships of different papers.

What makes you think it is the party that I object to “ if Corbyn had been elected?”. I object to incompetence whatever someone’s party....

I know a few people, like my mother, who have decided to forgo medical treatment at the moment. Doesn’t take many people thinking that before you see an uptick in deaths.

Boris Johnson And Donald Trump To Hold Talks On Coronavirus Pandemic

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ent...b6b2e5b837e627

As long as Boris Johnson doesn't end the call with:

• A plan for removing lockdown based on President Trump's plan and "metrics"
• A commitment to buy several million doses of hydroxychloroquinine that the US wants to be shot of
• A promise to allow the US medical industry access to the NHS
• Unceasing praise of President Trump and his Coronavirus actions

Then I have no particular objection but I'd prefer him to get a feeling for the international response from countries like New Zealand, South Korea, Norway or even Germany who seem to be making a much better fist of it that the UK.

Hang on, if he is back there is hell of a lot more things he needs to be doing before kissing Trump’s arse.

Not if we're going to get that great trade deal after a no-deal Brexit :mad:

Millions of pieces of PPE being shipped from Britain to Europe despite NHS shortages

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...urope-despite/

Apparently doing so would cause issues with bituminous elements in the oil clogging the systems if they stop pumping, possibly rendering it impossible to start it back up again later.