I intend to pull a cloth face covering over the respirator mask in shops. If I go at all, which I probably won't unles something unforeseen comes up. I haven't been in a position where I could possibly have been infected since 12th March.

A slightly off-topic question from the colonies :) Is Gove's name pronounced as in "Guv'nor?" or as in "Grove"?

As in 'grove'. Or to rhyme with 'complete and utter self serving bastard'

Now the London government is apparently sending out advertisements encouraging (inciting?) people to travel to Scotland despite the risk of re-introducing coronavirus into a country that has almost eliminated it, and despite the fragile nature of the communities and healthcare in the areas tourists are likely to visit.

https://twitter.com/DrTomWalker/stat...12561179320320

In addition to "racist" and "despicable", refusing to rule out some sort of border restrictions between Scotland and England (similar to the current border restrictions between Victoria and New South Wales) is now "shameful".

We're not talking about actual border restrictions, because there aren't any, just about the refusal to declare that this would never be considered under any possible circumstances, no matter how great the difference in viral prevalence between the two countries.

We need out of this union.

Last 4 days Covid19 UK deaths:

England 147 48 82 121
Wales 1 0 2 4
N Ireland 0 0 0 0
Scotland 0 0 0 1

Spot the difference
Spot the problem

"What borders on stupidity?"
"Scotland and Wales!"

Or try this:

On the instructions of Dr George McCall Smith, the Surgeon Superintendent of Rawene Hospital, mounted and armed guards stood at all crossroads to turn back would-be visitors and thus restrict the spread of the disease between settlements. Travellers wishing to enter Hokianga were simply stopped at the boundary. The rule was simple: anyone could leave, but no one could enter.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokianga

I don't understand these numbers. Scotland hasn't had a single death for four days in a row. Soon to be five.

I seem to recall that some Brexiteers back in march were gleefully saying that the EU couldn't close their national borders because of Freedom of Movement to stop the spread of virus. But the EU countries did it anyway. Now it looks more like it's the UK that has that problem.

Germany (at least) has closed internal borders. Nobody called the Länder involved racist, or shameful, or despicable.

Because who cares about protecting others.

https://news.vcu.edu/health/Early_fa...d_according_to

On politics, this is hilarious:

The Big Boy President Wore a Big Boy Mask And Now the Election is Over, Aides Say

Although that headline may seem to be over the top, look at the series of tweets that Trump's advisors made after Trump wore a mask in public for the first time.

Good pick - you're dead right; it's one of the funniest things I've read in some time.

Amazing how much he looks like the Lone Ranger. A real tough guy.

All it'll take is one Putinbot telling him that he looks stupid with a mask, and he'll never wear one again.

Fauci getting thrown under the bus by the Trump Administration.
He'll be one of their scapegoats (besides Democratic governors, et al).

White House Moves to Discredit Fauci as Disagreements With Trump Become Evident

Cross posting but:

This is an illuminating (and somewhat deranged) Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/KwCongressional

https://twitter.com/KwCongressional/...74636168167424

Obviously he meant to use this flag :RUSSIA:

Can we keep the US politics in the US politics subforum/thread, and reserve the non-US politics thread/subforum for non-US politics?

That last number for Wales, per capita, isn't that clever :(

There were ugly drunken crowd scenes in Cardiff yesterday as well so maybe a new spike is in the offing.

A while ago, a British comedian (possibly Paul Merton) was trying to get people to pronounce it Goove, to rhyme with move. I think I heard it on the News Quiz and HIGNFY. It didn’t really get anywhere, but it amused me. I am quite childish.

ETA: it was Marcus Brigstocke.

Sorry, I should have thanked you earlier for the graphs on Japan. Where did you take the stats from?

Anyway, Japan's numbers are really on the rise now.

Today, 84 new cases in Osaka, whereas it had been in the twenties and thirties before that.

Cases in Tokyo also soaring.

So what better time...

Link

He looks stupid without one.

Oh, sorry, I thought I had put the link in....

The ECDC website - it's updated daily. I just use some sumifs statements in excel to uinquely identify each day for each country (so the sum is of one cell) and turn that into a 7-day average

https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/public...ases-worldwide

ETA: then I take the average of day x +/- 3 days (so my graph has a lag of 4 days from the last date) to get the turning points on the correct days.

Thanks again! :thumbsup::)

Thing is, you can rely on many politicians, Scots and English, not to know where the border actually is...

How often do you hear/read them talking about north or south of Hadrian's Wall as the border? FFS, even using the Tweed doesn't work.

'S like none of them know Northumberland is even here...

Can we come with you, Scotland?

I took an English friend to Neidpath Castle, on the bank of the Tweed just above Peebles. You know how far Peebles is from the border. I realised as we were talking that she thought (just for a moment) that we were actually looking across the river to England!

The Scotland-England border is one of the oldest stable international borders in Europe, give or take the odd attempt by either side to carve out a bit more for itself. It was established, I think, in the early 13th century by King David I, and whatever the border raids everything always settled back to that line across the Cheviots. Sorry lads but Northumberland is in England and international law doesn't allow a country to grab a chunk of territory when it exits a union.

Not that we'll be exiting any time soon. Our esteemed leader has explicitly declined to make any capital out of the current chaos and indicated that we're going nowhere for a good few years. (The sooner she's out and replaced by someone with a backbone the better.)

And now Johnson has come out and contradicted Gove:

PM says face masks ‘should be worn’ in shops

This should have been an incredibly simple thing to come up with a policy on, yet again reduced to a confused mess by Johnson's lack of leadership.

eh?

Don't you mean our PM Mr D Cummings?

The government seem to be fighting two contradictory impulses.

On one hand they're desperate to continue their positive headlines and keep lifting the lockdown restrictions. On the other hand, they're aware that the Leicester outbreak has caused negative headlines so they want to try to keep infections low.

In short, they don't want to be meanies and compel people to wear masks but they recognise that wearing masks may help reduce infection. It's like a parent asking their child not to eat cake for lunch but not being prepared to tell them not to do so or have any punishment in the event that they do eat that cake.

As you say, a lack of leadership.

I've just come back from the post office. I'm pretty relaxed about this now because it's now more than three weeks since there has been a case in my region (Borders) at all, and if that case (21st June) was the one later reversed by a -1 report then our last case was 10th June. We're near two county boundaries, but Midlothian is also pretty clear (a single case over a week ago, and two weeks clear before that), and while South Lanarkshire is one of the regions with higher numbers, those in the know say the towns involved are Rutherglen/Cambuslang which are 40 miles away and really suburbs of Glasgow. Even if it's Motherwell/Wishaw, that's still 30 miles away.

Nevertheless everyone was wearing a mask except the clerks who were behind their normal screens anyway and also wearing face shields. None of that would protect the customers from a clerk who was aerosolising virus, but few customers and going to be in the shop long enough to breathe in an infective dose of aerosol anyway. (Except the elderly lady in front of me who was having her day's social interaction I think, she was a bit shocked when she saw how many people were waiting outside, but nobody minded.)

Anyway my point is that for all the bellyaching you see on the internet, in real life people just do it. Reports are that compliance in Scotland has been very high. England should just do it.

I remember being against compulsory seat belts in cars. (I was very young.) Then once it happened I analysed my feelings. I didn't like fastening a seat belt if I was driving because it was somehow acknowledging the possibility that I might have an accident. I didn't like fastening it as a passenger because it seemed like a tacit criticism of the driver, as if I was signalling that I didn't feel safe with their driving. But once it was the law all these subconscious reservations disappeared, I was doing it because it was the law, simple, no other conscious or subconscious motives. I think this is kind of similar.

We now have figures for last week for the whole of the UK.

Deaths:
England 587
Scotland 2
Wales 10
NI 1

New cases:
England 4,000 (rounded)
Scotland 63
Wales 142
NI 30

England actually had 1,117 more new cases last week than the week before, which if I'm reading this right is something like a 30% increase. This is not good. And yet England still wants to be in charge and unionists constantly criticise the Scottish government for not doing what England is doing. They're perfectly capable of forcing us to comply. We need out of this union.

It's also the instinct to make it our responsibility. If they make it mandatory, then that's on them. But if they advise us and people don't adhere to it, then it's our fault.

That's how you can open pubs while telling people they should socially distance and then, when the inevitable rise in infections comes, say that it's because of a few irresponsible people, rather than actually being your fault.

In order to save lives we must act on masks immediately. In 10 days time.

Do you know if there has been any government-organized (lol! Oxymoron, right!) plan to mass produce masks. Even here in Japan, there were mask shortages at the beginning of the pandemic and it seems that shortages are happening again now. I believe that Korea had a big programme of mask production to make sure everyone had access to them.

Oh, this is going to be fun. For a week now all we've heard in Scotland from the unionist media has been "why are you making face coverings mandatory when England isn't?" and "if face coverings are a good idea what's the point of bringing them in now when the virus is in retreat?"

Answer to the first one being, why don't you ask England why they aren't doing that? and to the second, because most people were staying home most of the time and all but essential shops were shut. Now people are out and about and just about everywhere is open.

It's been like this for about two months. The Scottish government does something (like face coverings) that England hasn't done, and it's non-stop attacks and criticism irrespective of whether it's a good idea or not. It must be a bad idea if England isn't doing it. Then England finally gets round to doing it. This one is even stupider. Why wait ten days?

They can't decide whether to excoriate Nicola Sturgeon for not opening up as quickly as England, or for not locking down earlier in the first place because England didn't. Sometimes they do both in one sentence. (That was Jackson Carlaw and to be fair the interviewer did raise an eyebrow that time.)

Death and new infection figures are always given in the main news as being for "the UK" and a lot of people assume it's all more or less pro rata. At least one newspaper tried to paint an equivalence between Leicester (virus spreading freely in the community) and Annan (14 cases in the end, a cluster originating in an outbreak south of the border, which was contained within a week). You have to be listening to the Scottish news to hear that people have almost stopped dying of coronavirus in Scotland. Nobody ever actually points out and analyses the discrepancies. It's just "pubs in England are open why aren't they open here you evil woman?"

Now Nicola Sturgeon is being accused of wrecking Scotland's tourist industry, not by imposing any sort of border restrictions, but merely by refusing to rule out the possibility if the virus is spreading out of control in England. The thought that the worst thing for the tourist industry is virus spreading out of control in rural Scotland doesn't seem to figure. (There are plenty people in Scotland really keen to book holidays in Scotland, but that market will dry up in ten minutes if the virus is reintroduced to the rural tourist areas.)

I'm getting tired of this. Holding government to account and asking difficult questions is all very well, but constant relentless attacks when they're actually doing something right is the name of the game here.

I fully expect there to be a shortage of masks. I ordered some disposable ones from Amazon yesterday for Thursday delivery - I don't expect them to arrive.

A triple folded "buff" with some kitchen roll in the fold passes the breath test so we should be OK in the short term.

Maybe the 10 day delay is to allow influential companies to negotiate exceptions.

Seems silly to me that walking past someone in a shop is so dangerous that we need to wear masks but spending hours in a pub or restaurant surrounded by people is fine.

Only a few months too late.

If mask wearing becomes mandatory in English shops, I wonder if we'll see an influx of English people to Chepstow to shop maskless in Wales.

I went shopping myself this morning in Tesco. The one-way system has gone, people are less willing to socially distance, only a few people were wearing masks and although there was a degree of control for people coming in the shop, the tills were a free for all.

Why is it that the only people apparently taken by surprise by this government's decisions are.. This government? Johnson is standing below the tide line ordering the sea to retreat then claiming he always planned to have a wet crotch.

I don't think there should be a problem for most people getting a mask now, the non medical ones seem to be easy enough to get hold of, even my little local shop sells them, although only me and the bloke behind the counter wear them, he's taking it seriously one of the first fatalities in India was a friend of his).