At least Covid will presumably eventually go away and as national disasters go it does seem to have had a few salutary side-effects. Brexit is with us for the duration and has none that I can perceive.
-
-
....Oh good in September the person; David Frost, who is doing the negotiating is changing jobs....to do a job serious folk don't think he should do, or that he will do well; National Security Adviser....good timing, apparently we are sending the Elgin Marbles to take his place around the Negotiating table....bong chingComment
-
Unfortunately Covid-19 may outlast the B* word. I was hoping it would dwindle and dissipate, but so far that's not happening. The side effects of B* could present significant problems for us in the UK and also in the EU for some limited time, but at least those are self inflicted wounds.Originally posted by gurnemanz View PostComment
-
This article presents a sad indictment of the US and the UK - https://time.com/5861697/us-uk-faile...irus-response/
Ranked first and second some while back in terms of preparedness and ability to cope .... Something didn't work out well.Comment
-
I've mentioned this elsewhere as I've long thought that the high ranking for flu pandemic preparedness, so loudly proclaimed, was nonsense in view of the results of the Cygnet exercise, but I am assuming that the ranking was the result of a tickbox exercise which did not involve verifying any of the boxes ticked. In theory, and by ignoring the test runs, the results would indicate a high level of preparedness - but as has been tragically shown, theoretical PPE isn't effective...Originally posted by Dave2002 View PostComment
-
In contrast, sometimes theory is very useful. If the theory re spreading of pandemics had been studied just a tad more carefully, and acted upon - the number of deaths might have been halved, or minimised further. Of course that's all theoretical/hypothetical now! We didn't have to do the experiment to discover that exponential rise means a doubling of problems every few days - and that there can be an integrative effect.Originally posted by oddoneout View Post
Who needs experts eh, and who ignores them?Comment
-
It's the structures that underly present-day problems that get ignored in most discussions, rather than the experts doing their best in their respective disciplines to deal with them & provide answers.Originally posted by Dave2002 View PostComment
-
Many of the experts are actually pretty good. This particular pandemic has been difficult for several reasons. Firstly, the equations which deal with the spread of diseases like this are very sensitive to small changes in input parameters. There are solutions which give hardly any infections, and hence hardly any herd immunity (if such actually exists) and there are solutions which give a lot of infections but some herd immunity builds up. This particular disease doesn't fit into either of those patterns. On top of that there is what actually happens, which was not known by modelling until things were really already starting to go bad. Nobody knew that older males were going to be particularly vulnerable, nor that the disease would perhaps not only be a respiratory disease etc., so there is more work to be done on the biology in the hope of an eventual "solution" to coping with it.Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
Politicians seem to have made things worse than need have been, on the whole, both during the current period and in the years leading up to this.Comment
-
And it was Cygnus not Cygnet - brain not engaged as well as it could have been.Originally posted by Dave2002 View Post
By its very nature Covid-19 was always going to catch governments out but if the most basic preparations for dealing with a large-scale disease event are not in place then that's an extra layer of difficulty, and for that lack of preparedness to be a known and apparently deliberate position taken by government is, in my opinion, inexcusable. It certainly hasn't saved any money, which is all that seems to come into consideration.Comment
-
When you consider what the Trump Administration is doing to Dr. Anthony Fauci, things can get a whole lot worse. Much worse than a disagreement over whether masks should be mandatory. By the way, has it been decided?
Comment
-
Yes -masks compulsory in shops and supermarkets from 24th July. Announced at the end of the 10.00 p.m. news on BBC 1.Originally posted by Padraig View PostComment
-
All of my local supermarkets are shops . Definitely.Originally posted by LMcD View Post
Those of us not so thrilled at this news have 10 days to stock up, at least.
I suspect that the so called government have stats that tell them that more people will be tempted out to the shops by compulsory mask wearing than will be put off by it. If that is their reasoning, and I bet it is, it would be good if they were honest about it.
Ah, just spotted a problem there......I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I am not a number, I am a free man.Comment
-
This possibly explains at least some of the inaction I referred to above(#55), but raises all sorts of questions itself, not least because, as I understand it, there had been a series of small scale simulations over the years preceding Cygnus which came to the same conclusions regarding preparedness.
Comment
-
Stuff on R4: this a.m. - sorry can't recall prog, but speaker was Prof SpiegelhalterComment
-
So, Labour under Starmer has proved it has no cojones by caving in to the blackmailers.
This has to join the Murdoch supremacy as the two most glaringly obvious examples of the moral bankruptsy of present-day political leadership in the western world, and the sycophants who keep its wheels and their spinners well oiled.
It's hard to imagine how much lower we can go. What a mockery to all those who fought to secure democracy, the vote, civil and human rights. I predict a mass exodus of Labour Party membership as people choose not to have their subs used for paying off the story tellers.Comment
Comment