Unfortunately I have. Students seem to love it, but then you could argue they don't yet live in the 'real world'

Burn the heretic!

What do you do for a living Q? Just interested. 

I spoke to a friend today who works in senior management for Leeds Mental Health. He told me that they have cases across all the elderly wards, with many patients expected not to make it. He also said they had the first staff death this week. It sounds absolutely horrific.

No idea TBH. However, I wondered if would partially explain why the virus seems to be hitting affluent and developed areas harder. For example, I would assume the smoking rate in northern Italy is lower than in the south. Likewise countries such as Iran, India and China don't seem to be getting hit so hard despite having (I think but correct if wrong) higher smoking rates.

Traffic warden.

But that's not how it works

Until recently the virus thrived in bats/pangolins but not in humans. It can infect cats but apparently not dogs. Any vaccine will be similarly specific and seemingly arbitrary.

The animal trials aren't to show it 'works' as such, but to show it doesn't kill the host, and even then that might not translate over to humans (one of the main arguments put forward against animal testing)

I cannot believe that people can look at the slow action from the government and the casualties and think 'job well done.'

As for economic measures, as we were slower than other countries we could see what they did and have done similar things i think.

I don’t want to downplay the catastrophic errors made regarding the NHS , I’m with you all the way on that, trust me. 

I have been pleasantly surprised by the action taken to safeguard people’s jobs, to be frank, just look at the US as a comparison. 

I think even if we ever had hundreds of thousands of deaths (we won't), there would still be people who might say:

• we need to wait for a year, all countries will eventually be the same


• this was an unprecedented challenge, what did you expect? 


• you criticise with the benefit of hindsight

There were more deaths than just in the NHS though.

Re: jobs etc, there are other comparisons rather than just to the USA. I appreciate however, that this has been unprecedented and that the government in charge have had to travel a long way from their normal ideological stance on their attitude to the role of the state.

Yes, it's infuriating and it has nothing to do with party politics. If people can't see that the government has been very slow and has made a a very challenging situation even worse, then they are part of the problem too.

To be fair to the govt, it is true that this is an unprecedented challenge for all governments and of course mistakes were easy to make. They also seem to often had weak or wrong scientific advice, which has made things worse. There are however, two counter points to this:

• we had a 2 week live hindsight from Italy and we didn't use it


• We don't really know the scientific advice as it's not published

I also read that air pollution is a big factor regarding susceptibility to Corona. N. Italy, for example, is a region of the world with unusually high amounts of pollutants. 

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200406100824.htm

Didn't the W.H.O initially play down this also? Perhaps the slow response of State Governments is a reflection of this. 

Students believe all sorts of nonsense. I know I did. They soon grow out of it. They are just very visible on social media - and therefore in the print/online media which increasingly just reprints stuff off Twitter, so they give an exaggerated view of how prevalent woke culture is.

Looking in from the outside, it's unclear to me who is running the UK. Is it Chris Whitty?

Having lived in Scotland for a number of years, I have no love for the SNP and I'm very cynical about the timing of the various announcements from the Scottish government. But at least Sturgeon looks like she's in charge.

(Trudeau is in a slightly different position - because a lot of this is decided at provincial level he almost has less to say each day. His approach seems to be to announce more money on a regular basis).

 I did wonder that when it started and the spread of infection in crowded cities was not just being too close to everyone else but some other trigger.

I get that. 100%. I meant in general. 

Just back from a short run. I declare today to be the day when social distancing in the UK died and was replaced by "semi social distancing if I must". Interesting times ahead I suspect. 

He's not really the glass is half full type though really, is he? 

More 5G conspiracy nut jobs.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-52395771