The more we allow ourselves to bury our heads in the sand the worse it will be. The "armchair experts" weren't elected to do a better job. The people who have consistently ignored expert advice from years back were. The people of this Country are fighting to come up with solutions to help the government. Nobody is working against them but we should not be encouraging them to pretend it's alright with testing and PPE when it isn't.

If you recall, this pointless argument started with you claiming that London had overtaken Wuhan in terms of deaths. But that is only true if you believe the official statistics from China. Even basic anecdotal evidence concerning the number of funeral urns being collected by relatives in Wuhan would suggest the official figures are wildly out of kilter with reality. Let's leave it there.

Yes, that is the problem. Johnson said we are doing more testing than most of Europe. One it isn't true and secondly this isn't some kind of league table where we have to beat somebody else. It's what we need to do and succeed in doing that matters.

This is correct on the basis of available data. If international scientists are happy to use this data in their research and comparisons, then I'd go with them even though i know that we cannot be certain that the data is right. It is you who is super confident that the data is dodgy and I have no time for this.

Peston fact checked:

https://order-order.com/2020/04/02/pestons-testing-shortage-disinformation/

On Tuesday evening, ITV Political Editor Robert Peston made extraordinary and widely shared claims that “there is no shortage of the relevant reagents” – implying that the Government was either lying or simply hadn’t bothered to ask around. His tweet has attracted over 14,000 retweets and 20,000 likes.

His single anonymous Chemical Industries Association source could be right. On the other hand, Guido has pulled together some other people who might just know what they are talking about:

• Professional Association of Laboratory Medics, Germany: “The association is worried that the materials required for testing — sample kits, materials for extracting samples, and reagents — are becoming scarce”


• Department of Health, Australia: “Due to global demand exceeding supply, stocks of all laboratory related testing consumables are under considerable strain. At the moment there are particular concerns around supplies of swabs and DNA extraction kits.”


• Centre for Disease Control, United States: Important reagents are “now are in short supply,”


• Leo Varadkar, Ireland: “The current cause of delay is a shortage of reagents. We hope to address that but then there may be a shortage of something else. We have to be honest about that – we will hit delays.”


• Chief Public Health Officer, Province of Manitoba, Canada: “Right now the major roadblock is the reagent and that is worldwide.”


• Center for Disease Control and Prevention, South Korea: “Kwon Jun-wook, deputy director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said … it was true that Roche Diagnostics’ supply of reagents for nucleic acid extraction was not stable.”


• Health Ministry, Israel: Deputy Director General Prof. Itamar Grotto said that “Unfortunately what we just received is not exactly what we needed. The test is comprised of many components and the main problem is that we are missing swabs.”


• National Public Health Surveillance Laboratory, Lithuania: “The reagent kits have been shipped out but have not yet arrived. Supply chains are breaking down. We are following the situation and trying to coordinate.”


• Metropolis Health Ltd, (registered lab offering tests) India: “Since resources are limited, including protection equipment for sample collectors and reagents, we have decided to prioritise testing to those who are most at need.”


• Virology Laboratory at Italy’s National Institute for Infectious Diseases, European Commission Coronavirus Advisory Group: “major companies that provide the reagents that labs need to analyze tests are reaching “the maximum of their capacity,” said Capobianchi, noting there’s also a need for more swabs for collecting samples. “I don’t know how long they would require to scale up their capacity,” she said of reagent producers.”

Whilst he later acknowledged that there was a global problem, Peston has still not deleted the original thread. Inevitably his later correction only got a tiny bit of attention, with fraction of the interaction.

..."

Cats can infect each other with coronavirus, Chinese study finds

I had to check April 1st was yesterday. Most of the their flights are UK bound. 

Pakistan to resume some flights

While most airlines are grounding planes, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) has been given permission to run several routes.

PIA will run a total of 17 international flights from 4 - 11 April. They will mainly be going between Islamabad and London, Manchester, Birmingham and Toronto, PIA confirmed to our BBC Pakistan & Afghanistan correspondent Secunder Kemani.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52130552

Report in Der Spiegel:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/corona-challenge-germany-reaching-the-upper-limit-of-testing-capacity-a-4d75e7bd-dd0e-41e3-9f09-eb4364c43f2e

"Every day, tens of thousands people in Germany seek to get tested for the novel coronavirus. Often, though, they run up against a lack of testing capacity. And it is likely to only get worse. "

- lack of test resource is even affecting gold star Germany.

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Scottish comedian Eddie Large has died from coronavirus - he was 78

Quote

 

Eddie Large has died at the age of 78 from coronavirus, his son has confirmed. The Scottish comedian was best known for his double act Little and Large with Syd Little. His son Ryan Mcginnis announced his passing on Facebook. "It is with great sadness that Mum and I need to announce that my dad, Edward Mcginnis, passed away in the early hours of this morning," he said.

"He had been suffering with heart failure and unfortunately, whilst in hospital, contracted the coronavirus, which his heart was sadly not strong enough to fight. "Dad fought bravely for so long. Due to this horrible disease we had been unable to visit him at the hospital but all of the family and close friends spoke to him every day.

 

https://www.lbcnews.co.uk/uk-news/scottish-comedian-eddie-large-dies-age-78-from-cor/

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Amongst all the doom and gloom, and understandable panic, it’s important to listen to accounts like this, as well as the more dramatic ones.

https://www.facebook.com/stowsurgery/videos/please-watch-video-below-of-dr-anna-chiles-and-her-familys-experience-of-covid-1/893158681135746/

I now have some almost first hand experience. A casual acquaitance of mine displayed symptoms of mainly diarrhea, chronic fatigue, fever. Not sure the extent of the cough. He insisted he did not have the virus but then became severely breathless. He is now in hospital on a ventilator with double pneumonia. He is 72 was very fit, no known pre-existing. Four weeks ago I was sitting next to him at a quiz in in a busy hall. I'm hoping that is a sufficient gap as I don't have any symptoms. I understand he was socialising a fair bit up until the lockdown.

It has not been confirmed as Corona virus yet as the hospital have said it takes 5 days to get the results back !! At least he has a ventilator so fingers crossed but this sort of post is likely to become more common as it gets nearer home.

If our number of infections starts coming down, then I think we need to close our borders.

Contrary to popular belief the Germans can be very self critical. This article in the Fail is quite balanced and has extensive quotes from Professor Frank Ulrich Montgomery, president of the European Union's Standing Committee of European Doctors and former president of the German Medical Association. Having read it I would much sooner be having Germany's problems than ours. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-8177807/Germany-100-000-Britain-8-000.html

950 new deaths in Spain and 140 in Germany.

Zambia report first Covid death

A few weeks ago I mentioned here that the best place to be for this would probably be Germany and the worst probably the US. Just the other day I saw a neighbour down the road who is a dentist and married to a German. He had stopped working long before the lockdown and he was critical of our response, but I was amazed to hear that a couple of weeks ago he had his own elderly parents move temporarily to a holiday home they keep in Germany.

Madness if that's the case , how the bloody hell can you keep a lid of the virus with this going on

Many pharmacies operate like this in Greece now, they take the temperature of anyone wanting to come inside and (by law) they only allow 2 people in at any time.

Not surprised if correct 

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

There was a question the other day about how officials could refer to "stabilisation" when confirmed cases are still increasing  - this BBC report on the situation in Spain explains it quite nicely:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52131756

""We continue with an increase of around 8%. This points, as we have already seen, to a stabilisation in the data that we're registering," María José Sierra, from the Spanish health ministry's emergency co-ordination unit, said at a news conference.

This, she said, is resulting in an "important lowering" in the increase in the number of people being taken to intensive care units, already under pressure across the country."

That was me. I understood he/she had meant hospital admissions were steady at 1,000 per day and not increasing. However, it's very possible I misinterpreted what he/she meant.

PS: Will you be writing to your MP to say the government should not be allowing Pakistan International Airlines to resume flights to the UK?