It's everywhere now anyway, stop fucking about with borders and quarantine.
It's everywhere now anyway, stop fucking about with borders and quarantine.
UK deaths have doubled in 24 hours. There was me hoping if we kept it smaller we could justify our stance.
And now my flight's been rebooked. Newcastle at 7am. Not the fuck on.
Looking at the various ways countries have reacted to this in Europe, there's a chance it might also bring down the EU.
The key part of the Italian case will be just how long they can actually keep this lockdown going. If it gets to 4 and 5 weeks, and cases/deaths start to drop, how long do they keep it going? Three months? A year?
We'll also need to see what happens in China and Korea if and when they start lifting the lockdown.
Which is the point of our approach.
BA kicked me straight off their helpline. PUT ME ON HOLD!
Indeed, and I'm not saying our approach is necessarily wrong, for this very reason, but lockdowns will stop cases spreading, at least in the short term, which will be perceived as a success by the vast majority of people.
If we're then sat there, in it for the long haul, with deaths and cases still rising exponentially, while looking abroad at measures which are seemingly working, we're going to have civil un-rest on a scale of medieval proportions.
The FTSE is probably going to collapse as well.
Unless it comes back for a second spike in Italy/China/Korea, in which case our situation will start to make more sense.
What Twitter people are unable to grasp at the moment is that day by day conclusions simply cannot be drawn, at least not by us sitting on the sofa. We'll just have to see how it plays out.
Nah, I still think we should've locked down travel. So many cases were linked to it early doors and even a brief halt could've allowed us time to track passengers.
Yeah, of course. But what happens in between that time. Our cases are rocketing and everywhere else (bar the US, they are utterly fucked) are going down.
And these conclusions are fine to be drawn, the government have told us what they're trying to do, albeit not in so many words, so we're going to get a lot of dead and people can't handle that.They'll handle it even less well if its a disproportionate number for a few days, let alone the weeks/months this might take.
Alright, chaps.
Thought I’d log back in as I might be able to provide some insight into how the Trust I work in is trying to manage this. And I’m going to need something to do if we enter full lockdown mode and one can only masturbate so much.
For context, my organisation has five hospital sites over a city and three towns in the Midlands. Two of those hospitals are acute sites and so will be taking Covid-19 patients.
So far the two acute sites have set up ‘cohort’ wards for patients with respiratory symptoms who require admission. We have already ring-fenced ICU capacity for Covid-19 patients only. I don’t know if those areas are full yet but suspect not as it’s something we’d likely be hearing about. What I do know is that the remaining ‘normal’ ICU capacity is full. Patients will move in and out as they do anyway but there is now clearly going to be very little tolerance in terms of capacity. The concerns about not having enough ICU capacity nationally are very real.
I’ve received word today that visiting patients is now done with immediate effect, other than in a small number of exceptional circumstances. My team (I’m a corporate programme wanker these days so further removed from the frontline than previously) will be meeting on Monday to discuss our contingency plans which are based on the existing national pandemic plan. Some will start working from home, some have clinical backgrounds so are likely at some point to be drafted into patient care, others like me have operational backgrounds and will probably be shifted into managing capacity and demand. But that’s me just reading between the lines for now.
I can’t imagine it will be long now before all routine outpatient appointments and surgery is scrapped. Everything will be moving away from scheduled stuff towards acute medical care. It’s just a matter of time. Like everybody else we are relying on the government’s plan being the right one. I have no particular insight as to whether it is or not. We do have consultants who are worried about it but they’re not epidemiologists. I doubt very much that even cancelling routine stuff is going to give us anything like enough capacity (that’s not just beds, it’s people, kit etc) to cope very well with the peak of this.
Look at all The Group coming back to seek shelter now.
PISS OFF WE'RE FULL!!!!
Fucking hell, good to see you.
Will you be staying? I'd like to know what the insiders view of how the NHS is coping vs. what the government tells us.
EDIT: I mean I know it's not going to cope, no healthcare system could, but I'm curious nonetheless.
Depends what you mean by ‘coping’. As well as any health system which has been underfunded and understaffed against significant growth in activity. Not as well as it could be, but it isn’t about to collapse beyond usefulness and the government doesn’t have a dastardly plot to privatise it.
It is obviously going to struggle very badly through this crisis. We do have the advantage of being centrally controlled whereas in Lombardy there is some privatisation and thus fragmentation of resources and response. But in the context of years of shit funding that might end up being useless. We don’t know.
As for staying; dunno. Like most things I do and am not paid for it depends if it’s going to be fun or not.
Fuck me. Every Trump press conference is just a self-flagellation train wreck.
Live now.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Auq9mYxFEE
There must be a real discussion going on at the CIA (or whoever does these things) as to whether to bump him off.
That cap ffs:
UK and Bottom Ireland to be added to no-entry list on Monday.
He doesn't have a clue, does he? Words just spill out.
That was quite possible one of the worst press conferences I've ever seen. Constant self-congratulation, rambling, mumbling and completely lacking clarity, direction and information. Genuinely embarrassing.
He’s been doing that before he got elected.
The American public don’t care. The educated can tell he’s a rambling idiot, but there aren’t enough of them to count in a vote.
They'll care when the US are at the top of that league table.
Current Top 10 by Total Cases per 1m population
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Man, Norway sneaking up from behind in the medals table. I guess this is a winter sport still
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
WWE did an empty arena show last night but they forgot the world feed doesn't stop for adverts when the US networks do. Whoops.
What did people think they did?![]()
Wouldn't they keep wrestling if a crowd was there? I've never been to a live show.
Rest holds. A quick read of BA's response to the travel ban is they won't do a refund but might offer a BA travel voucher.
Must be a wrestling thing, lost on me.
Can you not hear a lot of what they're saying to each other when there's no crowd?
8 of these new 10 deaths were men, over 80 with underlying health problems. Are these type of people not dying all the time anyway? Is there going to be a way to accurately determine whether more people are dying with this about than simply do normally?
Mother and newborn baby infected sounds an interesting test case, for a number of reasons.
That looks a bit like a "this isn't that serious" post.
Full refund.![]()
Once you've picked a side you have to stick with it.
I can confirm that new applications to Team Panic are now CLOSED.