... UK lockdown: what are the new coronavirus restrictions?

Isn't it a bit like closing the stable doors after the horses have bolted?

Errr... That was a long time ago back in March. (We're now in May... ;-) )

We are now already a lot more relaxed with relaxed restrictions...


Here's watching if we suffer a second wave.

Stay safe!
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Sorry about that, I missed the date on that article, but the latest articles are behind paywalls here so I'm just going on the latest TV reports here today.

Cheers.

Quoting myself, but sadly it's proving tonight to be at least partially true. It's being reported by the BBC, sourced to newspaper reports by the Guardian and the Daily Mirror, that Dominic Cummings and his wife both travelled 250 miles north from London to County Durham whilst knowing that they were both infected with covid-19. The effrontery of the man! I'm speechless.

The more I see & hear of that man, the more I get transported back to the 70's & reminded of our bolshy union reps/leaders, & this guy is an advisor to a Tory PM?

I have a recurring nightmare - and this is purely fictional, from my brain alone - that while Boris Johnson was safely tucked up in isolation/hospital, Dominic Cummings secretly crept out at night to seed the care homes. Reason? - everybody who has looked at the much-needed future reform of the British care system has shuddered at the cost, and put the file back on the shelf for the next government to deal with. So, let coronavirus cull the current occupants: no one will dare to move into the vacant rooms: the fees will dry up: the management will go bankrupt: Dom and his friends will be able to buy them up cheap in the resulting fire sale: and make a killing (sorry!) from the increased fees they'll be able to charge for the 'enhanced biosecurity' they'll be able to boast about when we've all forgotten about this and the next age-group need to be housed.

Please tell me it's not true.

It's not a farfetched nightmare in New York, Cuomo intentionally sent Covid-19 patients to care facilities.

https://nypost.com/2020/04/23/nursing-homes-cant-reject-coronavirus-patients-cuomo-says/

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"Sour Grapes make a bitter Whine." <(0)>

Well it was on the cards all along and now it has been proven, it's working for those "spread the virus" fools.

Coronavirus US: Anti-lockdown protesters caught spreading the virus.

But I wonder if they'll learn anything from their stupidity.

Lorry drivers, seasonal farm workers, and coronavirus medics will be exempt.
The requirement will also not apply to those travelling from the Republic of Ireland.

UK arrivals plan unveiled
Didn't realise that there are so many Irish truck drivers still (insert word/s of choice).
Thankfully, I'm not one of them. :-)

Lorry drivers, seasonal farm workers, and coronavirus medics will be exempt.
The requirement will also not apply to those travelling from the Republic of Ireland.

UK arrivals plan unveiled
Didn't realise that there are so many Irish truck drivers still (insert word/s of choice).
Thankfully, I'm not one of them. :-)

Now that was the story I tried to get earlier.

The big question being asked about quarantine is: why now?

The government argues that it simply wouldn't have made enough of a difference while the virus was spreading widely within the UK.

But it hasn't, so far, fully explained why such a blanket measure was not introduced much earlier in the outbreak, before the virus took hold.

And hence my, "Isn't it a bit like closing the stable doors after the horses have bolted?", comment.

Now that was the story I tried to get earlier.

The big question being asked about quarantine is: why now?
The government argues that it simply wouldn't have made enough of a difference while the virus was spreading widely within the UK.

But it hasn't, so far, fully explained why such a blanket measure was not introduced much earlier in the outbreak, before the virus took hold.

And hence my, "Isn't it a bit like closing the stable doors after the horses have bolted?", comment.

I think that will be the sentiment of a lot of people. What is worse is the inference that lorry drivers can't catch or spread the virus.
As for the Irish, well, many still think Leprechauns are "magical".
Harry Potter they are not. :-)

I think that the unspoken assumption behind the exemptions being discussed is that certain people will remained securely cocooned within their employer's controlled environment.

Lorry drivers? Will sleep in their cabs, never need to refuel (they'll have extended range tanks), never need to eat, drink, or pee outside a secure lorry park at their destination, and so on.

Formula 1 drivers? Will be helicoptered directly into the paddock, and will only ever touch their motorhome and their race car.

Tourists on foreign holidays? Will be air-bridged to a sealed aerodrome, transfer to sealed coaches, and spend their holiday at an all-inclusive beach resort (one nationality per hotel, of course).

And squadrons of flying pigs will supervise it all....

And squadrons of flying pigs will supervise it all....

with Dominic Cummings the chief porker in charge. :-)

When starting comparing numbers and use statistics it's easy to get mislead.
Here is how it looks when comparing all deaths from all flues this year from the previous year in Sweden.

The number of deaths in covid-19 in elderly homes has upset both politicians and experts and has been taken as an income for Sweden's failure to protect the elderly and frail. But according to Thomas Lindén at the National Board of Health, the death toll on special housing is not surprisingly much higher than during a regular flu season.
- If we now say that we have not succeeded in protecting our elderly in elderly homes then it is like that almost every year in that case, says Thomas Lindén.
In special housing, this year, just over 11,000 people have died during the period January to April. During the same period in 2019, almost 10,000 people died, according to Thomas Lindén.
He also points out that most elderly residents do not have any covid-19 infected at all and that there are municipalities that do not have a single infected on special housing.
- It can also be said that of 100 people over 70 living in special housing, two died of covid-19. But it's described as it is in principle a death sentence to have elderly at the elderly homes, he says.

Well I hope that this isn't a sign, but the U.S. finished the 23rd with the count of cases numbering 1,666,828.

Canada has finally pushed past China for 13th place, but then there's a trio of countries racing to see who's next for that spot.

Let's hope we don't follow the historic curve by making the same mistakes:

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Why were the sums not done before Trump decided he wanted everywhere open, maybe for every extra death, he should personally pay the bill.

The government has spent decades studying what a life is worth. It hasn’t made a difference in the covid-19 crisis.

The U.S. government often studies the trade-off between cost and safety. But the White House has failed to release any analysis of the pandemic, which could offer clues to what’s ahead.

When President Trump said in late March he didn’t think the economic devastation from stay-at-home orders was a good trade off for avoiding covid-19 deaths, tweeting, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” economists across the country already were busy working on the exact kind of cost-benefit analysis implied by the president.

They reached a very different conclusion from Trump.

Economists at the University of Wyoming estimated the economic benefits from lives saved by efforts to “flatten the curve” outweighed the projected massive hit to the nation’s economy by a staggering $5.2 trillion. Another study by two University of Chicago economists estimated the savings from social distancing could be so huge, “it is difficult to think of any intervention with such large potential benefits to American citizens.”

In other words, the economists are saying, “the cure” doesn’t come at a cost at all when factoring in the economic value of the lives saved.

What these academics are doing — and what Trump’s tweet is getting at — is measuring how the extreme efforts to avoid covid-19 deaths compare to the devastating economic fallout. They do this by putting a price tag on the deaths avoided. It’s something the federal government does all the time when deciding whether to require carmakers to install new safety features or drugmakers to add new warning labels. And it’s required by law for big-ticket new regulations, such as road safety laws and pollution controls.

But this kind of approach has been missing from the debate about how to respond to the covid-19 pandemic, which has killed almost 100,000 Americans and fueled historic unemployment rates.

The calculation — known as Value of a Statistical Life or VSL — is the amount people are willing to spend to cut risk enough to save one life. The VSL at most federal agencies, developed over several decades, is about $10 million. If a new regulation is estimated to avoid one death a year, it can cost up to $10 million and still make economic sense.

Let's hope we don't follow the historic curve by making the same mistakes:

The DIFFERENCE between 1917 and 2020...........Modern Medical Science......there was no vaccine developed or in development. The end of the Spanish Flu pandemic was dependent solely on NATURAL herd immunity developing without artificial aid(vaccines).

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"Sour Grapes make a bitter Whine." <(0)>

The death rate for a given virus is dependant on at least two factors - how infectious the virus is and what the morbidity of the resultant disease is.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

I have some sympathy with the politicians on this one. There are two mistakes they could have made:

They could have imposed a really hard, damaging, lockdown on a virus which turned out to be relatively weak, benign, shortlived.

Or they could have chosen not to impose a severe lockdown, because they believed that the virus would be relatively weak, benign, shortlived.

In the first case, they end up with egg on their face. In the second case, they end up with blood on their hands.

In their place, which option would you choose?

I think every one of us should ask ourselves that question.

Still a vast difference in Medical technology and research in the half century since the 'Hong Kong Flu' (interesting it also originated in Wuhan).

The research into AIDS has opened new avenues of treatment and understanding not to mention the application of super computers to the problem(which also weren't available in 1970). Viral research and understanding is magnitudes greater than just 25 years ago when HIV appeared and intermittent battles with Ebola have also improved the weaponry that can be brought to bear.

Even Dr Fauci now believes a vaccine and treatment regimes will probably be available for widespread distribution by the end of 2020. We will have to learn to cope and live with this scourge from now on as we do with Flu, AIDS, the common cold and Ebola. Each have a devastating effect on human existence, physically, emotionally and financially, each of which we also must learn to mitigate in the most efficient and least harmful method.

Another new insight into the causes of the 'Inflammatory Storm' caused by Covid and a possible treatment:

‘It’s something I have never seen’: How the Covid-19 virus hijacks cells

https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/21/coronavirus-hijacks-cells-in-unique-ways/

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"Sour Grapes make a bitter Whine." <(0)>

Let's hope we don't follow the historic curve by making the same mistakes:
...

The DIFFERENCE between 1917 and 2020...........Modern Medical Science......there was no vaccine developed or in development. The end of the Spanish Flu pandemic was dependent solely on NATURAL herd immunity developing without artificial aid(vaccines).

Note for even today:

No way can we have a vaccine developed, tested, and ready to inoculate the entire population, all to be completed within three months.


Now back in the real world...

Stay safe!
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

.....Never, say never.........

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"Sour Grapes make a bitter Whine." <(0)>