rocket_scientist

The NHS are vulnerable to collapse very quickly. For a start we have half the amount of beds and respirators available per capita than Italy, who are already making decisions on who to let die (plus they've reduced the exponential curve by following world advice and locking down). That's just one example of our underresourcing. Our staff are ill-equipped and already insufficient in number, exactly for the reason you said, austerity and cuts over the whole of the last decade. The sickest joke is money before people. It won't be obvious to most, including those who are working and who have worked in the NHS that for 20+ years, our successive governments, in tandem with the corporates, have been attempting to privatise the NHS by stealth. Pilger's superb documentary was aired 3 months ago. By flooding the staff with non-productive middle management and increased administration and wasting money by over-charging for external services, the introduction of PFI's are being facilitated by a reduction of core resources, the worst examples being the rape by big pharma. My wife is forced to pay £60k per patient p.a. for the same treatments that Australia pays $250 p.a. for, from the same company, for the exact same drugs. And nobody in government cares and the bureaucrats aren't listening to the specialists and are ignoring our consultants, the best medically qualified people to know.

In the worst case scenario, that the UK's strategy results in our people suffering a massively disproportionate death rate, the biggest nail in Boris's coffin (legally speaking) will be the credentials of the people he chose to ignore. The guy Ryan at WHO didn't miss in his press conference yesterday. They have been screaming for action and he made some excellent points about inaction, leadership and human nature. Three further reasons that concern me about the UK outlier strategy are as follows: - Our PM himself. He has a track record of lying, he's a man on the make with zero integrity. He's also not very bright but skews and hides this by having learned oratory skills in his public schooling and university days. His blustering buffoon act is uniquely his, a disguise and a mask he wears but underneath this he is convinced of his own superiority, although his career and life record and especially his total lack of achievement (other than political office) proves otherwise. Secondly, what our health professionals say. 99% of NHS staff know that we are underprepared. That's the percentage that the Channel 4 survey found and whilst TC may be in the 1%, it is fact that our front line staff have been measured for the protective suits (weeks ago in some cases) and have failed to get them, meanwhile infected patients are turning up at their doors. Thirdly, the Irish company who have developed a self testing kit (which can tell in ten minutes) have been ignored by Boris. They've sent 20,000 to South Korea but we don't want to know. I don't get how identifying those amongst us who are infected already can NOT be a good thing. I fear this is one more concrete example of our government being unfit for purpose.

Further posts from the virology and public health expert in our family; "Watching the C4 news thing and frustrated that no one is pointing out why herd immunity is such a risky strategy for covid. Known coronaviruses only have lasting immunity for 3 months! So if everyone gets infected, then there will still be no herd immunity because people will start becoming susceptible again". After my wife said - "I think the guy from America expressed his thoughts on herd immunity by his gestures alone ??" - my daughter said - "He talked more about the infection rate, the thing that the London tropical medicine guy seems to be missing is the point that herd immunity can only be possible if people who are infected develop lasting immunity and we have no evidence for that being the case". The bottom line is that we lay people don't understand this field and we need to rely on our leaders to protect us. Our "leaders", including the wank from the government on QT this week don't understand the situation either. They are quick to mention "the science" and naturally they acknowledge that they're being advised. So the WHOLE ISSUE relies on whether the advice that they're acting on is good or bad. Like everything, there are differing opinions. In something as crucial as a pandemic, we can't afford to get it wrong. The UK is engaging a strategy that no other country is doing. Either our advisers to our government are cleverer than every other scientist on the planet or they're fools who are committing a major capital crime, for which the PM is ultimately culpable. Negligence is well defined in law and choosing to act on bad advice is no defence to a result of a million of our citizens being wiped out, should this come to pass. There would be something in law termed strict liability applying here, particularly when the PM has been advised strongly and vehemently by others not to follow this strategy and there is no precedent, medically or otherwise to choose to rely on it. It's a highly dangerous and risky strategy that may have dire consequences. I just hope his "Brexit thinking", born from a sense of ignorance and arrogance that "Great Britain is greater than everyone else" isn't behind him choosing to be the outlier here.

24,000 fatalities @ 80% mild

If I could isolate right now, I would but since my wife will inevitably be redeployed to the front line of the NHS, I'm at equal high risk. The UK needs to lock down right now. The guy on Question Time last night was bang on, despite Fiona's best BBC efforts to shut him up.

You're asking the wrong dude, dude. The first I'd ever heard the term "herd immunity" was in a text today and the second time I heard it was at 8.10 pm tonight on Channel 4. It appears that the poster above and Boris know all about it however but I'm with you, my instinct is screaming total horseshit. Four specific reasons to support my instinct on this point - other than the obvious consistency of instinct (over half a century experience in my case) - is that the guy arguing for it was a tit, Boris is a cunt, the guy who wrote a convincing argument was dead against it and finally, I trust my daughter, her intellect, experience and judgement in this particular field. And fifthly, good old fashioned integrity and common sense, which is none too common of course but in "leaders" like Boris (and Trump), is completely void.

Wow! Tomas Pueyo, the author of that article on air from the US arguing strongly with the studio scientist!

I didn't understand this post when she said it; Boris is wrong about his herd immunity take, it will put more people at risk and we have no evidence to suggest that people have lasting immunity to it so unlikely to be effective Now that they're talking about this exact subject on Channel 4, I'm inclined not to believe the balloon on TV just now who's job it is to know about this shit.

As there's no live sport to gorge on tonight, I recommend the Channel 4 News Special starting at 8 pm. Are we doing enough?

My daughter posted up that article last night, well, at 1 a.m. but I hadn't got round to reading it until now. Having glanced through some of the comments that the article attracted, I'm going to be interested in her take on it. The thing I took from it the most is the need for swift action, like immediately.

Yeah it's fucking shite. Apparently it is the right decision but I need fitba and golf. Can't understand why they decided to cancel The Players. They decided no fans for today and the weekend but now they've scrapped it totally. Bastards didn't want Hideki to embarrass all their superstar duds. I've got less matches to bet on and need to cash out almost all of my bets, and they were all going to win too. At least my drink tracker app will look better now that the big Friday night sesh ain't happening. Not that it would've been bigger than last Friday when King Joey gave me and 4 others a lift to the next pub and I eventually got home at 3 a.m. Cunts.

She lost me here (in the family chat): - Mum is right! RNA is a bit like DNA - genetic information. But in human cells RNA kind of ‘copies’ DNA and transmits information from your genome to the parts of the cells that makes proteins/ perform other tasks (that’s maybe a bit simplistic, there are lots of types of RNA that do lots of things). DNA is very highly regulated because if there’s a mistake in your genes, it can have dire consequences. RNA is less regulated cause the occasional mistake/ incorrect protein to come out of it isnt likely to have a noticeable effect. Some viruses have RNA genomes which means they can mutate much more quickly than those with DNA ones

This may be of interest too: - After the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s research for a vaccine started. It was much more deadly so symptoms were more severe and it was easier to track and quarantine cases/ reduce spread which is why it ultimately exhausted itself. The thing is, once SARS died out, no one cared to keep funding this research. The only other human coronaviruses at the time caused mild/ self-limiting colds - no interest or money to be made in that. So this area of virology had been relatively untouched/ with much less attention and vaccines left half-developed. I don’t know specifics for covid, but I know it can be tricky to target. Often viruses enter Human cells via receptors and “live” inside the human cell. (Whether or not viruses constitute living things is another debate haha). When you’re a virus, hiding in a cell, it’s very hard for the immune system to recognise the infected cells and kill them appropriately. Developing a treatment has to be a trade off between identifying and killing infected cells while limiting damage to healthy/ uninfected cells. Vaccines are better than treatments because they limit the number of viruses that ever enter your cells in the first place but they’re hard to develop because they’re “training” your immune system - but immune systems are complex. If we understood them, there would be no allergies/ asthma/ rheumatoid arthritis/ Crohn’s disease etc. If you train the immune system to recognise an antigen/ marker with too little specificity, you risk a) it does nothing b) you accidentally train it to target itself and you end up dying by your own cells attacking you. You can also have problems even when the target is right: in an early Dengue fever vaccine, it was specific enough to the virus, but instead of making the immune system appropriately respond to and kill the virus, it caused the body to go into anaphylactic shock, essentially over reacting to the virus and causing death. Covid isn’t a virus that we seem get lasting immunity to (unlike chicken pox which you catch once - it’s more like norovirus. Your immunity to noro wanes after about one year)

This was my daughter answering one of my questions: - It jumped over from an animal to us through close contact/ maybe consumption of the meat which is something viruses (specifically RNA viruses) are known to do. HIV, Ebola, SARS, swine flue and bird flu are all the same. There have been warnings for years from viral epidemiologists about the possibility of this happening, and studies estimating how quickly it could spread/ mutate and cause a pandemic - they’ve been publishing papers and talking about it, but few have been interesting/ listening. If anything, we are lucky covid isn’t more deadly (but being so new in humans, the odds of it continuing to change and possibly become more deadly is worryingly high). This is an area of research that’s been chronically underfunded. Big pharma don’t love vaccines cause once a disease is eradicated no more money can be made (though almost everyone has to take it for it to work, so certainly CAN make money) but, more importantly, investors are short sighted here. The success story/ money spinner is “look at this disease we cured/ reduced rates of” not “look at this disease we prevented from happening.” If you put money into preventing a global pandemic, did your investment work or was it never going to happen anyway? That quote I used in my Max P essay: when you do things right, people aren’t sure you haven’t done anything at all As someone with first class honours in virology and stratified medicine and a Ph.D. in public health, she's working in this field so is at least qualified to know a bit about it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/JasonReidUK/status/1237830209904283648

The football postponements in most European countries now, the golf events being cancelled and everything else is in the last couple of days are massive moves which are going to have huge impacts on the economies of every country. The restrictions on travel are last resort measures which are going to have deep impacts very quickly. The poor monkeys in Thailand are having gang wars amongst each other because there aren't the daily streams of tourists there to give them their daily food. THAT is how serious this is. Here in the UK, we know nothing. We must be in the relegation zone of the league table of preparedness and that guy on Question Time and the audience were coming out with amazing examples of our government's ineptitude, particularly to our lack of testing in the early days and over the last five weeks. Now our PM is telling us that we WILL lose loved ones. And what the fuck is he doing about it? What the fuck has he done about it? My wife is waiting for redeployment, not because she has been told this but because she has forty years experience of healthcare and knows how fucking pathetic our response has been. We won't have the staff. Close the schools and who's going to look after the kids? Simple critical thinking hasn't been done. There's been zero due diligence and forward planning done and we are reacting the whole time, on a minute-by-minute basis. The panic buyers make me vomit. We expect everyone to be selfish, that's human nature but we are seeing the sickness of our Tory-managed UK being acted out on a grand scale currently. It's going to get a whole lot worse real quick, at an accelerating pace.

The snake oil salesman wants to "improve the fan experience". In order to even think in these terms, he needs to understand what the fans want. He's all about "the atmosphere". As a former fan, unlikely to ever return, I was all about "the product". Still am. By that I mean the football team. That's at least what Milne identified (25 years ago at the meeting at the Capitol) as the most important aspect of AFC plc, even though he lied about it being his priority. Yes I agree with the women in football (BBC Scotland documentary this week) that football needs to change. Budge and Dempster etc. speak with good sense. Like Cormack though, who's been in the US too long, these clowns miss the essence of the football and try to apply "helicopter vision" and standard business thinking to a situation they don't fully understand. Not all customers want the same thing. We Scots aren't as stupid as Americans. The caterers know more about the football fans in this country than this new breed of chairpeople do. They serve us shit because we don't go to Pittodrie for the pies. As Rab C Nesbitt said, we're scum and proud of it.

Stunning keeper fuck up cost them. He was shit for the second and third goals too. Only got themselves to blame. Wijnaldum as good as won them the tie and then Klopp subs him off? Bizarre.

Inherent in your rant is that you think Trump is, or Biden would be "in charge" of the USA. It's like you're saying that Blair was, and Boris is in charge of the UK. Just like your views of left v. right, this is old traditional thinking that is as good as obsolete in the modern era. It wouldn't have been obsolete if Corbyn had won but the biggest question is WHO is in charge of the west? Putin is clearly in charge of Russia and the party is in charge of China but arguably they're just as corrupt as the people who really control the west. Equality of opportunity and addressing the climate issues are required from natural justice and common sense alone but these aren't close to the agendas of the "leaders", self-gratification being the key drivers. I'm amazed people still think in traditional terms without seeing what's really going on.

I also saw the highlights and whilst I agree that Taylor and Logan were guilty of a total lack of communication leading to braindumbfuckery, I thought the pass through for their goal was too simple and another defensive fuck up, one trying to play offside (correctly) and another playing him on. Good three points though and a nice surprise to see two quick goals on the text whilst watching lower league fitba.

3-2 the day, a scoreline that flattered Brechin. The second goal today was a thing of beauty with more than half the team involved in putting together 15/20 passes. Fraser Fyvie spread a couple of amazing passes that deserved goals on the end of them and Mitch Megginson is a tremendous instinctive striker. They're an intelligent bunch of footballers, honest and hardworking. I don't see any weaknesses so far, just an excellent team. Really enjoying it.

Not just uneducated and dangerous, Trump is stone cold insane. The worst of it is that he gives licence to the mad racists in society. We saw Brexit giving licence to this here in the UK. Chinese have been targeted in Scotland over the corona virus. How fucked up are some people who live amongst us?

Watching USA v England just now and it's so bad and this is the best the women's game has to offer? I guess the only attraction might be who are the least shit? Terrible standard on show in the first women's game I've ever started watching. Half an hour in, I'll stay to HT but fucked wasting any more time on this. The She Believes cup? What the fuck's that about? Believe what?

The announcement (by WHO possibly) that 12 billion is being made available to combat this is interesting. Who thinks every dollar of this will be properly spent? Who thinks it will even be audited? There's another 11 figure sum (10 bn+) of public funds getting misappropriated, big pharma, private and public health organisations, new quangos and support groups including consultancy fees and focus groups all getting hand outs. Not to mention the individuals in public office who will benefit directly and indirectly.

The wife just said that Asda had sold out of soap today. The wifie working there told her that some wifie shopper came in and bought 10 x Dettol liquid soaps earlier. Now what sort of moron does that and did these people never wash their hands before? Fucking panic-buying and fear abounds, unsurprisingly. as people are mostly morons. But I still can't work out the underlying agenda. The report in the Times this morning - that Parliament was considering shutting at the end of this month - has been disputed by the government but there's something going on.