RandoEFC

The US and the UK are the most broken and divided countries and also the worst affected by the virus. No coincidences here.

Hospital admissions were falling in London before the end of April I'm pretty sure. There was certainly a decent consensus a couple of weeks ago that London had gone through the worst of it while some areas around the rest of the country were only just hitting the peak. I doubt the R value has jumped from 0.4 to 0.95. It's probably more the case that it was actually around 0.65 or 0.7 and now its back up to 0.85 or 0.9. I hope at least.

Pretty concerning update on R value across England. Possible at or over 1 in some places and close elsewhere including London where it was previously thought to be between 0.4 and 0.7 but is now in the region of 0.95

Imola would have been a treat but sounds like we might be getting double Sochi instead .

@Bluebird Hewitt thoughts on this? A bit surprising as I thought Welsh Labour's handling of the pandemic hasn't been universally praised.

Maybe not for you but other people absolutely do see it that way and hearing other people call him Boris helps to perpetuate it even if they're not doing it for the same reason.

I thought Starmer didn't do himself any favours over the private letter/phonecall about schools opening stuff. Johnson got properly rattled but just because he's an overgrown schoolboy who doesn't understand that the whole point of PMQs is for the government to be scrutinised doesn't mean that Starmer had to excel himself to make Johnson look like the flustered man-baby that he is. I also wish people would stop calling him "Boris" as if he's this fun character that's just your mate. He's the prime minister and he's supposed to be leading the country. Calling him Boris perpetuates this weird subconscious fetish people have for thinking that he's relatable because he has a goofy and sort of common name. He has next to nothing in common with either of us and Boris isn't even his real first name.

This is the man who suggested that many victims of the Grenfell fire would have survived if they'd shown some common sense and run out of the building against the advice of present firefighters. He thinks it's common sense to set up a 1km+ queue for MPs to vote when there was already a working online system which didn't exclude over 100 who couldn't attend the House of Commons physically. An absolute moron in every sense of the word. Common fucking sense. Johnson used the British common sense line again in one of his "answers" at PMQs today. His idea of common sense is shaking hands with infected Covid 19 patients, almost dying from it and allowing his chief aide to claim on national television that he drove 60 miles to a beauty spot on his wife's birthday with their infant child in the back seat to test his eyesight and repeatedly claimed this was within the rules, also on national television. I met some friends yesterday who luckily don't pay as much attention to politics as I do and they're still convinced that Johnson's blundering buffoon persona is an act and that he's actually quite clever. I asked them what he's ever done that shows him to be clever, and whether they can name anything he's good at. They could not. He's another moron who because his Daddy's rich got sent to Eton, learned how to speak posh and be able to quote a few Greek philosophers so the little people with their subconscious class-based deference to the ruling class would think he's Churchill come again. There's a reason they only trusted him with a three-word slogan (again) during the election campaign. The sad thing no matter how ridiculous these clowns get, there are thousands across the country who will continue to vote for them every fucking time because they care more about a posh accent, a strongman image and the dewey-eyed nostalgia for a mythical Britain that, if it ever existed, did so years before their time, than they do about voting to make their own lives a little bit less miserable. These people won't change their minds so I need to stop getting arsed by every new glaring example of this incompetence. What I wouldn't give to see even Cameron or May back in the saddle to banish the weird Victorian cosplay faction back to the irrelevance of the back benches. For the sake of balance though, their idea to offer the citizens of Hong Kong refuge in the UK at some point is something I like, even if the logistics look really difficult. Along with the overdue but better late than never policy of implementing controls on people entering the country and Starmer's mediocre performance at PMQs today, I thought the Tories had had a decent day until I saw the Sharma thing which done set me off on one.

The day after Rees-Mogg's Alton Towers queue made the UK parliament a laughing stock for the sake of getting a few more cheerleaders back behind Johnson during PMQs and to quash the "I'll send my kids back to school/go back to work when the House of Commons is full again" shouts, Business Secretary Alok Sharma visibly showed symptoms of Covid 19 at the despatch box and is now self isolating after being tested for the virus. If he tests positive a significant number of MPs will have to self-isolate for a week or a fortnight in line with the new "world-beating" test and trace system which has definitely been up and running since Monday even though the woman running it said it won't be fully operational until the end of the month. Your daily Tory shambles update was brought to you by OnlyFourAndAHalfMoreYearsOfThisShower productions.

We are now down to 0 active cases with no positive tests for 14 days. Now we just need the UK to sort their shit out so we can open the borders again.

In a world where everything is changing Everton remain particularly stubborn about being the exact same cursed entity we've been my whole life.

It's pretty much all gone to shit now hasn't it?

Football will boost the nation's morale though and that will surely cure the remaining Covid 19 cases.

Yes

We've had no new cases for 9 days and only 3 left in self isolation. We're still supposed to keep 2m when we go out and people are still observing it more or less. I met some of my mates at the beach tonight and there were loads of people out in groups. Plenty of people not strictly observing the 2m rule but its not like people are taking the piss and having massive pile ons. It's a weird one for us now because while there still could be symptomless cases, no positive tests in 9 days is making people think (including me to an extent) that we've literally got rid of it over here. The next question is when do we open the borders to the UK again? Not soon hopefully. I think it's mad that you guys are lifting restrictions about the same time as us or a few days behind when the R number is barely below 0. There's also massive variance in different parts of the UK which makes the government's insistence that a regional listing is for some reason unacceptable (partly because they can't monitor travel between regions so fair enough to an extent) a bit difficult for them overall.

I'm sure they have to have a fairly significant time lag so that police can be informed and briefed of what they need to do and it gives people time to see the news, digest the changes and a clear deadline for the change of rules. Can you imagine if they announced it on Monday 5pm, as of right now you can visit your grandparents, you drive round for a barbecue in their back yard half an hour later, their neighbours who haven't seen the news might then report a gathering next door. Police who started shift at 3pm come round not being fully aware of new rules and procedures and confront you for doing something you've just seen the government announce is fine on national television. The timing has been unfortunate as it's not the first time we've been told "it's now okay to do this stuff but please don't do it this weekend even though we've said it's fine and the weather's going to be fucking great". I think that's potentially linked to the review of the lockdown that happens every three weeks on the same day, which itself depends on when we went into lockdown, that's just happened by circumstance if I'm right. It does seem more sensible if they could announce it on Wednesday and say the rules change at 5pm on Friday or whatever.

He has been training though, he's only just finished his rehab from the second injury that he got in January and this has been described as a freak accident. He literally did an interview yesterday declaring himself fully fit and ready to play in the games we have left.

I swear they included the testing figures yesterday.

Two weeks is pretty fast even by our standards.

For context, Gbamin first injured his quad for 6 months having a shot. He has a record of making 25+ appearances in each of the past five seasons since making his professional debut at Lens and then Mainz.

£25m signing with one start suffers third long term injury since joining the club before teams even return to contact training. Literally astonishing. This is what happens when you combine Everton with 2020.

Again, if they'd said yes he made a mistake, he's very sorry and he won't do it again, but he won't be leaving his position as he's too important to the government at this stage in the crisis, enough people would have accepted that by now that this story would have faded from sight for the general public and been restricted to people like who spend too much time on the internet banging on about it. By pretending he didn't break the rules and forcing the police to investigate it, they've caused this themselves, Cummings will be back on the front pages tomorrow a full week after this first broke. More bad press for the government and more noise distracting everyone from getting this crisis right. The anti-Tory in me definitely enjoyed this for most of the weekend and I'm glad that a lot of people are starting to see this bunch for what they are but the actual human being in me is back in the driving seat now and this farce needs to end. It's the media's job to report on it and the police's job to investigate the matter, no doubt they'll get abused for doing their jobs but theres one man who wants the country to move on from this and has access to one very simple solution which will allow that to happen.

Several countries managed to sort this out overnight and it's going to take us over 3 months from the start of the pandemic to do the same. Beneath the government's spinning of the truth and flat out lying to make themselves sound better than they are, the decisions made at government level along with the contributions of SAGE, public health England and the parts of the NHS, such as procurement of PPE, which aren't the nurses and doctors reacting on the front lines has been an absolute national embarrassment by almost every measure. More data from the FT today suggests that excess deaths per capita in the UK is worse than anywhere else in the world that has published comparable data, including USA and Italy. We had longer to prepare than most comparable countries, we have the unique geographical advantage of being an island and therefore having more control over the virus entering the country, we have a national health service that may be understaffed and underfunded compared to previous years but still much stronger than most other countries have to fall back on. Set the Cummings incident and the government taking the absolute piss out of their own lockdown rules to defend one man while the death toll approaches 40,000 against this backdrop. The handling of this in the UK has categorically been an abject failure and a combination of our clown government, corrupt and irresponsible sections of our media, the lack of a viable testing strategy even now, and the general idiocy of many sections of the public mean that there's no guarantee we won't see a second wave either. Don't forget this embarrassing shambles of a country under this tin pot populist administration is supposed to be big and strong enough to leave the biggest trading bloc in the world without a single trade deal in place with any other major economical power while relying on a demented psychopath who tries to shut down social media for fact checking one of his tweets and might not even be reelected in a few months' time as their primary ally.

I'm not sure, when I say bored I'm only bored of talking about it because theres only so many times you can repeat the same facts to people who choose not to see them. It won't be forgotten though. Their lead in the polls has been cut from 15 points to 6 points according to YouGov. It'll be interesting to see whether it remains on the front pages tomorrow, I don't think it will be aside from possibly the Mirror and the Guardian but the damage has still been done over it, and Tory MPs are still coming out to condemn him today and call for him to resign. Bits and pieces will continue to cut through and damage them. A brighter light will be shone on Cummings in the long term and any further controversy surrounding him you'll see this episode erupt back to the fore again.

Remember when they called themselves the People's Government back in December? Lasted long that .