RandoEFC

The latest baffling element of this debate now is "we can't stay in lockdown forever". Give your head a wobble please. Nobody is arguing in favour of that. At most, people are arguing that there shouldn't be significant changes for 3 more weeks. And if you think what's happened in England is a "lockdown" then you're sadly mistaken. If a real lockdown had happened, the infection rate would be much lower by now and you actually could start talking about getting back to something relatively normal. Instead the government have fucked it up with poor messaging and unclear policies, parts of the public have fucked it up with ignorance and ill discipline and parts of the media have fucked it up by treating it like a soap opera and giving dangerous sociopaths like Katie Hopkins a platform to spout shit about something she isn't qualified to comment on. But that's what England has been reduced to now, a perfect storm of ignorance, selfishness and confused nationalism.

Another 600+ dead in the UK today including a six week old baby and more reports of people flooding to parks across the country. I've spent a lot of the last few days pointing fault with the government and SAGE but the lack of responsibility taken by so many (by no means am I saying all or most) of the public has also been really poor. Yeah I totally agree with all that about the DM and getting the clicks and hits and retweets with clickbait headlines that wind people up. I was more trying to add context for our overseas friends that it was pretty standard fare for that particular publication. I agree Starmer has made a positive start. After Johnson vs Corbyn and the cultism that surrounded both during the last election, there's a real gap in the market for an adult in the room and this crisis really brings that to the forefront.

And more:

Economic shocks are nothing new. This might be the worst one in our lifetimes but if the country hadn't locked down the fatalities could have been in the hundreds of thousands which impacts the economy in its own way. The majority of people won't see a life changing or even noticeable impact on their lives from even a major drop in GDP. Those that do should be supported by their governments. That's what governments are there for above all else, after all. Why do you pay your taxes your whole life if you don't expect the government to try to look after you when you get fucked over by something you couldn't do anything about? It's not like this is or ever was a case of sacrificing the over 70s or we'll all face economic ruin. Economic shocks happen, countries have always recovered from them and they will this time as well. I absolutely sympathise with the thousands who will lose their jobs and businesses because of what's happened but it won't kill them. Mental health and loneliness is going to be a much bigger killer, at least in the short term, along with other not quite essential treatments falling by the wayside because of coronavirus taking over health services.

The entire world economy to go bankrupt? We're not even close to a discussion on that. I can't even call that an exaggeration because we aren't even near being on that sort of scale. Having face to face retail, sport and hospitality and a few other important but ultimately non-essential sectors have been shut down for a few months. None of those things are killing people at the moment. When food production, freight, water and electrical supplies are shut down that's when more people will actually start dying from economic shutdown than the virus itself but nowhere in the world that I know of has a lockdown stringent enough to cause anything like that.

Very interesting until he leans heavily on the assumption that it's in any way viable for any developed country to just leave the over 70s to die and treat the rest of us so as not to overwhelm the hospitals. Another extremely shit hot take. It's taken months and only recently been (more or less) confirmed that people aren't catching this twice and therefore herd immunity is going to be a tool used to get countries reopening but there was no evidence of that when the outbreak was forcing countries into lockdown so pursuing it would have been a reckless strategy. You still have to control how many people get infected at once so as not to overwhelm hospitals. Until theres a vaccine it's clearly a case of striking a balance now between allowing people to get infected and gain immunity without too many people having it at once. This guy is basically a lunatic. Just because he's apparently happy to die as punishment for being part of the baby boomer generation doesn't mean the rest of his age group are or that the rest of us are ready to write off our grandparents, parents, etc so that we can get back outside again.

It's not much of a hot take though is it? I'm sure the academic study is fascinating but I don't need to read it to tell you that Germany aren't going to reference a war that they lost as inspiration for overcoming adversity. Maybe we should club together and write an academic paper studying how much AC Milan fans, coaches and players talk about channelling the spirit of that night in Istanbul as a source of inspiration compared to their Liverpool counterparts. I have an idea of what the results might look like but no spoilers! You can trust the Mail to pervert almost anything to make themselves look stupid though. Last night they tried the first hatchet job that I've seen against Keir Starmer when a cameraman was sent to film him and his wife clapping for the NHS. As the bloke doesn't want his kids to be exposed to the media limelight in any way because of his prominence as a public figure, he sent his daughter across the road to clap out of shot. When it was done, he asked the cameraman "do you have everything you need" so that he could go and get his daughter from across the road. You won't believe what happened next! (Is that a good click bait?) Why am I bothering with this in addition to the article above? Well we have many members from outside the UK who look at us and question the madness of the last five years, up to and including our response to this pandemic, and the stupidity of so many of our public. Well the fact that the Daily Mail and its sister paper the Mail on Sunday are both among the top 5 circulating papers over here might go some way to explaining it.

I think there will be an impact on how other countries deal with China and their communist party, which will be significant, but not so much globalisation on the whole. If anything there are many factors about this crisis that highlight how important international relations and cooperation are.

Yeah new cases still very low over here. We're allowed to visit the houses of "loved ones" now as long as we don't enter the house and keep our 2 metres so on Friday I'm heading down to my parents' house for the first time in over 2 months which is sound.

Just make sure nobody finds out until long enough after for the legalities to be too complicated to untangle. In seriousness, there was a lot of grey area surrounding the whole thing, but the fact it was grey enough to carry in court is pretty bad.

This government is infested with the Vote Leave campaigners who literally got charged with breaking electoral law and are led by a man who has been sacked twice for lying (once from government itself) yet won the biggest majority in decades because that's where we are as a country. Don't hold your breath.

So taking the fudging of the numbers out of it, would it have been a failure if they'd done 99,000 tests on that day? They just stuck a nice round number on it. It might be relevant to point scoring in that the government set themselves a target they couldn't achieve they must be incompetent, if that's the route you want to go down but what's relevant to them actually making progress towards the end of this crisis is them demonstrating they can vastly increase testing without putting an arbitrary number on how much and they did achieve that. My point is that it will go unrecognised because this is the UK and a hot take or a quick headline reigns supreme over a patient and sensible analysis.

Twitter seems to be a much greater source of leftie loons at least in the UK. There are pockets of rightie loons on there as well though and absolute hordes of them if you stray into US Twitter to the extent that the undertones of white supremacy and shovanism on 'blue tick' influencers and Fox employee accounts are genuinely concerning. It's hard to see a way back to the sensible majority of middle people having their voice represented in a proportionate matter but I don't know how we get back there.

The 100k was only relevant because Hancock said it. A general increase in testing is relevant in the actual matter of getting this crisis sorted. Ironically, they achieved the actual relevant achievement but like I said, politics is so broken in this country that instead they had to obfuscate about hitting the meaningless 100k target instead.

I'm not calling you a Labour activist for pointing this out, that's exactly what I have a problem with people doing, but in this scenario my Twitter feed was already flooded with literal Labour activists, members and MPs tweeting about him fudging the numbers (which he did), so in this case I'm not generalising. It would have been even worse if he hadn't 'found a way' to make it look like 100k tests which is what I'm saying. When did they get to 100k tests? Well if they've always counted home tests being sent out in their daily tally, then they did it on Thursday. What's concerning about this is that if they've been counting those tests every day then the daily testing numbers are even lower on the days either side of Hancock's deadline day than they look, but you have to hope that those tests are getting carried out and returned (and not counted twice when they are returned). The whole 100k thing is a red herring, dead cat, distraction, call it what you want. It's an arbitrary number and the end of April was an arbitrary date. It doesn't actually matter whether or not they met it even if they should be challenged on the fact that they appear to have fudged the numbers because they couldn't bring themselves to say "well we only got to 85,000 tests but we've still made excellent progress towards building an effective test and trace system and we'll be carrying out 100,000 tests a day on a sustainable basis within the next couple of weeks" because, well, this is the Brexit government whose support base (and most vocal opposition over the past few years) doesn't understand shades of grey, only black and white, and because they believe (perhaps with good reason) that the media would slate them less for fudging the numbers on one day than missing their arbitrary target. The fact that it's received so much focus over the past week and a half is symptomatic of just how broken politics and the discourse around it has become in the UK.

I defended Hancock on testing and was pleased when he got to 100,000. To be honest on the day, I'd rather he fluffed the numbers a bit to hit 100k on the day he said just because I couldn't be arsed with the media and Labour twitter activists getting all antsy about him missing his deadline. Sadly, I was wrong in thinking that they'd keep working to get to 100,000 tests a day legitimately a couple of days after they fudged the numbers. They haven't, which pretty much confirms that fudging the numbers was done in the interest of Matt Hancock's vanity project of hitting 100,000 tests by the end of April. It's absolutely typical of this government to set themselves an arbitrary, seemingly unachievable goal, fail to achieve the goal, tell us that they actually did achieve the goal, and expect everyone to just go back about their business as the number of tests sinks back to 70k-80k for the following days. The testing capacity is one small part of the mass testing and tracing programme that's required to get us out of this mess. Again, this lot have focused disproportionately on achieving a good headline rather than putting the infrastructure in place to build the system we need for the benefit of public health as quickly and efficiently as they can. In football terms, they've spent a month of their pre-season doing shooting practice so that they've got a great capacity to put the ball in the net but the lack of fitness work, tactics and match practice means that they won't get the full benefit out of it. He deserves to be challenged on it and yes, her wording was a bit point-scorey but the man is supposed to be the face of the NHS in this crisis and to speak like that to an actual front line GP in the House of Commons is rude and a massive own goal politically.

I'm not denying that there are as many muppets in pretty much whichever corner you look in. In fact, anyone who has loyalty to a political party is probably a massive idiot because they're basing their support of that party on identity regardless of their policies for government. I have no partisan opposition to the Tories, nor do I have any partisan support for Labour. As a teacher and someone with a semblance of empathy for others, and someone who's very laid back about personal finances and so can't conceive of someone earning millions of pounds a year having a problem with paying more tax to support the health and education and living standards of those who aren't earning millions of pounds a year, it's basically impossible to imagine an iteration of the two where I'd ever vote for a Conservative party over a Labour party but at the same time I can happily admit that the prospect of facing this crisis with Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott leading the charge doesn't fill me with glee either. It's incredible how easy it is to make that statement as someone who would have voted Labour if I still lived in England in December, but like you say, so many people (or more likely just the loud minority) simply can't do it. You're expected now to put all your eggs in one basket and if the basket falls to pieces and all your eggs are smashed to bits, you find the nearest rooftop and scream at the top of your lungs that you still made the right choice because the other basket would have broken 5 minutes earlier than yours. I'd sooner have Blair, Gordon, Cameron, May, Miliband in a crisis than either of the offers that were on the table in December. Thank fuck I don't have to be as directly affected by the UK government anymore because all of the parties are so shit that they've all been shown up by the best farmers, shopkeepers and electricians they could find from the population of 90,000 on the Isle of Man to make up a government over here. I think I'm in a unique situation where I've seen a local, totally amateur government follow common sense and be proactive and cautious while across the pond you lot know no alternative to the utter incompetence that has infected Westminster (and by the sounds of it, your Welsh parliament) over the past few years. The problem with your comment is that it suggests the hypocrites only exist on the left. By saying that the hypocrites on the left are "somehow justified" you're joining in with the footballification of politics by implying that the right-wing hypocrites somehow don't get away with it when they clearly do in equal measure. The thing is, none of them get away with it, and none of them are justified, they just seek out the right echo chambers of like-minded idiots to convince themselves that they do/are, and when there's enough of them, they become emboldened enough to start inflicting it upon the rest of us. If you read back through the thread (don't, you have better things to do), you'll see that I've tried my best to be objective and fair when analysing this response. I've praised Johnson's leadership, Sunak's policies and even defended Hancock to an extent. (Raab and Patel are still total morons whichever specs you put on, unfortunately). However, in my objective and fair opinion, we're reaching that point now where sympathy has run out for this government, whether they're Red or Blue, this crisis has been mismanaged spectacularly.

Hooray for Greatest Britain for only following the British exceptionalism science for a week, which flew in the face of actual real things that were happening in front of people's eyes in other countries, whose experts pleaded with us weeks in advance not to make the same mistakes they did. The "we handled Covid 19 better than some third world countries in Central America" bank holiday should replace VE day with immediate effect.

UK hitting the top of the death charts in Europe despite having the most time to prepare, despite having the most insight into what was to come due to being the last country to get hit, and despite being a fucking island and despite having one of the very best health services in the world, is about as predictable as it gets. What's worse is that we're still posting daily death tolls in the 600s - we're far from done. Nobody's allowed to criticise Boris/Brexit/the Tories it seems these days without being a naive left-wing remoaner Corbynite communist Islamophile self-hating Britain-hating muppet who just needs to get over it and whose shrill bleating is the whole reason the Tories won such a large majority at the last election, but I'm going to simply point out that we (well, you guys, I'm lucky enough to live on an island where the locally elected farmers, shopkeepers and electricians took sensible, proactive and well-communicated steps at the right time to keep this thing relatively under control) as a country voted to double down on this group of charlatans and lo and behold, the first serious challenge faced by the country in the aftermath, while unprecedented, has been absolutely bungled. Then there's SAGE, what an absolute shit show. We're just going to ignore what's happened in all the countries in Europe as this virus has steamrolled towards us from across China, think that we know better than all of them and take a completely different route which fails and gets disproven within a week and decimates public trust in the scientists' competence to guide us through this crisis. The foreign coverage of Britain's handling of this crisis is absolutely damning, and this government is lucky they have an ally across the Atlantic whose ongoing demented episode of Black Mirror makes the rest of the world look intelligent by comparison.

What's the deal with schools over there? Is the plan to go back with all the kids in class at once? The current thought over here seems to be some sort of rotation with smaller class sizes, not all kids in school at once.

Kidsos

Haven't heard anyone say this since before the lockdown. Good times.

I hope the government hit this 100k target. If they miss it, the only thing worse than the anti-Tory extremists screeching ThE gOvErNmEnT lIeD aGaIn SaCk HaNcOcK will be the pro-Tory extremists pouncing on any mention of the target for the rest of time as part of balanced analysis or factual reporting screeching LeFtIe SnOwFlAkE iTs YoUr FaUlt FoR bEiNg So NeGaTiVe AlL tHe TiMe YoU hAtE bRiTaIn SuPpOrT tHe GoVeRnMeNt when no actual criticism was intended. Also, people have talked about Hancock's job being at risk if he misses this target which is absolutely ridiculous and he's one of the last ones who's head should roll over the handling of this crisis.

Cannabis, Sir Balon and (genuinely) TAD. Also Keeley I don't think I've seen mentioned used to be a decent poster.

Niasse. Christ, just because they're black doesn't mean they're the same person. Racist.