Thanks for this tetra,. It is very informative and gives the clearest explanation of how the virus is spread that I have read so far. Will pass onto friends.
In the UK lock down is being relaxed a little but guidance is extremely sketchy. Advice on next steps and whether you can return to work or not is very ambiguous. Prime Minister's announcements yesterday seemed to be mostly telling us to "be alert" and "use our common sense". No clear message about what we should or shouldn't be doing. Most of us have greeted his ramblings of go back to work/don't go back to work, go outside/don't go outside, we have beaten the virus/we haven't beaten the virus with a shoulder shrug and an eye roll. As for using our common sense - my experience of common sense is that it comes in all shapes and sizes and some people's common sense was all used up long before coronavirus.
Thanks for this tetra ,. It is very informative and gives the clearest explanation of how the virus is spread that I have read so far. Will pass onto friends.
In the UK lock down is being relaxed a little but guidance is extremely sketchy. Advice on next steps and whether you can return to work or not is very ambiguous. Prime Minister's announcements yesterday seemed to be mostly telling us to "be alert" and "use our common sense". No clear message about what we should or shouldn't be doing. Most of us have greeted his ramblings of go back to work/don't go back to work, go outside/don't go outside, we have beaten the virus/we haven't beaten the virus with a shoulder shrug and an eye roll. As for using our common sense - my experience of common sense is that it comes in all shapes and sizes and some people's common sense was all used up long before coronavirus.
Thanks again- stay safe
I, too, found the details very helpful for judging which activities are relatively safe and which are not. Maybe Boris suffered a bit of brain damage while he was sick.
Your phrasing about common sense is hilarious, and too true.
I step in the water, but the water has moved on...
Nah - he is just out of his depth! Don't like the man and he is not trustworthy or honest. I met him years ago before he was a household name when I was helping arrange a conference and he was a keynote speaker. He was rude to anyone he considered unimportant and quite unpleasant - not the lovable eccentric that he presents himself as. Not that I am biased or anything............
Nah - he is just out of his depth! Don't like the man and he is not trustworthy or honest. I met him years ago before he was a household name when I was helping arrange a conference and he was a keynote speaker. He was rude to anyone he considered unimportant and quite unpleasant - not the lovable eccentric that he presents himself as. Not that I am biased or anything............
Nah - he is just out of his depth! Don't like the man and he is not trustworthy or honest. I met him years ago before he was a household name when I was helping arrange a conference and he was a keynote speaker. He was rude to anyone he considered unimportant and quite unpleasant - not the lovable eccentric that he presents himself as. Not that I am biased or anything............
Lovable eccentric?! Now that is rich.
I have so many friends who are the opinion that he is a breath of fresh air and a bit of a buffoon but in a loveable way - what we Brits like to think of as "eccentric" . He communicates well - I will give him that but I think the man is downright dangerous - he lied and lied to get us out of Europe and will continue to lie to us for as long as we let him **pauses to take a deep breath**. He is cut from the same cloth as your Mr Trump - his top considerations are himself, big business and himself. The divide between the rich and the poor is growing at an alarming rate here in the UK and it will continue while he keeps on telling us lies to obfuscate and stop us looking too closely at what he is doing. *stands down from soapbox* As you can maybe tell, I am not a big fan of the lying, numpty, deceitful, lying b*stard
I feel compelled to comment on this thread. First, the article that you provided a link to, Tetra, was probably the most comprehensive document on Covid-19 that I have read to date. Thank you. I’ve printed it out so that I can absorb every word.
Some months ago I created a similar thread but was derided for my seemingly unnecessary gloomy point of view. People more or less scoffed at me. To paraphrase, one person said he’d had the flu before and had gotten over it, so what’s the problem (my thread on the subject was dated 6 March). I knew at the end of January, beginning of March, that this virus was deadly and should be taken very seriously. I was amazed at the indifference shown by the government. It was as if they were asleep, or they were simply turning a blind eye. I wrote to my MP. He said the government was acting on the advice of scientists. In my humble opinion the British government should have banned flights from China and Europe, particularly Italy and Spain. We had no cases then.
The government carried on as usual. They allowed people to enter the country, 15,000 a day at times, with no temperature or health checks (we hadn’t developed a virus test then). People entering the country were not quarantined. The government still weren’t taking it seriously. Why was I? I’m not an expert and I do not have special powers of observation. I’m certainly not a prophet. Yet I could sense what was going to happen and it scared me.
Moco is right to point out the shortcomings of the government. But governments all over the world, with the exception of the Far Eastern countries, have acted unbelievably slowly. Great Britain seems to be particularly inept. It took a long while for them to grasp the implications of allowing so many people into the country. Only last week did they decide to quarantine people flying into the UK. But I have friends who have come over from Europe, walked through Heathrow airport with no tests, not even a temperature check.
It is so easy to politicise this argument. The liberal left will blame the Conservative government whether they did good or bad. But how would the Labour Party have dealt with it, assuming Jeremy Corbyn was still in power? Perhaps he would have put Diane Abbott on the case?
Social identity is a person’s sense of who they are based on their group membership(s). The famous psycholigist, Tajfel, proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem. Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world (it is one of the reasons why we exist on this forum). In order to increase our self-image we enhance the status of the group to which we belong. For example, England is the best country in the world! We can also increase our self-image by discriminating and holding prejudice views against the out group (the group we don’t belong to). For example, the Americans, French etc. are a bunch of losers!
My dear aunt, who brought me up, gave me some excellent advice regarding politics and religion. She said “never discuss religion or politics in public, unless you want to create division”.
Two cap it all, the English Channel which is just 22 miles wide at its narrowest point, is awash with inflatable dinghy’s carrying economic migrants, some would say asylum seekers, who have travelled from camps in France to our island. Some say these people must be desperate to make this perilous journey. The fact is the journey across the channel is not that perilous. People swim the distance from time to time. The ocean is relatively calm. Anyway, desperate people would claim asylum in the first country they arrive at (this is the international rule), not make their way across Europe specifically to enter the UK. Most of these people land on our shores and disappear into the community. Some are picked up by government boats, and like a ferry service, brought into the country. A couple of weeks ago none of these asylum seekers or economic migrants were checked for the virus (they might now, of course). This trickle of migrants from France, where many of the camps are rife with Covid, numbers around 900 to 1000 a week. Can you imagine what it’s going to be like in the summer? There will be many thousands. Most of them will disappear into the community with no health checks. It won’t be quite as bad as Greece or Italy, whose shores are littered with slashed dinghies, but in this particular time of crisis, it will add fuel to the fire.
Please don’t politicise what is now the greatest threats to mankind that we have faced in generations. It is so divisive. To call our Prime Minister “downright dangerous” is bordering on the absurd. Kim Yong Um is 'dangerous'. There's no comparison. I look across at the United States and could offer many opinions but it is not my place to do so. This is a forum for a spinal injury and not a forum for political rants. It is so easy for friends to become enemies. People maximise their differences. They demonise those outside of their ideology or their group.
We have over 34,000 deaths now and it is climbing at a rate of 400 or 500 a day, which is well down on the 1000 a day we were getting some weeks ago.
If anyone is to blame for this disease it is the country from whence it came, the society that never admits to any wrongdoing and covers up all criticism — even to the point of locking up whistleblowing doctors. The world should have been notified of the danger that arose there but they chose to keep it under wraps. Even now the WHO are not allowed into the country. They want to examine laboratories and markets that sell livestock, so they can learn more about the origins of the virus. So far they have been denied permission.
Once again, Tetra, thank you for providing that enlightening document.
Sorry mikeq, I was not seeking to politicize the the situation we find ourselves in. And did not intend to be divisive in the way you imply. I am just not a fan of our current prime minister as a personality not as part of a government (though for clarity I am not a Conservative voter either).In my book anyone who refers to single Mums as "“uppity and irresponsible”, gay men as “tank-topped bumboys”, black people as "smiling picanninies" (could give many more examples) is dangerous to our society though in an entirely different way from Kim Yong Um. I have no idea whether a Labour government would do a better job, possibly not. They would need to get their act together and act in unison which they are only just beginning to address - so chances of getting it right are diminished. But that is no reason to ignore the current government's shortcomings. Whatever our politics we need to call them to account. However we have no experience to draw on and it would be almost impossible to get it totally right when the scientists know so little about how the virus behaves.Luckily the majority of people have a huge amount of common sense and I am immensely proud of the way we are dealing with it as a society.I am truly in awe of how people are learning to work together and pool knowledge and expertise.I am reminded daily of how much bravery,kindness and love there is in the world.
But yes - you are right about rants whether political or not - I take your point. This is not a platform for my opinions and I wrote without enough thought. I apologise to anyone I offended. I won't do it again
i was thinking of posting to this thread yesterday, but decided against because i didnt want to politicize. well here it goes, i am a total believer in conservative thinking in governing, being in california a total liberal state government, being horribly run by people thinking they know better. i thought only the sick should be quarintined, not the healthy. total backwards governing.
Moco, please don't worry about your post. We all diversify from time to time. Anyway it gives us something to think about. I belong to no party, though I did join the Brexit party when it was formed a year or so ago by Nigel Farage. I paid my dues for one year. That was it.
Can you please supply references that Boris Johnson used the derogatory terms you mentioned; "“uppity and irresponsible”, gay men as “tank-topped bumboys”, black people as "smiling picanninies"
Moco, please don't worry about your post. We all diversify from time to time. Anyway it gives us something to think about. I belong to no party, though I did join the Brexit party when it was formed a year or so ago by Nigel Farage. I paid my dues for one year. That was it.
Can you please supply references that Boris Johnson used the derogatory terms you mentioned; "“uppity and irresponsible”, gay men as “tank-topped bumboys”, black people as "smiling picanninies"
Any links would be welcomed.
Will do Mike - I will message them to you so as not to break my new self imposed embargo on my content But Boris has never denied that he said any of those things - and there are lots more examples I could have quoted. He was confronted about them several times during the recent election and could not deny he said them as they are all documented in Spectator and Telegraph archives.
Mike- I found your post riveting. Thank you for taking the time to write. My only disagreement might be with the question of whom to blame for this virus. i see it more as an "act of God". Certainly China might have handled it better at the outbreak but no western countries handled it any better. Mine was considerably slower and now we lead the world in cases and deaths. America first.