Corona Virus

[st albans fox]

Just now, rachhere said:

Those who have had symptoms, how long did it take for your cough to go? I thought I had shaken mine off, but it’s come back the past couple of days. 

I’ve read that it can drag on for weeks ..... I guess it’s down to how much damage has been done in the lungs ...... I’m still coughing a bit nearly four weeks on ... I never used to have a cough ......

 

[lildave3]

It’s been a real eye opener to hear people basically being made to live the lifestyle I normally lead finding it horrendous and a waste of life 😂

 

Genuinely don’t understand why people are struggling so much with staying at home. 

[Dahnsouff]

1 minute ago, Finnaldo said:

 

Agreed, the best the opposition can do right now is provide constructive and useful challenges and critiques to government policy where necessary. Leave the moaning to us unqualified and address that once we’re in a position privileged enough to consider it.

That is exactly the same as asking for it now. Vocal discontent fuels the media which ultimately leads to causation within government action. 
Note it down, write a list, collect evidence, build a compelling case against Government action. Publish it, share it, shout about it, when this is at least mostly over.

 

[Parafox]

Just now, Dahnsouff said:

I got the polar opposite impression,  it maybe that’s just me.

I guess there is an element of left-ish leaning but, in general his post is pretty centralist and raises valid questions about the way our mainstream press has covered this whole thing. plus you have to question whichever party was in power at a time like this when you read that our Gov missed EU briefings and tried to play down the real threat.

[Dahnsouff]

1 minute ago, Parafox said:

I guess there is an element of left-ish leaning but, in general his post is pretty centralist and raises valid questions about the way our mainstream press has covered this whole thing. plus you have to question whichever party was in power at a time like this when you read that our Gov missed EU briefings and tried to play down the real threat.

Absolutely. That was a massive cock up from the Government, the reasons it was missed must be found, and that occurs when hopefully the level of emergency lowers in my opinion, and certainly not any time soon.

[Finnaldo]

48 minutes ago, Parafox said:

I've never seen any of your blogs TBH, but this piece is insightful and thought-provoking. I can agree on so many of the points you raise here. Well written, apolitical (as in you don't seem to have a political axe to grind). An interesting read, thank you.

 

Glad to hear your feedback as well as @z-layrex if he’s not too busy, alongside any other healthcare professional. 
 

It’s all well and good praising it and criticising it from a partisan view (as some already have) but those with first hand experience are the most valuable voices we have in these situations.

[rachhere]

4 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

I’ve read that it can drag on for weeks ..... I guess it’s down to how much damage has been done in the lungs ...... I’m still coughing a bit nearly four weeks on ... I never used to have a cough ......

 

It’s been just over three weeks since I first got a cough, so I guess it might be a while yet. It feels a bit more on my chest now than before. Is that the same for you? Hope you are feeling much better apart from the persistent cough. 

[Blarmy]

6 minutes ago, lildave3 said:

It’s been a real eye opener to hear people basically being made to live the lifestyle I normally lead finding it horrendous and a waste of life 😂

 

Genuinely don’t understand why people are struggling so much with staying at home. 

I have a ton of stuff to do at home. I play guitar, make electronic music and bought an XBox when I realised the lockdown was going to happen. I like films and read a lot. However, I also like to go out - weekends away somewhere picturesque, visiting family and friends, the pub, meals out etc. It’s bad not being able to do the “out” stuff for me, so I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who don’t have the indoor stuff also, and not everyone does. My gfs life is built around seeing other people and even when it’s just the two of us she wants to go out all the time. She’s going insane. 

[st albans fox]

3 minutes ago, rachhere said:

It’s been just over three weeks since I first got a cough, so I guess it might be a while yet. It feels a bit more on my chest now than before. Is that the same for you? Hope you are feeling much better apart from the persistent cough. 

It’s not persistent ......  a few times a day and nothing worth even noticing .......

 

as far as I’m concerned - completely ok - mowed the lawn today !   my eldest still can’t taste after 10 days ! Such a weird illness the way it varies ....... 

[Parafox]

32 minutes ago, Dahnsouff said:

Would people like to hear that the Government in unison with the opposition are commencing a cross party review of the virus and how it has been handled and steps moving forward, and they will do so right now? 

 

Genuine question (In my mind only one answer is even remotely sensible)

 

Surely there has to be some sort of inquiry into the cause, effect and the handling by government and our appointed senior medical advisors of this thing?

When something as unprecedented as this happens we have to learn so that we are more prepared for the next crisis. 

[FoxesDeb]

13 minutes ago, lildave3 said:

It’s been a real eye opener to hear people basically being made to live the lifestyle I normally lead finding it horrendous and a waste of life 😂

 

Genuinely don’t understand why people are struggling so much with staying at home. 

Yes this is me too, apart from the children not going out to school our lives haven't really changed that much. I'm now working from home instead of going to the office, but I love it, and I'm genuinely getting anxious now when people start talking about us returning to work. 

But otherwise my life is continuing as normal and I'm quite happy. 

[Finnaldo]

1 minute ago, st albans fox said:

It’s not persistent ......  a few times a day and nothing worth even noticing .......

 

as far as I’m concerned - completely ok - mowed the lawn today !   my eldest still can’t taste after 10 days ! Such a weird illness the way it varies ....... 

Good to hear your back to full health mate, kind of stories we need in these time 

[Finnaldo]

16 minutes ago, Dahnsouff said:

That is exactly the same as asking for it now. Vocal discontent fuels the media which ultimately leads to causation within government action. 
Note it down, write a list, collect evidence, build a compelling case against Government action. Publish it, share it, shout about it, when this is at least mostly over.

 

Fair argument mate, I can see your point. 

[st albans fox]

1 minute ago, Finnaldo said:

Good to hear your back to full health mate, kind of stories we need in these time 

 It the thing is, until we get antibody testing  you can’t be 100% certain (unless you’ve been tested) and we can’t be certain about re infection and immunity ..... it’s a strange situation when you go out and aren’t really bothered about social distancing but have to respect others because it’s not like you have a sign on your forehead.......... but then again there’s the tiny concern that you didn’t have it or could get it again ......

[BlueSi13]

1 hour ago, Freeman's Wharfer said:

Usually blog about Leicester City when I can find time to but today I thought I'd write a piece on my frustration around how the national media our, in my opinion, failing to hold our government to account on the handling of Coronavirus thus far. I know this will divide opinion.

 

You can read here: https://tinyurl.com/vl3m566

 

Or I've copied and pasted below:

 

“When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there”.

 

This is a line from the excellent HBO historical drama ‘Chernobyl’ and, as the UK comes to the end of an unprecedented Easter weekend, it can at times feel like we are all living through a drama that is being written right now and which, when we return to some form of post-Covid normality, will be put forward for acclaim alongside those other television series and shows on which we binge to while away the banal hours of lockdown.

 

But how will history judge the lead characters of our time? Who will be the capable and who will be the culpable?

 

It feels very much to me, that those portrayals are already being subtly crafted now before our very eyes. At the end of a weekend where we reached the point of over 10,000 people in this country having lost their lives to Coronavirus, it has felt all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of those figures. For they have become just that.

 

Read it again: 10,000 people in this country have lost their lives.

 

In a matter of days, it is likely that this number will surpass 11,000 and then 12,000. I wonder at what point that stops becoming digits rolled out at a daily briefing with some nice bar charts and graphs comparing us to other countries who are, in many way, incomparable. And I wonder if that point will bring the type of questions we need answers to around why this figure has been so high, whether we could have done things differently or better to prevent such fatalities and what the exact plan is moving forward to prevent any more avoidable deaths, especially to those working in our Health Service.

 

Had you read any of the major newspapers this weekend, you’d have done well – on any of the front pages – to find the real news. That 10,000 people in this country have now lost their lives to this virus in the UK. You would have, instead, seen that Boris Johnson was better. That Boris Johnson was out of hospital. That Boris Johnson planned to take a couple of weeks recovering at Chequers. That Boris Johnson had praised the NHS who had saved his life with heart-warming reference to nurse Luis from Portugal.

 

When any Head of State becomes seriously ill, of course this is news. But the truth – that truth which may offend but is still there in the background – is that this Head of State being ill should not be a free pass on facing the tough questions that need asking about the UK’s handling of this pandemic up until now and from here onwards. Do not let anyone tell you that it is not right to question your government during a pandemic.

 

Accountability keeps standards high, but I’m not seeing much of it right now.

 

What I see happening right now – and what frustrates the life out of me – is a mass distraction campaign. When our government should be delivering, they are instead campaigning. The dumbing down of serious issues – in the exact same way that ‘get Brexit done’ Brexit was broken down into simple numbers and phrases that could be spoon-fed to the population (see ‘oven ready’ and ‘take back control’) – we hear about ‘Herculean efforts’ and ‘ramping up’ when they are asked why, two weeks into the thick of this crisis, our National Health Service staff are dying because they are not supplied with the appropriate equipment to do their job.

 

When they are asked if they are sorry that doctors and nurses have died due to a lack of basic protection, they cannot even muster an apology to the families of those victims. Priti Patel does wear empathy and humanity well at the best of times, but there is only one answer to that question: of course we are sorry and we are doing everything we can to try and minimise the chances of this happening further (here’s how and here’s when).

 

History already has not been kind to the way this crisis has been handled in the UK. When scientists were advising we were on the cusp of an unprecedented pandemic, our Prime Minister was telling the world he was shaking hands with Coronavirus patients and smirking as he effectively declared Britain would “see this thing off in 12 weeks”. When Italy was telling us of the horrors it had been facing, we were somehow different because we were Great Britain.

 

There is the old saying that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Well if you elect on slogans and personas rather than policies then you get... slogans and ‘good ol’ Boris’ personas. Something deep in the Brexit memory recess jarred when, asked about the UK’s comparatively low quantity of testing to other countries when the World Health Organisation had advised “testing, testing, testing” as the key to handling this crisis best, Matt Hancock replied: “No test is better than a bad test”. You don’t have to think too hard to remember which deal was better than a bad deal.

 

And if you elect a government that consistently shows an inability to care for the most vulnerable in our society (see ‘herd’) then don’t be surprised when your government initially pursues a strategy of immunity for our ‘herd’ (see ‘society’). Similar to how, if you also elect a government that has consistently voted against funding and pay rises for the NHS, you also get a health service that is on its knees.

 

So what of the state the NHS was in coming into this pandemic? When do we ask those questions?

 

An intensive care capacity of 7 beds per 100,000 of population – Italy and Spain were at 12+ just for comparison – shows that, however great the work to mobilise and build the Nightingale hospitals has been, we were in-part solving a problem we had already created for ourselves. It has also been very easy to forget over the past couple of weeks that the NHS is not a charity. Whilst clapping on your doorstep, running a 5k or shaving your head are admirable and easy ways to support – so too is holding your government accountable to our state funding that service adequately to begin with.

 

A simple search on YouTube brings up videos of Barrack Obama and Bill Gates a few years ago predicting in the next 5-10 years that a deadly virus would sweep the globe: don’t let anyone tell you it was impossible for a government to expect that this might happen.

 

Senior scientists were urging the government to raise the risk level of the coronavirus as early as December and January: don’t let anyone tell you that we didn’t have enough time to prepare more. 

 

Britain missed 8 meetings with EU Heads of State or health ministers in between 13^th February and 30^th March on the pandemic: don’t let anyone tell you that we’ve done everything we could have done.

 

Finally, this is also not a war. If you find yourself comparing Boris Johnson to Churchill or eulogising over a speech that pits us against an ‘enemy’ or puts us ‘in the trenches’ then take a moment to consider how the fallen in this supposed war are currently being treated (largely nameless and faceless in our national media). We are not fighting over land, freedom of speech or religion here – we’re tackling a virus.

Why are our national media - many of whom are in cahoots with the Conservative elite - happy to portray this as such? And why has it been to easy to lose sight of the devastating reality of those numbers of dead and how they could have perhaps been lower?

 

I know that right now may not be the right time for all of the tough questions to be answered but I just hope that, as our national press fails to ask the right questions or write the real stories, we don’t lose sight of what those should be. My fear, in a weekend where LAD Bible are allowed a seat at the table to ask the government on their Covid-19 strategy – whilst on their Instagram feed I can’t see ‘stories’ about a girl cooking her own McDonalds Big Mac from home and quirky dog videos (which probably speaks volumes for who the government is happy to have scrutinise their strategy right now) – is that they will be obscured in a haze or PR campaigning and distraction.

My fear would be that the responsibility falls to us, the British people, to somehow cut through the noise and the rhetoric and make sure that these questions are asked. Consider whether you had, thus far, been willing to ask them.

 

There is also a line in ‘Chernobyl’ – about failing to show accountability for the actions taken before and during an unprecedented catastrophe that brings huge threat to human life –  “Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: what is the cost of lies?”

 

What is the cost if we do not ask the tough questions that currently sit unasked by our press and unanswered by our government?

 

 

I'm sorry but how is comparing ourselves to other countries of a similar stature "incomparable"?  

 

Is it because it highlights the fact that the issues that have dogged the UK have also dogged other countries (a lot of them far worse) and that is it really isn't all Boris' fault? 

 

The sad sad truth was that the UK was ALWAYS going to be hit hard by this, we have one of the largest populations in Europe, an ageing population, home to one of only two global cities in the world in London that is hugely reliant on international trade and travel and we are also one of the most densely populated countries on earth.  Significant numbers of casualties were always unavoidable and I think the government were pretty transparent with that early on.  Got them a lot of criticism at the time but it had to be said.  

 

This is truly a global tragedy and not a single country has an instruction manual for how to beat it.  All countries have had successes and failures.  If you can't leave your political bias by the door then at least try and accept that the UK is FAR from alone with this issues it's faced.

[st albans fox]

France to 11 may .... macron also says that schools could re open after this once measures are relaxed ..... we have assumed that schools here are done till next academic year but perhaps June/July could see a return for a few weeks ....

[lildave3]

10 minutes ago, FoxesDeb said:

Yes this is me too, apart from the children not going out to school our lives haven't really changed that much. I'm now working from home instead of going to the office, but I love it, and I'm genuinely getting anxious now when people start talking about us returning to work. 

But otherwise my life is continuing as normal and I'm quite happy. 

Unfortunately I’m working as normal, so it’s only the school thing that is different basically. 

 

That and the local chip shop being closed. 

[Dahnsouff]

7 minutes ago, Parafox said:

Surely there has to be some sort of inquiry into the cause, effect and the handling by government and our appointed senior medical advisors of this thing?

When something as unprecedented as this happens we have to learn so that we are more prepared for the next crisis. 

Damn right there should be. Don’t care who was in the charge, mistakes in this unprecedented situation were and continue to be inevitable. So we have to have a lessons learnt review after this reaches suitable time/period. (Whenever that could be).

[Izzy]

5 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

France to 11 may .... macron also says that schools could re open after this once measures are relaxed ..... we have assumed that schools here are done till next academic year but perhaps June/July could see a return for a few weeks ....

[BlueSi13]

30 minutes ago, Parafox said:

I guess there is an element of left-ish leaning but, in general his post is pretty centralist and raises valid questions about the way our mainstream press has covered this whole thing. plus you have to question whichever party was in power at a time like this when you read that our Gov missed EU briefings and tried to play down the real threat.

What briefings were these?  About the EU ventilator scheme?  The scheme that hasn't actually produced any?

https://euobserver.com/tickers/147981

[Dahnsouff]

9 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

France to 11 may .... macron also says that schools could re open after this once measures are relaxed ..... we have assumed that schools here are done till next academic year but perhaps June/July could see a return for a few weeks ....

It’s only bloody mid April

[st albans fox]

6 minutes ago, Dahnsouff said:

It’s only bloody mid April

Be v surprised to see any return to school before end may half term ......... that takes us to June .......

[EastAnglianFox]

Surely the school Summer holidays will now be shortened? 

 

The 2 little sods next door are doing my head in as they have had nearly 4 weeks off already due to having a stomach bug before the Easter hols. 

 

Must be driving the Mum insane as she is taking no chances and not even heading out other than the back garden. 

[fuchsntf]

7 hours ago, Freeman's Wharfer said:

Usually blog about Leicester City when I can find time to but today I thought I'd write a piece on my frustration around how the national media our, in my opinion, failing to hold our government to account on the handling of Coronavirus thus far. I know this will divide opinion.

 

You can read here: https://tinyurl.com/vl3m566

 

Or I've copied and pasted below:

 

“When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there”.

 

This is a line from the excellent HBO historical drama ‘Chernobyl’ and, as the UK comes to the end of an unprecedented Easter weekend, it can at times feel like we are all living through a drama that is being written right now and which, when we return to some form of post-Covid normality, will be put forward for acclaim alongside those other television series and shows on which we binge to while away the banal hours of lockdown.

 

But how will history judge the lead characters of our time? Who will be the capable and who will be the culpable?

 

It feels very much to me, that those portrayals are already being subtly crafted now before our very eyes. At the end of a weekend where we reached the point of over 10,000 people in this country having lost their lives to Coronavirus, it has felt all too easy to lose sight of the magnitude of those figures. For they have become just that.

 

Read it again: 10,000 people in this country have lost their lives.

 

In a matter of days, it is likely that this number will surpass 11,000 and then 12,000. I wonder at what point that stops becoming digits rolled out at a daily briefing with some nice bar charts and graphs comparing us to other countries who are, in many way, incomparable. And I wonder if that point will bring the type of questions we need answers to around why this figure has been so high, whether we could have done things differently or better to prevent such fatalities and what the exact plan is moving forward to prevent any more avoidable deaths, especially to those working in our Health Service.

 

Had you read any of the major newspapers this weekend, you’d have done well – on any of the front pages – to find the real news. That 10,000 people in this country have now lost their lives to this virus in the UK. You would have, instead, seen that Boris Johnson was better. That Boris Johnson was out of hospital. That Boris Johnson planned to take a couple of weeks recovering at Chequers. That Boris Johnson had praised the NHS who had saved his life with heart-warming reference to nurse Luis from Portugal.

 

When any Head of State becomes seriously ill, of course this is news. But the truth – that truth which may offend but is still there in the background – is that this Head of State being ill should not be a free pass on facing the tough questions that need asking about the UK’s handling of this pandemic up until now and from here onwards. Do not let anyone tell you that it is not right to question your government during a pandemic.

 

Accountability keeps standards high, but I’m not seeing much of it right now.

 

What I see happening right now – and what frustrates the life out of me – is a mass distraction campaign. When our government should be delivering, they are instead campaigning. The dumbing down of serious issues – in the exact same way that ‘get Brexit done’ Brexit was broken down into simple numbers and phrases that could be spoon-fed to the population (see ‘oven ready’ and ‘take back control’) – we hear about ‘Herculean efforts’ and ‘ramping up’ when they are asked why, two weeks into the thick of this crisis, our National Health Service staff are dying because they are not supplied with the appropriate equipment to do their job.

 

When they are asked if they are sorry that doctors and nurses have died due to a lack of basic protection, they cannot even muster an apology to the families of those victims. Priti Patel does wear empathy and humanity well at the best of times, but there is only one answer to that question: of course we are sorry and we are doing everything we can to try and minimise the chances of this happening further (here’s how and here’s when).

 

History already has not been kind to the way this crisis has been handled in the UK. When scientists were advising we were on the cusp of an unprecedented pandemic, our Prime Minister was telling the world he was shaking hands with Coronavirus patients and smirking as he effectively declared Britain would “see this thing off in 12 weeks”. When Italy was telling us of the horrors it had been facing, we were somehow different because we were Great Britain.

 

There is the old saying that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Well if you elect on slogans and personas rather than policies then you get... slogans and ‘good ol’ Boris’ personas. Something deep in the Brexit memory recess jarred when, asked about the UK’s comparatively low quantity of testing to other countries when the World Health Organisation had advised “testing, testing, testing” as the key to handling this crisis best, Matt Hancock replied: “No test is better than a bad test”. You don’t have to think too hard to remember which deal was better than a bad deal.

 

And if you elect a government that consistently shows an inability to care for the most vulnerable in our society (see ‘herd’) then don’t be surprised when your government initially pursues a strategy of immunity for our ‘herd’ (see ‘society’). Similar to how, if you also elect a government that has consistently voted against funding and pay rises for the NHS, you also get a health service that is on its knees.

 

So what of the state the NHS was in coming into this pandemic? When do we ask those questions?

 

An intensive care capacity of 7 beds per 100,000 of population – Italy and Spain were at 12+ just for comparison – shows that, however great the work to mobilise and build the Nightingale hospitals has been, we were in-part solving a problem we had already created for ourselves. It has also been very easy to forget over the past couple of weeks that the NHS is not a charity. Whilst clapping on your doorstep, running a 5k or shaving your head are admirable and easy ways to support – so too is holding your government accountable to our state funding that service adequately to begin with.

 

A simple search on YouTube brings up videos of Barrack Obama and Bill Gates a few years ago predicting in the next 5-10 years that a deadly virus would sweep the globe: don’t let anyone tell you it was impossible for a government to expect that this might happen.

 

Senior scientists were urging the government to raise the risk level of the coronavirus as early as December and January: don’t let anyone tell you that we didn’t have enough time to prepare more. 

 

Britain missed 8 meetings with EU Heads of State or health ministers in between 13^th February and 30^th March on the pandemic: don’t let anyone tell you that we’ve done everything we could have done.

 

Finally, this is also not a war. If you find yourself comparing Boris Johnson to Churchill or eulogising over a speech that pits us against an ‘enemy’ or puts us ‘in the trenches’ then take a moment to consider how the fallen in this supposed war are currently being treated (largely nameless and faceless in our national media). We are not fighting over land, freedom of speech or religion here – we’re tackling a virus.

Why are our national media - many of whom are in cahoots with the Conservative elite - happy to portray this as such? And why has it been to easy to lose sight of the devastating reality of those numbers of dead and how they could have perhaps been lower?

 

I know that right now may not be the right time for all of the tough questions to be answered but I just hope that, as our national press fails to ask the right questions or write the real stories, we don’t lose sight of what those should be. My fear, in a weekend where LAD Bible are allowed a seat at the table to ask the government on their Covid-19 strategy – whilst on their Instagram feed I can’t see ‘stories’ about a girl cooking her own McDonalds Big Mac from home and quirky dog videos (which probably speaks volumes for who the government is happy to have scrutinise their strategy right now) – is that they will be obscured in a haze or PR campaigning and distraction.

My fear would be that the responsibility falls to us, the British people, to somehow cut through the noise and the rhetoric and make sure that these questions are asked. Consider whether you had, thus far, been willing to ask them.

 

There is also a line in ‘Chernobyl’ – about failing to show accountability for the actions taken before and during an unprecedented catastrophe that brings huge threat to human life –  “Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: what is the cost of lies?”

 

What is the cost if we do not ask the tough questions that currently sit unasked by our press and unanswered by our government?

 

 

IMHO..excellent post...

This has been my biggst bugbare and worry...Nobody is asking the Major rellevant question,just getting Radical & arrogant on totally irrelevant point-Scoring

Soft-touch questions...I still Finding hard to grasp the point itself that we are still believing,this will be turned around before the summer,!! this is not going to go Away in the next few weeks or even months...

2020 should be seen by all ,that all ,thoughts  on past normal society,Work ideas ,travel hopes, social-meetings,entertainment will not be  or returned to any past thought  Stage of " normality"  in  near future. The knock-on effects/ changes not speaking of any Financial-Platform will run deep into 2021,if not longer

 

Its being regularly mentioned about,Face-maske and the Media  pushing Politicians debating "Thoughts" of making them compulsory.....

The important question Europe wide,where are these   millions of multi-FMasks needed Coming from.

Only One of the hard question not been repeatedly  pushed or asked...Home-Made doesn't cut it..!!

[st albans fox]

5 minutes ago, EastAnglianFox said:

Surely the sechool Summer holidays will now be shortened? 

 

The 2 little sods next door are doing my head in as they have had nearly 4 weeks off already due to having a stomach bug before the Easter hols. 

 

Must be driving the Mum insane as she is taking no chances and not even heading out other than the back garden. 

Staff will have holidays booked ......  building/essential repair work will be planned for the summer hols ......