Quote: john tregorran @ 4th April 2020, 6:01 AM

Conservative governments all over the world are now giving money to the poor and not just the rich so something is seriously wrong.

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Yes. Kind of.

AVERAGE CHAVS AND DODGY DEVELOPERS

Yesterday on my late evening walk I walked along two normally deserted residential streets towards scrub, woodland and farmland. On street number two, just before the scrubby bit, I encountered a family of six - two adults, four kids -, sprawled out along the pavement with skateboards and balls having virtually taken over the street. The mother seemed unable to talk normally. She communicated by screech. Chavs essentially and the first instinct was to take a dim view of it. Except as they headed back to their large enough, very modern terraced house I realised that, like many in such places, they had no garden to speak of. Just a tiny yard at the back and front of it. Modern design has a lot to answer for.

THE CAR BRIGADE........GAWD 'EAVENS!

In contrast, there are many around who really should know better. They seem by their demeanour to be more on the ball so it is much more shocking when it turns out they are bloody thick or blase. Once this week, I did have to go into a local shop. I was anxious about it. Reluctant. I have steadfastly avoided supermarkets which in any case are a long walk away. I picked a quiet time. On my arrival, a woman of about 40 leapt out of a car towards it. I asked her if she had a big shop to do. She said no. I said, well, why don't you go in first. I can wait. I would prefer to be outside and go in after you.She said no. You go in first. So I did. Once in, she opened the door and asked me if any other customer was there. I said no. She said that she would come in then and then proceeded to stand right behind me. I could have cheerfully strangled her.* I barely bought a thing, racing to the till to quickly get out. But she was quickly there too just a few inches behind me.

*Metaphorical!

THE IDIOCY OF SMALL TOWN CAPITALISTS

And then I said loudly to the woman behind the till that I would put my card in the machine and take it out. Just after it was approved she grabbed the machine and the card. I said no, no. I will take the card. But it was too late. She was annoyed actually for no reason whatsoever. She said to me "I do have gloves on". I didn't say anything but I thought just how thick are people. Those gloves are there to protect her. Not the customer. They go on everything. I walked out and thought that I am really not sure if I will go back into any shop again. On balance, slow starvation seems preferable.

THE REMOTENESS OF FRUIT PICKING

I am the age where I am half way to being vulnerable and half expected by society to help the vulnerable. I feel that I am having an identity crisis forced on me in that way. Many aged between 50 and 70 must be feeling similarly. Coping with parents who are unpredictable at 90 is in some senses more than enough. But broadly, it strikes me that had I felt obliged to do something more and there was a way of doing it, I would have chosen the option of picking fruit. Liaison with the sick would be minimal. We keep hearing that we don't have enough people in the country to do it. Unfortunately, not having a car, I cannot get to a fruit farm safely. Every one is about eight miles away or more. Being crammed into a minibus to there is not an option I can take on. But many who are driving alone could easily do it. Consequently many should. I am not convinced that enough has been done in this area to persuade them that British people can do it too.

THE MAD BUS AND THE PATHETIC SUPERMARKET

Here in the outskirts of Greater London - we are just a quarter of mile inside the boundary - buses fly round and round the local streets as regularly as they have always done and actually more so as the current crisis coincides with a major boost to the service as planned last autumn. Not a soul apart from the driver is on any of them. Not one. It looks totally mad because it is totally mad. It is one of the key symbols which declares that the world really has gone truly barking. What is the point of them if people in the main are rightly complying with Government instructions? Meanwhile, every major supermarket is increasingly becoming inept at maintaining a delivery service fit for demand. Why? It isn't as if they aren't rolling in billions. Drivers of empty buses should be turned into drivers of food delivery vans by immediate decree. Do that now. We can leave the campaigns for boycotting supermarkets out of existence when we get to the end of this.

In the early days of this virus threat, we were told the virus was transmitted by flying droplets emitted by people primarily when they sneezed or coughed.

Essentially, they were saying the virus was not airborne - i.e. floating about in the atmosphere.

Now, apparently all that's changed and they're saying that, after somebody has breathed it out, it does float about in the atmosphere for a significant period - just waiting for someone else to breathe it in.

Clearly, walking into a busy supermarket or shop (or even a street) would be folly at the present time but, in the recent past, I've always believed that I couldn't breathe the virus in by walking into a relatively empty room or street and staying away from other people.

It now seems I might have been misinformed and my confidence misplaced.

Quote: Rood Eye @ 4th April 2020, 1:48 PM

In the early days of this virus threat, we were told the virus was transmitted by flying droplets emitted by people primarily when they sneezed or coughed.

Essentially, they were saying the virus was not airborne - i.e. floating about in the atmosphere.

Now, apparently all that's changed and they're saying that, after somebody has breathed it out, it does float about in the atmosphere for a significant period - just waiting for someone else to breathe it in.

Clearly, walking into a busy supermarket or shop (or even a street) would be folly at the present time but, in the recent past, I've always believed that I couldn't breathe the virus in by walking into a relatively empty room or street and staying away from other people.

It now seems might have been misinformed and my confidence misplaced.

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FOOD NON SUPPLY

It is a combination of them not knowing and for logistical reasons not being able to say. Let's say they did know for sure. One of the first things that would happen is that the absence of shop staff would rocket. They have nothing in place to cover that gap. I did predict to my MP that we would all be on real rationing by August but that incredibly was based on optimism. The optimism that Government, army, volunteers, local shops and supermarkets would work together to get a standard package to every household. I no longer believe they have the capability for such a coordinated exercise. The Government can cope with just 1.5 million and the supermarkets considerably less than 5 million. Hence it's patchwork.

BOGUS WEATHER LINKS

But I'm not sure that they do know. I have looked at all of the research which links flu peaks with the weather and you get a lot of scientific stuff about its prevalence and growth in the northern hemisphere with dry winter air. That of itself sounds counter-intuitive. Surely it is wetter in winter. Well, yes, but apparently you can divide that precipitation out and the air itself is often actually more dry in winter months. The notion is that droplets carry further and longer in dry air and drop down rapidly atmospherically. But then you look at the patterns both here and globally and they don't really fit together very well. Look too at weather patterns for this virus if it is a virus and its growth or prevalence is pretty similar from country to country whatever the weather. I mean. The Czech Republic. That has one of the best "coronavirus" records to date and it is hardly located somewhere entirely different. It is not a sun-baked tropical island. Jamaica, of course, is very hot and sunny and its cases are mounting. So I personally think the weather thing is somewhat bogus.

TO MASK OR NOT TO MASK

Cynically I suggested in an earlier post that the paltry provision of PPE to front line medical staff might not just be about incompetence but a rather dark strategy for building up herd immunity there. To expand this a little, if you permit such staff to take the greatest hit now, then the vast majority who survive it will have built up enough immunity to work with patients in any later more severe second wave. Obviously if there were an element of this involved, it couldn't be said politically. There would be an outcry. You could say in defence of it that the 50% rate of flu vaccination among medical staff shows that in clear flu situations there is some buy in by medical professionals to the concept of exposure and immunity anyhow but I suggest that this tends to be for different reasons. A 25 year old GP might decide to expose herself to a strain of flu so that at 55 she can deal safely with patients with that strain knowing that she has immunity. But here the exposure is not about individual medics but society. It is to ensure there will be enough medics in round two.

And yet it may not be just incompetence and contrivance. It may also be a case of not knowing. WHO have argued among themselves about the benefits of masks when it comes to the public for years. They have changed their minds twice in just the past month. Currently they are saying yes again which is why bandanas are suddenly all the rage again in the US and even t-shirts held over the nose and mouth are now being viewed as helpful. The suggestion was that well people didn't need them. Only ill people should use them to prevent transmission. But then someone asked why was it is that they are regarded as essential by fit medics and also .how do you know if you are well or not when you can be unwell and without symptoms. I could be criticised for bringing this back to flu on umpteen occasions but the truth of it is that scientists are largely going by flu based experience. All this malarkey about how long it exists on cardboard or metal - hard shiny surfaces are the worst - that is all flu stuff. It is based on scientists' experience of influenza. Which means that when it comes to what is going on here, they don't really know. And they would be short of resources even if they did.

SOME CONSTRUCTIVE POINTS

This is all of my own work based on reading, instinct and preference. I lack confidence in most areas of my life but always have confidence in my instincts when they are combined with actual research as my track record is pretty sound. Preference is a more difficult factor in anyone. We all skew towards what we want to believe which is a thing that needs to be self-checked. I have to say I have had the worst nightmares of my entire life during this period. I had one last night. Only in this way am I able to half cope with them and associated anxieties. I wonder if others have had more nightmares?

Much of what is outlined above reveals that policy makers are taking decisions in an absence of access to arithmetic. Here are a few questions for you. If a fit 20 year old gets a full sneeze in the face from an infected person, are they more likely to become unwell than a 70 year old with some pre-existing health issues who happens to walk on a path which was trodden two minutes earlier by an infected person? If someone aged 90 sits ten feet away from an infected person in a room in which there is no coughing or sneezing, is that worse for them than leaning on a shop counter which has been touched by an infected person one hour earlier? What about three days earlier? In reality, no one knows the maths!

If the number of serious cases among the under 60s is 15% which it is, is there an argument that the under 50s or the under 45s should be able to choose to return to non-essential work and exercise so long as they live in households of people only in the age bracket 18-45/50? If not, why not? And when a virologist says that even talking and breathing is an issue, to what extent does that reveal the character of the virologist himself? Clearly he works in a field where life and death are more in his mind than a banker or a footballer or a civil servant. Could it be that the unusual accent in his work on saving lives has a darker unintended side - a sort of unconscious balancing up countering to that accent which sees positives in stifling living although that would in his conscious mind be vehemently denied? After all, by definition, the armed forces operate in that sort of area. The yin and the yang. It isn't to be denigrated. It is what it is. A professionalism.

We can think we know. If an elderly or severely disabled person coughs - and coughing in them is often just a part of everyday life - we can believe they are more likely to have the virus and that we are more likely to get it and that the worse theirs is the worse ours will be. Well, they may have it bad and we may not. We may have it bad after coming into contact with someone who is not in that category and whose symptoms are very mild. And those who are clearly in a terrible way - they may not have a virus at all. So what precisely determines the likelihood of infection and likelihood of severity, notwithstanding other health conditions? They do not know. Some talk of genetics but no gene has been found.

Some say environmental air pollution or tobacco which satisfies us because it sounds rational. Smokers are showing a moderate increase in levels of severity. About 25%. But the Chinese are of the view that smokers as a group are for some reason less likely to get it in the first place. Meanwhile, there is a claim from none other than Benson and Hedges that they have produced a vaccine from tobacco plants and can roll it out quickly in its billions. It's a very weird world. Remember all that stuff towards the tail end of last year about people vaping? The mysterious vaping deaths. Nobody worked out why. Who is to say that those were not an early sign of a so-called coronavirus pandemi? Early HIV was "mysterious" with a lot of unclear and unexplained things going on until they made sense with the benefit of hindsight!

Let me put forward a theory here as a non-scientist. That Kaufman theory that this is not a coronavirus but rather a widescale exosome release as an immuno defensive/protective response to a variety of causes of attack. One of the key things on his list is "illnesses". Well, surely flu is an illness. He doesn't mention flu. But are exosomes not released when flu strikes? Why wouldn't they be? If so, it seems to me that this could largely be a global phenomenon of exosome plus virus rather than exosome versus virus as he and others purport with that virus being not a coronavirus but a standard pandemic influenza. I am surprised that link wasn't made. But I don't know. Nobody knows. Though some claim to.

Just ordered $400 worth of ammunition by mail in case things get weird. 1000 rounds of .22, 500 .223, 40 00 buckshot, 60 .40, 60 .38 Spl +P.

Stores are running low, so I figured I'd stock up. Now I'm ready for the zombie apocalypse.

Quote: DaButt @ 4th April 2020, 3:01 PM

Just ordered $400 worth of ammunition by mail in case things get weird. 1000 rounds of .22, 500 .223, 40 00 buckshot, 60 .40, 60 .38 Spl +P.

Stores are running low, so I figured I'd stock up. Now I'm ready for the zombie apocalypse.

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Just bought an extra jar of Marmite myself...

Quote: Billy Bunter @ 4th April 2020, 3:31 PM

Just bought an extra jar of Marmite myself...

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That stuff would repel even the most fearsome attacker.

Quote: DaButt @ 4th April 2020, 3:01 PM

Just ordered $400 worth of ammunition by mail in case things get weird. 1000 rounds of .22, 500 .223, 40 00 buckshot, 60 .40, 60 .38 Spl +P.

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Are you planning to kill over a thousand people, or are you just a really bad shot ?

According to the latest figures, coronavirus has claimed 708 more souls in the last 24 hours.

The UK death total is now 7313.

Quote: Firkin @ 4th April 2020, 4:26 PM

Are you planning to kill over a thousand people, or are you just a really bad shot ?

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The .22 wouldn't be much good for killing anything larger than a rabbit.

It's cheaper to buy things in bulk, so that's what I did. It's easy to blow through a few hundred rounds at the shooting range, so I bought what I could afford at the moment. It's flying off the shelves, so I figured I'd stock up while I can.

I'm a very good shot. I scored "Expert" (the highest level) in the Army.

A great many people in Britain are opposed to gun ownership by private citizens but, in the event that the police forces of Britain become outnumbered by hordes of marauding savages, I think a great many people in Britain might be wishing they owned a shotgun and several thousand rounds of ammunition.

Quote: Rood Eye @ 4th April 2020, 5:27 PM

A great many people in Britain are opposed to gun ownership by private citizens but, in the event that the police forces of Britain become outnumbered by hordes of marauding savages, I think a great many people in Britain might be wishing they owned a shotgun and several thousand rounds of ammunition.

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Things will be fine as long as the food, electricity and water keep flowing and there are cops on the streets. If those things go away it'll be chaos and blood within 3 days.

I see that burglaries in New York City are up 75%. My son said that the same thing is happening in Seattle. The cops need to have a heavy presence in times like this.

If the poo hits the fan, I'm glad I live in a heavily armed neighborhood.

Quote: DaButt @ 4th April 2020, 8:28 PM

Things will be fine as long as the food, electricity and water keep flowing and there are cops on the streets. If those things go away it'll be chaos and blood within 3 days.

I see that burglaries in New York City are up 75%. My son said that the same thing is happening in Seattle. The cops need to have a heavy presence in times like this.

If the poo hits the fan, I'm glad I live in a heavily armed neighborhood.

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God help you, bloody savage that you are. Might have been better if you hadn't voted a moron into power.

Quote: Briosaid @ 4th April 2020, 10:55 PM

God help you, bloody savage that you are. Might have been better if you hadn't voted a moron into power.

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I guess there's quite a language difference between our countries. Where I live, "savage" would be used to describe the person who constantly dehumanizes their fellow human beings and hopes for their deaths, not the person who is always polite and open-minded with everyone.

But you're right, Hillary would have singlehandedly prevented the worldwide pandemic had she been elected president.