[Johnny Brown]

I do wonder if we’ll see some stronger enforcement / interpretation before any relaxation. After all now is the critical time.

Nah. We'll get some 'please do keep staying at home' platitudes for the next week or two, while ignoring any increasing non-essential economic activity. The official lockdown lift will be fairly late but academic as most will be ignoring it anyway. I'm increasingly convinced they want us at home curtain-twitching on the neighbours so we aren't out and about seeing how many people are still working. They're relying on the good people of the land to take the economic hit by choice while the greedheads keep working.

[Will Hunt]

Neither of which are non essential I’d wager.

The thing is, there's never been any instruction from government to stop non-essential work. Anyone who can't work from home is to carry on as normal with an updated, but probably not honoured, risk assessment that says that colleagues shall avoid licking each other.

[Johnny Brown]

Quite. I shut down our business early under the assumption that guidance or ruling would follow so our competitors etc wouldn't carry on regardless. No such information followed, and I strongly suspect these will turn out to be the most significant lines of transmission. One of the biggest failings of the goverment imho.

[Bonjoy]

 
Of course it will be the #covidiot going for too long a walk/cycle who will conveniently bear the blame in many minds/newspapers.

[T_B]

Had a quick ride out into the Peak at 5pm. Lots of cars driving in town (no doubt back from B&Q) but quiet once in the Peak. 6 cars parked at Curbar Gap, 1 at Froggatt bend, none below the Grouse.

Yesterday at a similar time I did my local (running) loop around Eccy woods. Families standing around casually chatting with the adults 2m away from each other but young kids and doggies mingling. 80% of dogs off leads.

Lockdown schmockdown.

[Johnny Brown]

30+ cars at Redmires today. I think the drone shaming and negative Nat Park signage is putting people off travelling over the border to Derbyshire.

[Nigel]

There’s a good graphic showing this on the Guardian live blog now. If I was more competent I’d embed the image, but the answer is that the “ramping up” isn’t going well.

Thanks for the heads up Ali, I was out and about so on my phone hence couldn't embed either (not that I'd have the skills anyway!), but I did see it.

To illustrate for those who didn't, you are right we appear to be nowhere close - 23,560 tests on Wednesday. Those tests actually tested 14,629 people. By its own estimates the government says there is approximately 10 million key workers in the UK, and they want to test them all. At the current level of testing I calculate that will take nearly 2 years to do. Hopefully the test numbers will increase "exponentially" as promised - they need to. Whatever ramps the government have procured for their "ramping up" of various critical planks of tackling the virus do seem rather gentle. We needed ski jumps, and they got us the ones they used to drag the blocks up when they built the pyramids.

[abarro81]

Our radio wakes us up in the morning, and this was on the Radio 1 headlines.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-52406342
Now I know radio 1 is hardly high-level thinking, but why would you put this on the headlines? Ok, it looks bad, but it only looks bad because we're involved in this pointless "some people are having a shit time so everyone has to have a shit time" bollocks.

[Wood FT]

Our radio wakes us up in the morning, and this was on the Radio 1 headlines.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-52406342
Now I know radio 1 is hardly high-level thinking, but why would you put this on the headlines? Ok, it looks bad, but it only looks bad because we're involved in this pointless "some people are having a shit time so everyone has to have a shit time" bollocks.

Radio 1?  Makes so much sense now.

Poor buggers on that sub. Should have just had the BBQ inside, that's what we're doing and we're fine£$@

[stone]

I'm guessing that the 100k tests/day could be met by the end of the month. They requisitioned loads of PCR machines (and Kingfisher RNA purifying machines) from universities etc back in mid March. Each PCR machine can run a thousand or so tests per day. They have more volunteers to run them than they know what to do with (the people who were using them before they were requisitioned signed up at the time of requisitioning). The increase in "capacity" is exponential because the mode of growth is that the people let in to test are all showing the next bunch where everything is and how things are done.

The main job with swab testing is actually opening the swab tubes and dolling out the snot to purify the RNA from it. That is what 70% of the people involved are doing. I did my first session of that yesterday. Great fun and a great bunch of people. It has a very stringent safety set up with negative pressure hoods and protocols for putting double gloves on etc.

Apparently the one thing Sheffield University has been allowed to do for the national swab testing effort is a mechanical engineering effort to try and automate opening swab tubes and dolling out the snot. I know nothing about that sort of thing but, to be honest, it doesn't come across as an easy to automate job (lots of awkward double bags and broken swabs etc etc). In a counterfactual situation where those swabs were some safe part of an uninteresting arcane research project that I was doing on my own; I guess I would just be dipping the swabs directly from the testee's nose into a 96well plate of virus-dissolving lysis solution ready to plug into the automated workflow -and so never have swab tubes to worry about.

[stone]

The M60 and M67 yesterday were similarly busy at 7am as at 2pm. Lots of vans. My guess is that almost all of the road traffic is work related rather than these evil BBQ antics apparently plaguing us.

[SA Chris]

Our radio wakes us up in the morning, and this was on the Radio 1 headlines.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-52406342
Now I know radio 1 is hardly high-level thinking, but why would you put this on the headlines? Ok, it looks bad, but it only looks bad because we're involved in this pointless "some people are having a shit time so everyone has to have a shit time" bollocks.

The captain of HMS Trenchant, a nuclear-powered attack submarine based at Devonport in Plymouth, has been sent home on leave.

Ah that will help...

[Will Hunt]

Sailors drinking? Whatever next?

 

[Oldmanmatt]

OT

*Rant*

Sent home on leave, is serious, for him.

It’s also all so fucking wrong it’s beyond belief and the scuttlebutt is of almost mutiny levels of discontent, fleet wide.

I expect it to be “forgotten” as soon as  the media do, because a crew who had been isolated, under the fucking oggin for several months and then kept in isolation, inside an ultra secure compound, within the pretty secure compound that is a Naval Dockyard, are perfectly fucking entitled to socialise together within the fucking compound.

So, the MOD and Whitehall have made a PR decision to treat the Skipper as a disgraced officer awaiting disciplinary action (which I didn’t believe will ever materialise), but, my mates (all now LTCdr, Cdr or Cpt) are not holding back in their ire.

OF 4’s and 5’s are often tempted away by private enterprise and their retention is a huge headache for the RN (hence why I’m rejoining at OF 4, along with about 20 other merchant officers), but these guys actually command the ships of the fleet; if they think the RN is going to fuck them over for PR reasons as petty as this, then they’ll be gone.
(OF 5, Captain, is almost a dead-end rank. You either make Admiral or retire, so most look outside the service after a few years at rank).

[Johnny Brown]

Agree. What's an average stint underwater? About the safest bbq on the planet right now.

In lockdown lifting news, just had an email from Petzl:

Last week, with the mutual agreement of both our employees and management team, we decided to resume operations within our distribution center. This is done with our full commitment to protect the health and safety of our employees. In the following weeks our production will gradually resume to 100% operational.

This from the supposedly more strict lockdown in France. According to JWI's graphs they're about 5 days ahead of us deathwise. 

[T_B]

Yeah saw that.

Contractors back on our road today continuing with an extension on #1.

We’re all in this together.

[petejh]

Our radio wakes us up in the morning, and this was on the Radio 1 headlines.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-52406342
Now I know radio 1 is hardly high-level thinking, but why would you put this on the headlines? Ok, it looks bad, but it only looks bad because we're involved in this pointless "some people are having a shit time so everyone has to have a shit time" bollocks.

The captain of HMS Trenchant, a nuclear-powered attack submarine based at Devonport in Plymouth, has been sent home on leave.

Ah that will help...

Media businesses making hay out of a crisis? Whatever next.
The behaviour of most of the media irks me in normal times, but especially irksome in a crisis. See the PPE moral panic. Not making light of anyone dying. I'll believe PPE was worth all the media hysteria when we see the evidence of excess mortality among various sectors.
Sometimes I slip into thinking that this pandemic would be dealt with more quickly and efficiently if we had Chinese state-control of all the media cunts and Nigel (joking, he's not a cunt just a pesky truth-seeker) and let our dear leaders democratic government get on with the task of making difficult decisions. But then I suppose they'd just make fuck-ups in private and perhaps more of them.
Still, I'm not convinced by the argument that our adversarial media cunts are supposed to incentivise our government cunts through fear of shaming and the punishment of ridicule. Large body of evidence shows it doesn't work in any other area of life - parenting, work. Positive reinforcement, backed by authority to sanction, works best in every other area of life, so why not in government? One to ponder maybe.

[Nigel]

Nigel (joking, he's not a cunt....)

How dare you! Of course I am!

I'll believe PPE was worth all the media hysteria when we see the evidence of excess mortality among various sectors.

I did some welding without a mask once and my eyes are fine. So I guess by that principle you might be right 

[petejh]

Fair enough, I'll re-phrase that to: I'll believe that it was worth the public hysteria caused by all the implications by the media that supplies of PPE are responsible for excess mortality among healthcare workers, when we see the evidence of excess mortality among various sectors plus the general population by age group.

I got snow-blindness once from removing my eye-wear for 1 hour at altitude, so I think you were lucky.

[Ru]

Fair enough, I'll re-phrase that to: I'll believe that it was worth the public hysteria caused by all the implications by the media that supplies of PPE are responsible for excess mortality among healthcare workers, when we see the evidence of excess mortality among various sectors plus the general population by age group.

I imagine most hospital workers aren't too keen to just wait and see how many of them die compared to the general population before they kick up a fuss about PPE.

[Oldmanmatt]

So there’s this:

https://www.energypeople.com/news/story/new-snood-for-offshore-workers-is-better-than-n95-mask-and-could-be-a-game-changer-in-corona-fight

A Mate, currently at day 93 in isolation on board his dive support vessel, off Saudi, shared this.

Couldn’t make out the entire post, due to (I think) auto correct of some expletives, but the words “heat”, “sweat” and “Ducking Birch” seemed to be common.

[ali k]

I'll believe that it was worth the public hysteria caused by all the implications by the media that supplies of PPE are responsible for excess mortality among healthcare workers, when we see the evidence of excess mortality among various sectors plus the general population by age group.

So you think the media are whipping up public hysteria by highlighting the PPE supply shortfalls? And by voicing healthcare workers’ fears of PPE shortages? Wow that’s cynical.

Of the ‘essential workers’ I would have put the doctors and nurses who by necessity have to come into direct contact with infected patients right up there at the top of the list. And if they can’t be supplied with sufficient PPE to be safe or at the very least feel safe when they go to work then fuck me something has gone catastrophically wrong.

[spidermonkey09]

Fair enough, I'll re-phrase that to: I'll believe that it was worth the public hysteria caused by all the implications by the media that supplies of PPE are responsible for excess mortality among healthcare workers, when we see the evidence of excess mortality among various sectors plus the general population by age group.

I imagine most hospital workers aren't too keen to just wait and see how many of them die compared to the general population before they kick up a fuss about PPE.

Exactly. Jesus fucking Christ, get some empathy.

[stone]

Does everyone now have the impression that they have backtracked on relying on herd immunity to get us out of lockdown? If so then I guess they are hoping that lockdown will cause infections to dwindle down to a point where contact tracing becomes manageable and a test-trace-isolate regime can be used. I've been wondering what sort of ballpark time scale that might take and how much longer our lockdown needs to be thanks to our flirtation with a herd immunity strategy (making all the normal gross simplifications etc).

I suppose about 10k people were fatally infected when lockdown came in on March23. If case fatality rate is about 1% then that would be 1M cases in the UK at that time. Perhaps test-trace-isolate becomes feasible with 1000 cases in UK. So we are wanting a 1000x reduction in infections.

If R is 0.8 now that we have lockdown, it will take about 30 virus transmission generations to get that 1000x reduction. With a five day generation time, that would be five months-ish.

A month long lockdown would have been enough had we implemented the lockdown by the time we had 4000 cases rather than a million. If R was 2.5 before lockdown then that means we would have had to have had lockdown a month earlier for that.

No doubt this is totally muddled by me! Sorry.

[abarro81]

This is why I'm confused about the gov strategy - if that's the strategy, it's a shit one. Much better to lockdown way harder, whatever estimates you make for the numbers. If it's not the strategy, then what is? Unfortunately nothing the gov says on this seems to shed any light. I don't really get why the media aren't pushing harder on the "isn't your strategy kind of muddled bollocks?" question.