love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

here’s the Johnson reply, urging Starmer to stick to his pledge to work “constructively” with the government: “The public expect us to work together.” pic.twitter.com/o285c9ylYh

— Jim Pickard (@PickardJE) May 13, 2020

starmer ‘missing the mood of the nation’ claims boris

The government has privately conceded there will be checks on goods crossing the Irish sea post Brexit

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

"That's a very mean question and you are mean for asking", where have we heard that before

Trying to beat Sir Forensic with pedantry isn't going to work so he's resorting to shame, but the fact that Starmer felt confident enough to try that question is because he knows the public is getting angry.

^this coming from someone who 1 week ago typed the words 'when Boris beats Starmer' to this very thread ;)

Sir Keir's performances in the House of Commons have been praised as "forensic" and his debate with Mr Johnson at Prime Minister's Questions likened to "a quietly terrifying force".

nothing worse than getting terrorised by a quiet and deadly fart.

is a handwritten salutation the done thing round those parts? publicly released letters here just have a typed salutation and autopen signatures on the bottom

doesn't really give a strong impression of Bo's motor skills

especially since it looks like his misspelled ‘keir’ and hamfistedly corrected it

Makes it look like a form letter somehow

doesn't really give a strong impression of Bo's motor skills

today the guardian/mumsnet crowd is asserting their right to put their servants at risk cleaning up their filth as a pressing feminist issue. in case anyone was unsure about their class politics, or who they mean when they talk about women

One time this country’s deranged press hounded a prime minister with a glass eye for using a marker to sign a card to a bereaved mother

It's interesting how the announcement has made everything ... just worse, really.

back in the 80's my heavily pregnant mum was doing a cleaning job for some posh lazy wankers and ended up having such a terrible miscarriage that she lost so much blood from it she was technically dead for a minute. I'm not saying it was categorically their fault - she was overdoing it for the condition she was in, but I still will blame the fucking arseholes 1000% for the rest of my life!

Like, there's now a really unpleasant feeling hanging around my head. Difficult to articulate it but it's sort of like if you were stuck on a desert island following a shipwreck, had kind of settled into a routine of eating grubs and waiting to see what would happen, and then what happens is the self appointed leader of the group announces that his an is, a ship will come if we all stand on our heads, because Jef the Mongoose told him.

*plan

Thing about the people wanting their cleaners back is, I'm supposed to have cleaners included in my rent. They've obviously not been coming round. Sure, why would they? Terrifying to me that people exist who think cleaners should now be expected to come back.

Our cleaner's safety is our main concern. Before entering the house, she's put through a series of polytunnels, where she's sprayed with disinfectant and walks through an antiviral foot bath. And during the pandemic it's been no different.

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) May 13, 2020

two of my wife’s musician friends, have been giving their regular lessons to pupils via zoom over the last few weeks, have reported seeing cleaners pottering around in the background of calls recently

just... fuckin’ pay them and let them stay at home you ghouls

that might be the best hedges post ever.

Read this URL and weep: https://www.economist.com/asia/2020/05/09/vietnam-and-the-indian-state-of-kerala-curbed-covid-19-on-the-cheap

From this piece, its author is reliably good: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/13/state-collapse-social-order-coronavirus-britain

When in 1918 the Spanish flu hit America, cities from Pittsburgh to Seattle responded in very different ways. Some locked down for three weeks; others for 10. What was the result? Surely, your average Tory backbencher or puckish columnist would say, it’s obvious: the harder you hit the virus, the greater the harm to the economy. In fact, the opposite is true, according to analysis published this March by three economists, two of them at the US central bank. They find the economies of “cities that intervened earlier and more aggressively do not perform worse and, if anything, grow faster after the pandemic is over”.

The title of the economists’ study says it all: “Pandemics depress the economy, public health interventions do not.” I have not seen it quoted anywhere by the hard exiters or the supposedly science-hungry cabinet. Funny that.

Dorries (who has consistently been a piece of vile fucking garbage) deleted a tweet from far-right account that recently tweeted that BAME c-19 deaths are higher because they live in "overpopulated shitholes". The deleted tweet was some typical neo-fash grooming gang misinformation re: Starmer's shift at the DPP. Good job the EHRC approves of them keeping their racism investigations strictly internal.

Lucy Allen and Maria Caufield retweeted it as well

The UK Freedom of Movement people who are organising mass meetings across the country are a registered company with one officer.

Step forward Britain First's Jayda Fransen pic.twitter.com/eGFNM8YXge

— Otto English (@Otto_English) May 14, 2020

I would be quite happy to see the pigs administering a good old fashioned shoeing to anyone involved with dangerously irresponsible neo-fascist "freedom" protests tbh

hit em with da 5g canon

Even the Stupid Old Hippy protestors are preferable to that lot.

By the way, I just saw my first ever "Keir Starmer has them running scared" post on Facebook, it got slapped down pretty quickly.

expecting some establishment on establishment homicide soon or he needs to resign!

oh I forgot he smoked some boris yesterday!

YouGov today has his net leadership rating at +23 while Johnson is down to +22

hmmm

A team of researchers from The University of Manchester, Salford Royal and Res Consortium, have shown that a significant proportion of people in the UK- over 25% - is likely to have been infected already by the COVID-19 virus.

The study - published this week in the International Journal of Clinical Practice - is the first to use the published local authority data to assess the cumulative impact of infection since the COVID-19 outbreak began.

This has enabled them to calculate the R-value - the number of people infected by one person with COVID-19 - within each local authority area.

The published case data from the 144 Local Authorities analysed by the team now gives an R value of well below 1.

The value – which was over 3 at the start of the outbreak in the middle of March 2020 – fell as a consequence of social distancing combined with the natural consequences of cumulative community infection.

Daily reported cases peaked at the beginning of April 2020 and hospital deaths a week later in England. By the second half of April, based on extrapolating the variation in infection rate between local authorities with more or less cases reported depending on location, over 25% in the UK population could already have had the virus, the team have found.

Dr Adrian Heald from The University of Manchester, one of the researchers, said: “COVID-19 is a highly infectious condition and very dangerous for a small group of people. However a much larger group seem to have low or no symptoms and have been unreported.

“This study tries to provide an estimate of the number of historic infections – and gives us all a glimmer of hope that there may be light at the end of the tunnel.

“We show how effective Social Distancing and Lockdown has been. Though this is a tragedy, it could have been far worse”.

What do we think about this Roche antibody test? Apparently it's actually effective and the government hasn't bought any yet, so presumably there will be a worldwide shortage by the time it actually gets round to it.

xxp
can't wait for the Boris fightback when he turns up at PMQs with a neatly combed hairstyle that fails to cover his baldness, trying to talk in a more lawyerly fashion but getting it completely wrong by congratulating tory mp's who raise stupid questions in a completely inappropriate accusationery tone. Starmer might even be good for 5 minutes!

By the way, I just saw my first ever "Keir Starmer has them running scared" post on Facebook, it got slapped down pretty quickly.

I don't understand the disdain here, he's been effective so far, he's seen a problem and been quick to address it. Already anti-semitism has been almost completely eradicated due to his quick actions, and how he is turning his sights on the government.

he fired his papermate of truth at the Labour AS bubble and popped that mofo!

lol not suggesting Labour AS was a bubble btw, Jesus got be careful with my wording!

Well whatever the truth of the matter its almost gone now, and thats the main thing.

next Conservative leader needs to be a forensic as well cos forensics are great at making racism disappear it seems

anti-semitism has been almost completely eradicated due to his quick actions

is this irony

no, starmzy did a zoom call and sorted it all out iirc

when Pesto give him the nod at the Jewish Labour hustings, antisemitism within the party was on borrowed time

Reading and weeping some more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/the-coronavirus-slayer-how-keralas-rock-star-health-minister-helped-save-it-from-covid-19

ONS reckons that 148,000 people have been infected in the UK over the past two weeks. That's over 10,000 a day - most of which was in supposedly full lockdown.

Definitely a good time to start relaxing everything lads, enjoy the garden centre.

My reading of their data is that, on average, between Apr 27 and May 10, 148k people had the virus in England (=0.27% of the population). Not that there were 148k new cases in two weeks.

Yeah the Guardian article is ambiguous - "the first national snapshot of Covid-19 rates has revealed that 148,000 people in England were infected with the virus over the past two weeks" but they can't really know whether they were new cases. Your read makes more sense and feels slightly less apocalyptic so I am choosing to believe it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/148000-in-england-infected-with-coronavirus-in-last-two-weeks

Here's the source:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/england14may2020

Depends on the quality and accuracy of the data collection but we'll only really know the trajectory after two or more weeks of these announcements. Could be really useful more generally. 148k is more than enough for the virus to start increasing exponentially if things are relaxed too much, though.