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

never mind as a society species

"the dead hand of the Labour party"

I know I said Starmer is a f/t wanker, but I didn't mean it literally!

We've normalised 100 people dying every day. If it stays at that level you're still looking at 21,000 deaths by the end of the year. That's assuming it takes at least that long to develop a vaccine but also that we don't have another spike (we will). I can't believe that's going to end up as background noise.

also that CQC report is heartbreaking. This idea that your worth is attached to your ability to contribute to society via capitalism needs to fuck off forever

i've seen nothing in this country's politics during my lifetime that makes me think that will happen

Tbh it's not only the UK that is not taking advantage of this moment but I do see this pandemic as one in a series of events that will make growth and our way of living pretty much impossible as it is.

Although things will change, many will find perhaps frightening ways to adapt to the constant 'disruption' and barbarism to come.

unfortunately otm

Normalising hundreds or thousands of deaths is what human beings do. Think about the best day of your life - hundreds of people with worthwhile lives and grieving families died in this country alone, some of them in entirely avoidable ways. There are limits to human empathy when things start to seem normal.

It's why fixating on the death rate alone - no matter how high it is - isn't enough and why it isn't constantly on the front pages. The thing that might drive behavioral change - and almost certainly already has - is the deaths that might still happen, particularly if its your parents, grandparents, your friend who had a heart transplant etc.

you could argue the same about public attitudes to the welfare system - exposure to more friends and loved ones struggling to survive thru unemployment benefits etc - but again without being melodramatic i wouldn't bet on it

the spikes will become more and more concentrated in more vulnerable populations and it will disappear from headlines/the minds of those not affected

Just depends, it's quite an unknowable situation. I'm inclined to go with a lot of bad things happening before the good, i.e. basically money running out for enough people to drive change. In the meantime many will die, but the rate may matter if we get back to near a thousand deaths and the NHS being overrun.

xp that assumes the government could manage the spike and tracing things to a local level and I'm not sure they'll ever get that right.

I am furious that the vanity of Boris Johnson the Prime Minister will prevent me the longest serving Member of Parliament on the Opposition benches from speaking or voting today!

— Barry Sheerman MP (@BarrySheerman) June 2, 2020

lol I forgot this non-entity had beaten off Frank Field (with his dead hand) for the father of the house status since they killed big beast Kenny.

He's not quite Father of the House yet.

who is?

Peter "Wake me up when he's finished speaking" Bottomley.

lol another non-entity

The only thing I know him as is Virginia Bottomley's husband tbh

Yes, married to the woman whose name is an anagram of I'm An Evil Tory Bigot.

lol at Sheerman getting pissy about somebody else's vanity

just looking with wonder yet again at the uk's tests / deaths ratio, which today stands at 276,332 / 39,045 and thus suggests the death rate in these united kingdoms is 14.1%

clearly it's not anywhere near that, and the colossal ratio is a side-effect of the woeful approach we've taken to testing so far, but i don't think i've ever seen anyone questioned about it and it seems like a missed opportunity to me

yeah check yrself barry ffs xp

Weekend COVID press conferences have been suspended 'due to low ratings'.

If it's not as popular as Midsomer Murders, it's clearly not worth doing.

that's some trump-level reasoning there, very reassuring

maybe get Ant and Dec to do the weekends, problem solved

some kind of care home death bingo where viewers at home get a chance to play for a car if their grandma dies

Liz Truss to lead further review into why BAME people more at risk from coronavirus, MPs told

oh no

The obvious choice.

Can't Truss It

The ratio obviously means testing is fucked but it might also mean that there have been enough symptomless carriers or mild cases to slow the spread of the virus in some areas. I'm not saying herd immunity here but it will have an effect. What happens in Sweden will probably be instructive here.

Has anything reliable or intelligent been written about whether there might be a proportion of people who were immune from the start? Assuming there is any long term immunity of course.

not that i've seen - feels like if that is a factor it'll be a long time before we have a large enough pool of data on populations to draw those kinds of conclusions

The conclusion to Truss's oh so probing report into bame c-19 deaths: isn't Wensleydale great, erm couldn't finish off my homework because some nasty pasty stoley wolled my special left-handed penny wen.

bloody italians can't keep their damn mouths shut, this is why brexit happened

Boris Johnson told his Italian counterpart, Giuseppe Conte, in early March that the UK was aiming for “herd immunity” as part of its approach to coronavirus, a TV documentary claims.

Channel 4’s Dispatches spoke to the Italian health minister, Pierpaolo Sileri, who said this is what was said in a conversation between Johnson and Conte on 13 March. Sileri told the programme:

I spoke with Conte to tell President Conte that I’d tested positive [for coronavirus]. And he told me that he’d spoken with Boris Johnson and that they’d also talked about the situation in Italy. I remember he said, ‘He told me that he wants herd immunity’.
I remember that after hanging up, I said to myself that I hope Boris Johnson goes for a lockdown.
In late February and early March the government’s scientific adviser were relatively open about saying that they thought it would be impossible to entirely suppress coronavirus and that there were advantages from allowing “herd immunity” to build up. Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, said this publicly, including in a Today programme interview on 13 March (the day the Johnson/Conte conversation took place). But very soon afterwards the government abruptly changed policy, in response to modelling saying that anything other than a policy aimed at full suppression of coronavirus would led to the NHS being overwhelmed.

Subsequently ministers became averse to being associated with the “herd immunity” concept, because that implied toleration or even support for people dying from coronavirus in manageable numbers, and now they insist it was never part of their policy.

Everyone already knows this Giuseppe, they literally said it out loud on national TV.

look just because they said it on tv and just because it was their actual policy when they said it, that doesn't mean they ever said it nor was it ever their actual policy

that is the old politics

Worth noting in relation to the worryingly high death rate among people of Bangladeshi origin, that Bangladesh itself - with a population of 161m and poor health care - they have recorded 709 deaths. The U.K., with a population of 66m - has recorded 40,000. https://t.co/JDd7x7QDhR

— Tim Walker (@ThatTimWalker) June 2, 2020

fucking hell

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/02/covid-19-spilling-out-of-hospitals-and-care-homes-says-uk-expert?CMP

September, fucking hell. Meanwhile PPE seems to have disappeared from the headlines, glad that's all sorted then.

i believe the combined efforts of schoolkids 3d-printing headbands for improvised visors made from overhead projector sheets now make up 78% of frontline workers' ppe

a hundred people or more dead every day for the next three months, just another 10k dead or so before the next spike nbd

Queuing up outside Westminster to vote against having to vote in Westminster pic.twitter.com/pY8F0zHkNJ

— Louise Haigh (@LouHaigh) June 2, 2020

Absolute archaic bullshit, as if there is no possible way of enabling MPs to vote other than physically walking through a lobby.

It’s just dickwaving, isn’t it. Is that Mrs May in the orange skirt behind her?

Rees Mogg is the number one dick who loves to wave

this is fundamentally all about whips, right? They're scared that MPs will get their brave pants on voting from home, away from the scowling eyes of the whips. That's a hell of a price to pay for discipline.

my school just sent a letter. they’re not reopening.

good shout

my wife disagrees with it. she says what about all the kids in bad homes that are stuck with terrifying parents, what about all the people who can’t go to their jobs. i mean - i disagree but i get where she’s coming from.

they would have got brutalised by their cruel violent parents anyway... sorry i'll get my coat.

i understand about that stuff and it ought to be addressed, but piecemeal reopening of schools doesn't seem to be honestly about that to me, nor even honestly about education.

is it fuck.. it's all childcare for people in shit jobs.