It plays well into his supporters xenophobia, seriously.

Yes, it's divide and rule. Blame someone else and then claim the credit for calling them out. Whenever the shit hits the fan, it's all their fault, I'm the good guy. And then when there's good news I did it, such a stable genius.

How far can we stretch the social contract upholding this reality before it gets ripped apart?

It will have to be stretched until the pips squeak before anything will change. In theory political changes would be able to turn society away from raw capitalism, to some something more social democratic. But in some countries this is being held back by the manipulation of the media and the use of populism, funded by the wealthy, the people invested in capitalism. There are established, even endemic (as in the UK) anti socialist ideologies which are fostered by this manipulation.

But as I see it following the financial crisis of 2008, more and more people have lost faith in the free market and the politics of the privelidged is loosing support amongst the young. In the UK this is becoming an existential battle, almost civil war. With older wealthier people who benefitted from the economic boom of the 1980's and 90's. Against the younger people who have had debt and unaffordable house prices holding them hostage, having to rent with higher and higher rates of rental. Meaning they can't generate their own wealth, while the older people hold onto their wealth.

Perhaps Corona will help to correct this imbalance.

This is the herding instinct

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tkVAUGaEcfA

I've just watched the BBC documentary on Dominic Cummings. He must feel like the most unlucky person in British politics, just as he managed to get into Downing St, the greatest national crisis since the Second World War happened within a few weeks. Sucking all his hard won power away, leaving him in the middle of a national scramble to a war footing in which political advisors have become irrelevant and the grown ups have taken the healm. Johnson likewise has lost control and must rely on the group of specialists and grown ups who actually run things. Be careful what you wish for Boris, Churchill is your idol, your hero, now you have been unceremoniously thrust into his shoes and you will have to deliver that level of leadership, or if you fail, you will be finished.

In the UK schools are closed now until further notice, as the government faces a rapid increase in infection, ove the next two weeks. These will be people who were infected prior to the social isolation measures introduced earlier in the week, who will develop symptoms following a few days of incubation.
Apparently London is a hotspot. The problem in London is that there are many people who either can't work at home, or can't afford to stop work, as they survive hand to mouth. This morning the tube( metro) was packed full of commuters, even during the social isolation measures. I suspect that the virus is spreading widely across London right now and there are still a lot of people still moving around to keep working.
Also health workers are not being tested, or not being provided with sufficient safety equipment. There are many health workers self isolating for 14 days, with some symptoms, but are not being tested.

why Mars?

I expect he was thinking of Total Recall.

And you’re right that we should get that support. It remains to be seen if we will. Shockingly, even Republicans seem to be considering a temporary Universal Basic Income as a possible solution

Yes in the UK there is talk of universal income. It will be the easiest way to help people, as it is becoming evident that what ever funding methods that are proposed, many people fall through the net.
It is equally shocking here as the party in government and their base tend to be the privileged and hard working, who look down on the poor and disadvantaged (while actively making them disadvantaged).

Which country are you in?
You should get financial support from your government and for your company.

Peculiarly I am going to be ok, I have just secured a big contract for a years work. Which will go ahead regardless, unless my clients die, they are retired though. Even without that contract I will be financially secure. My concern is more for some vulnerable parents.

I've already found the way it will be referred to.

Before Corona, BC.
After Corona, AC.

Mentions Ibuprofen. But I'm finding conflicting advice online tbh.

I keep hearing doctors saying that Ibuprofen shouldn't be a problem because it is a mild anti inflammatory and doesn't suppress the immune system. But there has been a scare in France, so as a precaution people are being advised to use paracetamol instead.

Interesting, I have been having this kind of dream (not the same subject, but a similar theme) for months now. In my dream death was about 5ft high, a simple pillar shape, but moved like a person walking and I sensed it as a being. There was a similar darkness, like light couldn't escape, so you are not actually looking at something, but an absence of something, all light is sucked in. There was a distortion similar to what you describe as gravity. It was like I was on a fairground waltzer spinning, and I was straining to see something I was spinning away from. There was a deep sense of negativity. Not evil, but an extinguisher of some kind, a harbinger of death, of endings, things coming to an end.

This gravity effect, I have realised is caused by a spell of sleep apnea/paralysis in which one tries to move, but can't, because the body is asleep. I find that some of my most inspirational, or prophetic dreams fleetingly happen during this struggle.

I used to interpret dreams many years ago, but lost interest when the idea of divination became an irrelevance for me.

I don't think there's a choice now, unless you choose some kind of oblivion*. We're all swept up in this.

* I'm drinking Russian cognac as I write

How is the pandemic perceived in Russia?

Somehow, I doubt the Russians will deport you and they can't really accuse you of intending to stay beyond your visa.

You can return to the UK and self isolate for 7 days, then live with your parents and help them self isolate.

So death is a he? How sexist. :-)

Which way, discriminatory against women, or men?

I realised that when I was typing, for for artistic effect I decided to go with he.

Yes, that's what happened. I do need to qualify this, it was a dream, so imaginary, also I can't be entirely sure that it was death who walked in, but all the emotional triggers were tripped. I have encountered this before, so am familiar with the signs.

I do have a history of premonitions in dreams, I think this was a premonition, but it is not clear at the moment if it was, or what it indicated.

Are you saying that since the number of known cases in US now is 4,500 and deaths 88, that if we multiply the knowns by 5 to 10 and divide 88 by that, that the real death rate is likely between 0.2% and 0.4%?

These figures don't show the true figure, firstly some of the infected people who are going to die, haven't died yet, they're still in life support. Secondly the Hospitals haven't been overwhelmed yet. So the patients are getting the best intensive care at the moment. But later on scarce resources will be triaged and given to those patients who have more of a chance of survival and those who don't will be left to die, with minimal treatment. So the mortality rate will go up.

Based on your reading of the article, how lethal do you think it is?

It's not lethal to the human species, it will just clear out some of the dead wood. Wheather it is civilised is another question.

:cool:

Sepia and puce.

In a dream lastnight, death walked into the room, as I was staring to see him, the lights were extinguished. In the total darkness I felt helpless and woke up with a fright.

If you were going to paint a picture of the sound of a fart, what colors would you use? Don't say brown

It's difficult to avoid the smell, but I would probably use khaki, or Olive green. Whereas for the smell, it would be a rainbow palette.

If find a bottle of fizz and BBC 6 music goes down quite well on a Friday night. I recommend Tom Ravenscroft at 9pm, Its Iggy Pop before 9 which is good after a drink.

Yes there are some hospices just for palliative care, but many double up as long term care homes. Also there is a grey area around which patient is a palliative care patient and which is a long term care patient.

It was Norwich hospital, but I can't confirm who refused to go in to the facility, as I heard a doctor from the hospital talking on talk radio about the rumours.

A hospice facility isn't a care home. It's palliative care.

The're interchangeable around hear. The're all heading in the same direction and the same point about the staff holds.

Yes, I'm British, I don't see the relevance though?

Everybody who goes to hospice is about to die. But I take your point. A sudden outbreak in a community where no one has immunity yet could briefly overwhelm the system. So the cancellations of large gatherings makes sense.

The staff in the care home are an issue, they could be lumped into the group of healthcare workers. They work in a healthcare community, or a hospital. It is imperative that such communities don't get infected because it is highly disruptive*.

Weirdly some of these facilities will be required to admit infected acute cases, while protecting the healthcare workers from infection. There may even develop a circumstance where acute cases are warehoused while they die ( khaki tents).

An issue with banning large gatherings has been highlighted, in that it might result in numerous small gatherings in confined spaces. For example holding football games with no crowd, resulting in many fans congregating in pubs to watch the game on big screens.

P.s. I'm not expecting you to reply to all that, I'm addressing the whole thread really.

*an example of disruption occurred in a hospital near me the other day. There was a scare that a patient with a persistent cough had the virus, he was tasted and found to be clear, but in the meantime rumours spread far and wide that there was an infected person in there. This resulted in healthcare workers, cleaners and maintenance staff not going in to work.

I was listening to a representative of the main ventilator manufacturing company, which makes many of the ventilators which are purchased in the world at the moment. He was saying that they have had many urgent orders from across the globe for many thousands of ventilators. The interviewer asked, can you step up production to 24hrs. He said, that in a good year they sell 500 ventilators, they may be able to increase by a few hundred over the next year.

Looks like there's going to be a short fall of maybe 50 million ventilators.

Could be, Covid19 has been matched to a virus found in Pangolins. The trade in Pangolin scales for Chinese medicine has increased massively over the last few years. The price per kilo is astronomical.

I have found a hole in your argument, I hope you don't mind. But in the UK, it is the elephant in the room.

Remember your 87 year-old neighbor? He didn't burden the healthcare system too much. If he did visit the hospital, he was dispatched to hospice care as soon as compassion would allow.

If he does go to hospice care, he will kill off everyone else in the care home. So he won't be allowed in, again he will be taken to a tent. In the UK plans are being put in place to isolate care homes, I don't have the figures, but it will include over a million people. Then there is a large constituency of people who are medically compromised, or with an underlying health condition, over a million again. Then there are all the health and care workers, who do the caring of all these folk, a few million there. They might bring the virus into the protected group. If they become ill, they will have to go home, or go into a tent. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the larger group is everyone over 70 years of age, who will soon become isolated.
We will soon become tent city, khaki coloured.

I was informed, before toilet role violence, that rubbing almond oil on the anus is good for Corona.

So this might be the new normal if and when there are pandemics, even less dangerous ones

I am sure we can learn to adapt and prepair for such epidemics, but as yet we are sorely ill prepared. Hopefully there will be much more effort put in to epidemiology now with real data to work with.

22,000 people in the US have died of the flu THIS YEAR already. HIV? How about heart disease which kills nearly 20 million a year. Cancer, around 10 million. Malaria, 1 million. Corvid ... at worst it may, just possibly, nearly compete with cancer this year. If I’m being honest I think it’s more realistic to view it as maybe competing with malaria.

I took a look and the statisticians are suggesting that the mortality due to heart disease is around 650,000 per year,
https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
Also cancer deaths are about the same level, in the US.

Unless you are referring to global figures, but you and ssu appear to be discussing US figures.

With Coronavirus we are being told that every country is likely to loose a few millions of citizens in the next few months due to something theoretically avoidable. That is the difference and it is unclear what degree of action will cause a significant reduction in these figures. No one knows how this will end, or if an effective vaccine will be found. Hopefully it won't be to bad and we will pull through with our civilisation unscathed. And we take this as a wake up call for what you suggest next.

The real issue is what will happen when the next strain comes around. That could be terrible - they’ve been warning about this for years already.

I suggested alcoholic mouthwash, I don't know how well it went down.

Or that could all be bullshit, but you heard it here first!
— unenlightened
Now that's a catchy phrase!

Brilliant! I missed that one.

we could try swilling the virus out of the mouth and into the stomach with an alcohol solution every ten minutes. In fact there are some good brands out there ready to use, like Smirnoff, Jack Daniels etc.

Yes, this is right, but I wonder if the economy will be able to sustain itself intact for extended periods where no one is working. It's going to have to be a balancing act between economic considerations and health considerations.

I think that the economy will go into a deep recession in the UK immediately, simply due to the lack of trade in travel, events and hospitality and it's knock on effects. I think we could get through this for a couple of months with help from banks, grants and tax holidays. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, it exposes large numbers of people who are a couple of wage checks away from being homeless, or in debt and an equally large group of people who are maxed out on debt, including mortgages. Once house prices start to drop significantly then the problems become entrenched in negative equity etc.

We were going to have a rough ride anyway with Brexit, before Coronavirus came along. It's turning into a perfect storm with Johnson and Cummings at the helm, blind to anything outside the comfort zone of the privelidged classes and wealthy exploiters. Doggedly following an ideological course of cutting all ties with the EU by the end of the year come what may. He is adamant that he won't ask for an extension to the transition period, currently up to 31 Dec' and intends to broker a trade deal with the EU by June. The very fact that he is not accepting the seriousness of the crisis and allowing an extension to negotiations shows that he is not concerned with getting it right, but only holding on to power long enough to get it done what ever the cost.

The ideologically driven Brexiters have risen up and grabbed control of the reigns in the UK and are accelerating the Brexit train towards the abyss at maximum acceleration just to ensure we go over the edge however bad it gets. This is an existential threat for the Conservative party, because if it fails at this point, they are facing a decade or more of a socialist agenda which would strip out the privelidged wealth of the privileged classes and condemn them to electoral oblivion. They will fight tooth and nail to preserve their privelidge and Brexit was an important step in their struggle against a growing desire for a more social democratic direction for the country.

but that they didn't realize the deaths would be so high as to crash the system s is the incompetence

They may have known this, but that it was already to late, they were between a rock and a hard place.
Johnson's economic advisors would have informed him how fragile the UK economy is at the moment and that any wide reaching measures adopted would bring the house of cards tumbling down. So they couldn't do anything that could compromise the economy. Instead they came out with the strategy line of delay and just keep washing your hands all the time. They might have also known that the number of deaths and the chaos in the health care system would crash the economy as well, but again, there was nothing they could do to prevent any of it.

No10 has been helpless right from the start and the sooner we have everyone staying in their homes except for food shopping and essential trips, the more likely we will be able to ride the first wave intact.

I have grave concerns about the US, it looks like the're going to have a rough ride.

Yes, I agree, all these notions they had about protecting the economy will backfire. The only way to protect it would have been to ban flights in December. Although, I doubt that would have been sufficient, because the virus will become endemic across most of the world anyway, so you would have to close your borders permanently and hope a vaccine is forthcoming.

As I thought, you don't know what leadership is.

I hear you, but I differ in my reading of the situation in No10.

When I described the political reaction to Johnson's strategy, I was not supporting it, only describing it. In my opinion the team managing the government's response is developing this strategy, they do have some strategic thinking going on, but they are lazy and naive about the magnitude of the crisis. As usual with a Conservative government, they are naive and live in an ivory tower. Their raison d' etre is to keep the privelidged classes in power and generate enough wealth to support their privileges. But the current government is the Vote Leave campaign, they are ideological fundamentalists and their doctrine is to leave the EU and become a Singapore on Thames. In this they have left behind the moderates in their party and are recklessly pushing forward the implementation of their ideology.

This being the case, what is most likely to be going on is that they are in a chaotic mess, with a fundamentalist driving forward their agenda come what may, which will include the calculation that the economy must be protected, or all is lost. That a lot of old and poorly people will die, which will actually bail them out of the healthcare and care home crisis. They will now have to formulate someone, or some process to blame. For this because the public would not tolerate such ruthless plans in government. All they need to do is say that the UK situation is different and the virus was to blame for the million or so deaths. And any flack that comes their way will be blamed on the expert advisors and the previous Labour government of 1997-2010, for bankrupting the country(not true by the way). It doesn't matter how bad it gets, they will still get Brexit done.

I heard that the toilet paper craze started in Australia, where a newspaper staged a scene of empty shelves. In fact they had taken the toilet paper off the shelves and stacked it behind the camera.

We're over the peak of toilet role panic now.

What happened to your post?