Well, it's Bo-Jo this and Ho-Ho that,
And kick him out, the clown,
But it's Saviour of his Country
When Corona came to Town
(apologies to Kipling)
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The chronicles of Ruin, continued. Call me Ishmael said....intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Anonymous said... When I don't know what to do,I come here. 10 September 2009 22:59
34 comments:
Mrs I: 14 giant planes with equipment and specialists have now landed in Italy from Russia. The shaking hands stuff: I read elsewhere that the Russian General was confident to be without mask and to shake hands because he had been immunised!! Also, little Cuba has sent 35 doctors plus nurses to Italy. Meanwhile the EU has done sweet FA>
But what has he been immunised against, mr. mike? Have the Russians developed a workable vaccine, and will they share?
I don't know Mrs I about the immunisation - I was digging into the deployment and read it on a blog which is orientated to matters military, particularly Russian. Its 6 brigades of Nuclear, Chemical, Biological warfare the Russian army have sent - virologists, doctors, nurses & support staff and all their kit. What they would use in a war, Serious stuff. Initially 9 planes, but more followed once the situation on the ground was assessed as more serious. 14 planes as of 24 hours ago, but now likely more as an air bridge has been established. Apparently Poland refused permission for overflight and they had to go the long way!!
It certainly has become serious stuff, mr mike. London is getting a new instant hospital. Just the two wards, each of 2000 beds.
Keep safe, everyone.
I think that although we here chronicle ruin that most of what I have seen and heard is pretty affirming of the species that we have become. I may go mad cooped up as I am with the three female mongeese - and, please God, may it not rain - but they are all entertaining and rather thoughtful folk. That they take to ribbing the innocent among them to pass the time is to be regretted but I guess leadership too has its burdens.
And the supermarkets are full again. People are no longer going mad. We may be as poor as church mice in a few months time but for the most part we are witnessing a remarkable kinship in times of trouble. The sun though has made this very much easier.
I wonder if maybe btw that the exponential graph-line starts to feel gravity upon it. Let us hope that that is true. News from OUHT that maybe many of us had this and didn't really notice in Jnauary/Feb is stratospherically to be wished for. I, mrs m, and fils had v mild symptoms which might support that.
Take care Mr mongoose. My daughter (she lives with her boyfriend) had the symptoms, but has now recovered - so there is hope. Too dangerous to go near a GP or hospital unless you are really bad. I fear we are still in the early stages of this. Even if they find a fix (months off at best) the fallout from this will be game changing. The US and Europe will be the big losers when the final tally is done. Down here we are not yet in lockdown, but going that way, and it changes by the hour.
It is a wonderful thing to say, Mr Mike, but it appears in the UK, anecdotally anyway, to be flattening out - the rate of increase decreasing. We are at just under a hundred deaths per day though and twelve weeks of that is 10,000 early deaths. It is still rising and therefore we will exceed 10,000. That's half of what was described last week as the best outcome to be hoped for. It looks to me as if they know what they're about and we are going to end up around the 20,000 mark. (Unless asymptomatic infection is very, very high and we don't know that yet.) Poverty too causes death, of course, and so, as you noted the other day, the economic shutdown medicine has its own grim ledger.
In Mongoose Towers we act out a daily temperature taking panto. Not a one of us over 37.2deg so far, and not a whisper of a cough from anyone. We do though live down a dead end with just five households and a bunch of ducks.
Mr mongoose: I read the virus cannot survive > 50 degrees. Me and the Memsahib have started our daily ritual of head over a bowl of steaming water; deep inhalation; clears the tubes where the virus starts. Worth a try - its free.
PS Mr mongoose: the stats the world over are an artifact of the extent of testing, which is limited, and cannot be relied upon. Even deaths are a function of how the cause of death is recorded which differs from country to country. For the life of me I cannot understand why countries do not do a proper statistical testing of the population to determine the underlying incidence. Without that there cannot be any sensible policy. Its not rocket science, FFS.
Yes, I have been thinking about that too, Mr Mike. A random sample of whatever thousand is required would be a good start on the road to
a) Not had
b) Had but didn't notice
c) Has
d) Had but recovered
e) Died of
f) Died with
And then we would know pretty much what was going to happen. Is it two tests? One for it is here and one for it used to be here? I came to the conclusion that they have not got a reliable test(s) that covers all of the above at a sensible cost. But then the chancellor started paying the bill for everything and cost flew out of the window. Or maybe they know but have not told us because we wouldn't do as nanny says. Folk play the lottery where theodds are thousands of times worse than the COVID-19 gamble.
Hi, messrs mike and mongoose,
I believe we can have a pretty good guess at what is going to happen from the preparations that are being made.A 4000 bed field hospital in London. The NEC in Birmingham commandeered for a similar hospital. Massive temporary morgues created. Dyson ordered to switch production to ventilators. Day surgery cancelled to free beds for Covid19 patients. Distilleries switching to hand sanitiser production. New, extensive police powers. The suspension of court proceedings.Volunteers recruited to support the NHS. We currently have a handful of deaths, but the preparations point to an expectation of morbidity beyond the projections that we know about and also to an accompanying level of civil unrest. The information that we are being given points to a low death rate, and that amongst a population of the elderly with co-morbidities, with men being more susceptible than women, whereas the vast majority of those contracting it will experience relatively mild symptoms. The preparations point to something else entirely.
I have had a little experience of contingency planning, and know that for well over a decade local authorities and the NHS have been required to develop contingency plans to deal with a large-scale highly contagious new virus coming out of China. This has been expected. For year after year, the new viruses have come along, caused some limited havoc, and then become part of the spectrum of virus that forms the background to our human life, as we develop species immunity. The contingency plans have been there, ready to swing into effect at need, but have not been triggered. We see how comprehensive those plans are, now that they have been triggered. And how frail a thread secures us to our Parliamentary democracy, our liberties that we have taken for granted and to the rule of law.
Better, by far, however, to be over-prepared than over-taken by events.
Meanwhile traffic cops are reported to be stopping people to ask why they're out and about, and folk are phoning Plod to bitch about neighbours seen leaving the house more than once a day. Posters have gone up in our small rural town saying, effectively, fuck off if you don't live here. I can see the sense in all these, but coming as they do only a few days into the new (or newly formalised) regulations, it's as unsettling as the viral menace itself. How long before the first Corona Riot?
v./
I think that it has been very fortunate for us all here in the UK that the first week has been so pleasant weather-wise.
I cycle for half an hour every day, mr v, across the new bridge and back over the old. It keeps the blood flowing. I await my interview with PC Plod and am not concerned really about the short-term. That the state alway does cheat and lie and use mission creep is obvious to us all, and we will call it out later - but not now. Now is for saving lives.
Thank-you, mrs I, for that. There are two competing analyses/models - the Imperial College one and the Oxford one. I have read both and understand the IC one reasonably well. The OU one is less clear to my mind but then I am a humble digger of ditches and hewer of oak rather than a proper scientist. Do you, using your expertise, have a view about it? (Do not trouble yourself to look on my account unless you already have. Rest and look at your host of daffodils.)
Imperial
Oxford
Dear Mrs Smith & Mrs WoaR
I miss him terribly and think that he could see comedy in all these people on his land. I work with massive databases, huge - so the prospect of being able to sit around all day tossing it off on a home computer always appeared a bit casual. I am getting paid now to sit around on my arse all day, probs go the coop, to sit around with people like you who own art. How's that happen?
My love, as always
DtP
Oh, PS. I've fallen in love with a girl from work, proper early days but my head's gone west which kinda means I've fallen in love. Will update after this fucking plague bollox xx
Dear mr DtP - you've fallen in love! How abso-bloody-lutely marvellous. The ecstacy and the anguish of the proper early days - I remember it all. I do hope things work out for you both, although how you are to pursue a courtship with all this fuckingplaguebollox going on, I do not know. It will have to be a meeting of minds via the despised home computer, as you cannot take each other out to a restaurant, to a show, to the pictures. You cannot even invest in new underwear (just in case), unless Amazon can provide.
Have you introduced her to Ishmaelia? All are welcome here, unless they are some random nutter, as Editor Verge describes the strange commentators that occasionally pause here.
And I miss mr ishmael dreadfully, too. He could always be relied on to tell us what to do. Now we shall have to make it up for ourselves.
Me DrP: remember to keep your social distance, for the sake of mankind. FFS.
Here in my splendid rural isolation, mr verge, there aren't the measures you describe. But there is no need for "Go Home Strangers" posters, as the borders have been closed. That's the thing about living on an island off the north coast of nowhere; instruct the ferries not to carry non-islanders (The First Minister did that last week) and close the airports (happening on Sunday)and Bob's your avuncular.
Any Corona riots will be efficiently and effectively dealt with, rest assured, by the police and the military, who will not be constrained by fears of by-standers taking videos and uploading them, because there won't be any by-standers. In the course of a month, we have become a police state and everyone's onside with that, for fear of the fuckingplaguebollox.
Hi, mr mongoose, looking at daffodils can get a little tedious after the first joy of their re-appearance following a miserable dark winter. Even Wordsworth, after his pleasant walk among the daffs went home to a nice tea prepared by his sister and got on with his writing, otherwise we would never have known about his hosts of golden daffodils.
The Oxford model is fairly impenetrable, I agree. Remember the words of the British statistician George Box: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
Douglas Adams, debunking probability modelling, postulated that Earth is a giant computer constantly computing billions and billions of probabilities for solving the question of ‘life, the universe, and everything'.
It seems that the rapid escalation of measures is the consequence of re-running the data following the Italian shitfest. The approach of allowing the population to develop what is called "herd immunity" at the cost of a 1% death rate was modified when it was seen that the Italian health system was almost immediately overwhelmed. This meant that to the numbers of dead caused by Covid19 should be added the numbers of deaths that would have occurred anyway and the numbers of deaths that maybe wouldn't have happened had health resources not been tied up in the plaguefuckingbollox.
One thing is for certain sure, mr mongoose, a birth certificate is a death certificate.
Interesting data starting to creep out, mrs I. UK cases is a laser straight logarithmic nightmare but deaths seem to be just nudging to a shallower rate of increase. This is good news, I hope, but still planety of bad craziness to come.
I would also like to take this opportunity to dob in mrs m who has 85 cans of catfood stacked in the back kitchen.
But do you have a cat, Mr Mongoose, that's the question Plod will be putting, from the safety of their car.
v./
That thought had me worried too, mr v. We've had some culinary adventures down the years. How we remember the day that the kids were served some pot-boiled pork ick that presented itself for carving afterwards still in its plastic wrapper.
We'll be back on bat soup before this ends. BTW we have hundreds of fruit bats out back that show up after dark. Nice Aussie ones not nasty Chinese ones.
And I have 5 cans of petrol stashed in my byre (former cowhouse, for English readers) but they are for my lawnmowing adventures. Harris keeps eating all his food, the stocks of which go down more rapidly than the human food. How did mrs mongoose get her hands on 85 cans? Mr Tesco is limiting purchases to 3 of anything. That really doesn't last Harris very long and requires me to keep on putting my health at risk by going shopping. Tesco was fun today. They have converted the Disabled car parking section into a sort of Alton Towers queuing system, with barriers to slow down numbers of people entering the shop. I wondered where the disabled badge holders were to park, but caught myself on, because of course the disabled have to stay at home and never be seen again. In the store, they have applied something resembling police incident tape to the floor in 2 metre sections, creating a series of boxes which you are not allowed to enter until your exit is clear. One chap was in deadly ernest about his PPE - he had on a top jolly complete-cover face mask, with breathing things on each side and he was shopping in gloves, of course. Later, I saw him decanting his shopping into the back of his car, first using his virucide spray on the bags. I kind of hope that he catches it, like Bo-Jo the Ho-Ho and His Royalness. You know, just to prove that God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.
I know, I know, I'm not a nice person.
It's the deaths wot matter, isn't it? As Mr Mongoose notes, they are unspectacular despite elastic definitions of coronavirus involvement, especially on Mad Italy. Ditto hospitalisations; it's the"with" instead of the "because of" which worries me, and should worry us all.
What are they up to, the Masters of War and the Masters of Debt? A controlled global convulsion to control the economic collapse over time is a type of fair trade and worth their pursuing. It's brilliant close-up magic, you know it's happening right in front of you, but the sucker card still ends up stuck to your forehead.
Mr BB: I agree - the total deaths per month, irrespective of cause, has not changed statistically across the world. I'm not a denier, but the economic medicine will definitely kill the patient. An economic crisis was in the works irrespective of the virus. As the old saying goes: never let a crisis go to waste.
I think, messrs Mike and BB, that it is a combination of uncertainties. It is almost impossible as an outsider to do anything other than count the declared cases and the declared deaths. And that worldometers link that somebody posted above is a good one for looking at comparisons. The asymptomatic infection rate is v high and has unexpectedly and invisibly saved the gig.
Shutting the western world down for three months delivers a gigantic smack to the nose of us all. That's a 20-25% reduction in GDP right there - public money burnt on the pyre. Sweden BTW has not shut down - yet. Let us wait and see what happens but I am more concerned for the wrecked final years of two of my kids' university careers, and the guess that is going to be made to enable the start of the third's. (This last from a gal who was sick the best part of half of her second A-level year and who repeated it to the get the grades she felt she owed herself.)
Mrs I, I must report the insane practice of the online buying of catfood (see petsathome.com). Mrs m reports that she somehow - "accidentally", "didn't mean to get so much" - bought 6 trays of twelve. I fear though that her aversion to paying even a penny on delivery charges caused her to buy the lowest amount that came here for free. And while the lady is easily the best read woman in all England, numeracy is to her but a secondary skill. We bought so much swimmers' energy drink one day - great gallon pots of it stacked in every cupboard you'd open - that she had to give the balance of it away after the kids had years later grown up and retired from competition.
Mr mongoose: the declared cases is merely a reflection of the extent of testing in different countries, which varies massively - some countries (eg US) willfully under testing, other countries (eg UK) are limited by testing kits. Re deaths, its the case that different countries have different methods for recording cause of death, particularly in the case of multiple causes. Italy happens to me more meticulous in recording Covid19.
My guess is that the prevalence of Covid19 is massively under reported as you infer. Also, I think the death rate is overstated - eg Covid19 is now as reportable disease in the UK - ie has to be mentioned on the death certificate, whereas flu is not. Both result in pneumonia.
I'm not trying to minimise the situation, but we have to take the current level of recording with a huge grain of salt. Absence reliable data, the policy response could be way off the mark.
I’m with you, Mr Mongoose, on the threat to our children, including the debts which they and theirs will be required to confront. But we are, I suppose, an ingenious and resilient race and species.
Let us pray that some truth and goodness might arise.
Mr mike,I'm totally with you regarding the absence of reliable data. There is simply no way of determining how many people have been infected, short of testing the entire global population and therefore no way of determining a morbidity percentage rate for Covid19. It follows, then, that the 1% morbidity figure - derived from other epidemics - (albeit probably on similarly dodgy data)is probably correct. Two probablies in that sentence, because that is what we are doing - a sort of informed speculation. And I'm also with you on the accurate death certificate reporting, because the co-morbidities factor is key - we are talking about a very frail susceptible group, who are already knocking on heaven's door in consequence of their existing conditions and simply do not have the ability to fight off a new virus.
Hang on to your hats, Ishmaelites, weather the crisis and prepare to fight the peace.
mr mongoose, I'm with mrs m, as I, too, subscribe to online buying of stuff - only insane in the overall economic sense of closing down the High Street and local stores, because on an individual basis Amazon knocks 15% off already-competetively priced goods, if you order 5 things a month to be delivered free of charge to your home. Trouble is, the supply is not consistent and they have failed Harris for several months now, as they say they've not been able to secure his favourite dinners.
You can console your mongoslings that life is long in comparison with the fevered, hectic 4 or 5 years of higher education. Something will turn up.
"What are they up to, the Masters of War and the Masters of Debt? A controlled global convulsion to control the economic collapse over time is a type of fair trade and worth their pursuing. It's brilliant close-up magic, you know it's happening right in front of you, but the sucker card still ends up stuck to your forehead."
mr bungalow bill, I'm currently reading "Miracle Men - a Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs", by Mark Pilkington, recommended some time down the road by mr verge. I would put nothing past them, the Masters of War and Debt. We are but pawns.
Lazily dozing in my bed until midday today, listening to the radio drone on, I was struck by how many different moans there are now forming about a common theme of not enough is being done. As Mr Mike said yesterday, the testing for the prevalence of a disease in its different stages is not rocket science. I bet that they teach it ten thousand times a year in every medical school in the world. Sample sizes, rate of false this and false that, antigens or live disease, blah, confidence intervals, blah. So the extremely clever folks who one sees standing next to Boris every five o'clock will know all this. And yet every dick-wit MP or journalist without even half a scientific thought in his head says "We're behind the curve on this. We need massive front-line testing. Something should be being done and if it is being done, it should have been done sooner." It's a sort of amateur hour fault finding game. What fun it would be if one of those nice, polite scientists told the gabshite from the Daily Drivel that his question is scientifically illiterate and no meaningful response beyond that observation is possible.
Its optics, Mr mongoose. Got to be seen to be doing something, even if its the wrong thing. Total lockdown is totally wrong, IMHO. Because, this will go on for a while, maybe a year or so, and skills, businesses and industry cannot be turned back on like a tap. With proper testing, the population could be divided in 2 parts: the sick and contagious, and the immune no risk - the latter group can keep working and keep stuff flowing. If the supply chains break and vital services become unreliable - eg no internet, electricity, water etc then this will lead to riots and looting. I see in the US they are anticipating trouble calling up a million reservists.
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