Creative Midfielder
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Everything posted by Creative Midfielder
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National League null and void
Creative Midfielder replied to sonyc's topic in Main Discussion - Norwich City
Likewise - you are right in many ways but, and it's quite a big but, the 'nonsense world of power and politics' does have an impact, a very big impact, on what the normality of everyday life looks like for most of us - whether we are poor, vulnerable or reasonably comfortable we are all affected by politics and political decisions, only a tiny minority are wealthy enough or powerful enough to be immune. But like you I very much look forward to getting back to some kind of normality without the current restrictions and threat of a deadly disease but I am also hoping that it won't just be business as usual and that there will be some real changes as a result of this crisis which will improve things for us all. Seems to me there are whole range of things that might be possible based on our experience of this crisis: the most obvious is perhaps that we might place a much higher value on our public and emergency services and reverse the relentless degradation of them that has gone on for many years now. Perhaps the only positive facet of the current crisis is that even after a very short lockdown we are already getting a glimpse of how much better our future would be if we actually got serious about de-carbonising our economy and slashing other forms of pollution. Governments all over the world are going to spend huge amounts of money to restart their economies and how they choose to do it could have a huge impact for the better on our longer term future but only if they choose to do it wisely rather than simply rush to return to business as usual which I fear will be the default setting. In the case of the UK we also need to avoid a return to BAU because we desperately need to rebalance our economy. Governments have recognised this for years but failed to do anything about it - now is the perfect opportunity to get serious about it. I'm sure there are many other things we could learn from this crisis and change for the better, those are just the first three that occur to me. -
From someone who wants a reasoned discussion that is a pretty bizzare response. I specifically said I didn't know whether Chris Whitty had been lying but that he hadn't been open and honest - not quite the same thing. And that observation applies even more so to this government who are particularly adept at completely misrepresenting a situation without telling a direct lie, although they also do that as well when they feel the need arises. Nor did I say I believe China over our government, I said I didn't believe any of them but since you bring up the subject, as above, we only suspect the Chinese of lying whereas we know that last weekend (I think?) Michael Gove looked straight into the camera and lied through his teeth to us, for example. As for the bullying, it has been reported in the papers and on tv news but of course it is necessary to both read/watch them and then believe that the individuals are telling the truth (although I believe some emails have been published but then they may have been forged!). But I suspect that you will not do so since you are apparently unwilling to contemplate the idea that we have an incompetent, or worse, government.
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As you said I think ventilators have become a much more topical issue - at least with the public/media whose attention span is always very limited even in situations like these. Ventilators I'm not sure but suspect may be another testing kit saga, there are definitely more on the way but whether/how many will be available by mid-April which many people seem to be pencilling in for the peak (rightly or wrongly) seems very uncertain. I think you are correct that currently we just about have sufficient ventilator capacity but one thing that doesn't seem to have received any publicity but which really alarmed me when I heard it directly from my daughter who works on a respiratory ward (now dedicated to Covid) is that although they have ventilators they don't have the ancillary equipment such as hoods which are required to safely ventilate highly infectious patients. So they are able to treat their patients but only at an even greater risk to themselves! She loves her job, even though she gets very angry and frustrated by the incompetence above her but I wouldn't do it for all the tea in China and most definitely not for what she gets paid.
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😀 As to the PPE I think it is pretty clear that although the situation has slowly improved we are still a long way off where we should be. You mentioned care homes, many of whom are definitely still struggling to get anything and even in the NHS there are many reports of problems where even though staff have the correct face masks, rather than the one time use (i.e. each patient is treated) which is what they're intended for and the guidelines state, they are having to wear them to treat multiple patients, or for a whole shift. There was even a report from a London hospital, I think, where they had worn them all week!
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They were mouthing the modellers advice not the expert medical advice they had access to, and they certainly remained silent about problems which they knew about and should have already been addressed, e.g. lack of PPE kit. Whether they told lies I don't know and don't really care, they weren't open and honest and they provided 'cover' for a strategy which they must have, or should have, known was at odds with what medical and public health experts worldwide were saying. It is also clear that there have been many attempts to bully front line staff from speaking out about issues that Chris Whitty et al (epecially the political element of 'al') have tried to ignore or smooth over, to the extent that some staff have been threatened with disciplinary action and/or dismissal for speaking about the real conditions on the front line. So if your question is really along the lines of 'Do I have any trust or confidence in the daily briefings?' then my answer is 'No, not one iota'.
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Why would anyone believe any of the figures from anywhere including the UK - we have been lied to frequently in the last few weeks. Nevertheless, the evidence of what is actually happening on the ground is still very clearly saying that China and some of the other Asians states have coped with this crisis much better than most European states and of course the US who have failed horribly. I think the obsession with the figures is driven by the prominence given to the modellers and what they can supposedly tell us about the spread\control of the virus but the models aren't that good and they are using data of spurious accuracy. We'd be a lot better off if we ditched the modellers and started listening more to the medical and public health experts who live in the real world and have hands on experience.
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Well it certainly wasn't medically driven, that much is already clear........
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National League null and void
Creative Midfielder replied to sonyc's topic in Main Discussion - Norwich City
I'm afraid I disagree with all of that - normality has failed nearly all of us at so many levels over the last decade that I'm really hoping that we don't get back to normal at any stage, ever. The 2008 crisis was of a completely different nature but it was entirely possible we were heading into a repeat of it except Covid 19 got there first - either way its clear that we, and many other countries, have endured a miserable decade and learned absolutely nothing from 2008. Getting back to normal has been a complete failure for almost all of us, we are financially, socially, politically worse off and our public services are crumbling......, and then Covid hits us. So I don't want to go back to normal I want to go forward to a period where people actually engage their brains rather than lap up the nonsense served up by our current leadership of liars and chancers. To actually have some genuine leadership which tries to honestly address the myriad issues our society faces - a few politicians with a moral compass would be a good start. I know its tall order but personally I've had enough of the sh*tshow of the last few years and the idea of getting back to normal makes me want to chuck - as my Aussie relatives would say! As for the football, this season was over weeks ago and should be nulled immediately. Let's hope we can still have a proper next season starting in August but more likely September - wrecking next season as well in an attempt to complete this one makes no sense to me at all and IMO just isn't going to happen. -
Exactly, it was a very cheap shot indeed from Hancock but entirely predictable - this government has proved itself to be not just totally untrustworthy but also completely incapable of acting as grown ups even in the midst of a huge crisis. And to return to their endemic incompetence, my daughter who is nursing on a Covid ward tells me today that although the supply of testing kits has finally improved from absolutely pitiful to very scarce (non-existant for the staff themselves) there is no noticeable benefit at all as they are having to perform the tests multiple times on patients which the doctors are already convinced have Covid but who test negative several times before they get them with a kit that actually works. Seems that the doctors are better testing kits than the kits themselves but of course they're in incredibly short supply as well. I really hope that Parliament somehow finds a way of forcing the Government to hold a Public Enquiry into this crisis once it is over because there is no way that these idiots should be allowed to just walk away from the mess they've created.
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Prem league date pushed back.
Creative Midfielder replied to City 2nd's topic in Main Discussion - Norwich City
Absolutely and if the Belgians have cancelled with only a single game to go they clearly do not believe that a summer completion is feasible or remotely likely. -
I know conflating this emergency with Brexit is a very touchy subject with some but it was reported last week, or possibly the week before I don't exactly remember, that the UK was in process of putting an emergency plan together but although the experts worked up a plan it never came to fruition because the government decided it couldn't afford the time for Parliamentary approval due to Brexit - this is doubly bizarre since despite the government's (both TM & BJ) obsession with Brexit to the exclusion of all else, the HoC didn't actually ever get to spend very long debating Brexit and even when they eventually did get involved I distinctly remember several long gaps when MPs were basically doing next to nothing whilst the government tried to figure out some way to get the unpassable Brexit Bill passed. Then, of course, when BJ finally did win a vote he just sat on his hands and decided he wanted an election and wasn't going to do anything at all until he got one. So there was absolutely no reason why Parliament couldn't have done the work to approve this emergency planning, or some of the other bits of Parliamentary business that the government happily junked. So I think you are being fairly kind to say they had the wrong priorities - they were utterly irresponsible as a government in pursuit of a single idealogical obsession.
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Well here's some people with a lot more expertise https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/absolutely-wrong-how-uk-coronavirus-test-strategy-unravelled and what they're saying is pretty damning although broadly what many of us have been saying on here - the government paying too much attention to speculative modellers and nowhere near enough attention to the public health medical experts. The strategy has been wrong from the start and we're now struggling to correct it because we're playing very belated catch-up in a global competition for testing kits and the many other resources we need.
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National League null and void
Creative Midfielder replied to sonyc's topic in Main Discussion - Norwich City
You certainly, this uncertainty isn't helping anyone. To be fair though, the EPL took action (even though it was only a postponement) whilst the government was still saying no drastic action was yet required - of course the government's judgement was completely wrong as it has been consistently throughout the crisis but the EPL, other sporting bodies, and indeed many businesses deserve some credit for seeing what the government failed to see even though they had a great deal more info than the rest of us. So whilst I don't know this, I suspect sport generally are hoping that the government will eventually make the decision for them because that may avoid a lot of contracual/financial problems that they'll encounter if they make another unilateral decision to abandon the season. So although I don't like it, I have some sympathy for football's approach of delaying making a definite decision whilst maintaining the pretence that the season can be completed - it can't and won't as @ricardo has been saying right from the start. Trouble is 'totally indecisive' appear to be two more of Boris' many middle names that we previously didn't know about so it looks as though its going to be a case of who blinks first, EPL or Boris - and from their track records I think we all know that Boris will bottle it first but maybe not yet awhile. -
No it didnt - Alternative Vote lost by quite a margin which is no real surprise as it isn't PR and is only a fairly minor improvement on the totally useless system we already have.
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Yes lovely but Herman was suggesting that you and some of your fellow brexiteers posting on here were trying to distance themselves from what you voted for. So I'm not too sure what relevance national polls have to his point but I notice that you're sticking by your belief that politics and political views in this country are always a simple binary choice. If only the real world was so straightforward............
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Really? I didn't realise that you, Fen, VW, RTB et al had your own polling numbers
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I agree but they're making a really poor fist of it.....😂
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I'm afraid trying to rewrite history is not going to get you very far but you're obviously determined to try............🙄
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Its been a political football because we have an adversarial two party political system based on a dysfunctional first past the post voting system. Funnily enough it is also a political football in the US where they also have an adversarial two party political system based on a dysfunctional first past the post voting system. But you're right that most other countries with multi-party politics based on fairer voting systems have managed to reach much more of a consensus on how best to deliver health care and indeed other public services such as education - another political football in both the UK and US but scarcely anywhere else that comes to mind. Funny that....
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I'm afraid it definitely is, and the reason there is an ongoing campaign to prevent it is that this government and its Tory predecessors have continually increased the presence of the private sector within the Health Service despite (just as in the railways and other public services) the repeated failure of private companies to deliver what they are contracted to and paid for - they are employed within the health service for idealogical reasons and without proper due diligence or genuine business cases to justify their involvement. This isn't even something to debate, it is just the reality of what has been happening on the ground for many years. The only debateable point is whether it is going to get better or worse over the next 5 years and I think you'd have to be a supreme optimist to believe that its going to be better. Not impossible of course but everything we know about this government indicates otherwise, as does their track record.
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No I'm not and in fact I don't recall quoting any stats at all. What I have repeatedly said is that we had a potential substantial advantage compared to many other countries in our ability to control this virus, i.e. being on an island with controlled borders - an advantage which we've squandered. Secondly that our government (and its chosen experts) firstly were very late to implement any strategy and when they did it was completely different to the one that the WHO, SE Asian experts with early experience of the virus and many independent UK experts were advocating. Thirdly they didn't do some of the most basic things that any competent government would have done like using the two month warning to stock up on basics that the NHS would need to fight the virus - PPE would have been a good start. All of those statements I think you'll find are factually correct. What happens from now on is very unclear but your suggestion that locking down earlier would have had other adverse consequences and resulted in a longer lockdown seems almost certainly wrong - the disease has right from the start been spreading very quickly and obviously the purpose of the lockdown is to slow or even stop the spread which again the existing evidence shows to be the case. So I would suggest that the earlier the lockdown, i.e. whilst the number of people already infected is lower, then the more effective it would be and the quicker the lockdown could be lifted - that seems simple logic to me or as we used to call it plain common sense.
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Sorry T but this is getting very tedious, there is no hindsight involved here and if you don't believe me then perhaps you should take a took at the Lancet and what they said in January and since. The idea that this government has followed the best expert advice available is a total fiction, they ignored most of the experts and took a gamble on minimising the economic impact - that gamble has totally backfired!
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I wouldn't put too much confidence in any countries' stats but given the amount of data that China has made available I would think theirs are as good, or better, than most. If you look for comparisons with other countries then I think you can probably find at least one country to prove almost any point of view but certainly there are those have performed much better or much worse than us, and there are plenty that look similar. All I would say is that as an island country with controlled borders, a high quality (though seriously under-resourced) health system and ample warning we should have been in the very good performing category if the government had taken timely, intelligent decisions and unfortunately we're not.
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The NHS didn't have the resources it should have had at the outset, that much is clear and obvious but it doesn't explain the two month delay in attempting to increase its capacity, or indeed source other very basic essentials such as PPE for health workers. Whether this government announced a totally flawed strategy\response to this crisis through sheer incompetence or in an attempt to hide their culpability for the unpreparedness of the NHS I don't suppose we'll ever know and at the moment it scarely matters but the fact remains that we are in a much worse situation than we might have been had the right decisions been taken at the right time.
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Think you're right about the timing but I believe the evidence so far (such as it is!) is that this virus is much more stable than, for example, flu and therefore once we have a vaccine it may well be effective for several years.
