With Scotland's number dropping off, and the NW seemingly climbing again, I can see some traction in the idea of regional segregation, despite some claims that it's unworkable.
It was still at 1.1 when Andy Burnham here, and the Liverpool mayor were both saying that it was too early to ease the lockdown in the northwest as the infection rate was still too high and that the decision was being taken purely as it was below 1 in London.
Looks like they were right. Its on the up again. You’ve got hotspots in places like Blackburn which are still getting loads of infections. And of course, 15,000 people in Manchester City Centre won’t exactly have helped matters
To try and lock down again, especially on just a regional basis, will be virtually impossible
Will there even be the political will to shut the school gates again, or hold off restarting retail so thousands of people aren't roaming around the Trafford Centre in a couple of weekends' time?
As incompetent as our gov are the journalists are not much better are they! From the beeb just now.
No deaths were reported in London hospitals for the second day in a row, NHS England said. However it added that a "small number" of people had died and they would be included in figures in the next few days.
From the beeb just now.
I was just about to post that exact same sentence.... from Sky News. Political soundbite?
johnson and his clown circus are placing much confidence that 'restarting retail' will kickstart the economy.
That makes everything OK; do they really think that discretionary spending will recover to anywhere near it's previous levels?
How many - or few - people feel confident about job security?
The 'leisure sector' - and you can draw that as widely as you wish - is stuffed; clothes/shoes/fashion - WFH will be a drag on sales as will the dis-inclination to take foreign hols; when gyms re-open I think as many as 50% of memberships will be cancelled.
New car sales have taken a big hit and I don't see that changing; as for PCP, I think it's had it's day.
Core retail will continue largely unchanged - supermarkets, convenience stores, pharmacies, butcher, baker, farm shops, children's clothes; I would include bookshops as core.
Once the various support schemes begin to unwind and then end we'll see the economic and business carnage; how many people will find that furlough support has, in reality, been delayed redundancy.
Lots of pent up demand. If we could see a safe return to full retail, shops would do well.
I’d argue that requires zero (or close to) cases in the region for it to happen, and track/trace/isolate to be in place (and not just PR hot air).
Pent-up demand for what?
Shopping. It's a national pasttime.
Was a national pastime; to be seen if that will change.
The queues to go to IKEA, McDonalds and KFC would suggest that the shopping tastes of the public haven't changed at all...
Not a chance will it change, they'll be back in the shopping centres quicker than a rat up a drainpipe.
If you can reopen shopping centres and city centres fully and safely, the retail demand would prove to be huge. We’re not doing that though, we’re planning on keeping the virus ticking along, and telling people they can risk shopping if they want. Many won’t. A recovery in the retail sector is entirely possible, people really do want to get out and about and do some shopping and socialising in their favourite haunts, but it requires the government to act very differently. This government needs to act if it wants an economic uptick, not just weaken advice and hope that magically means a return to full economic activity.
What do the public think about the government’s handling of all this … (you know, 10% of the world’s deaths from the virus, and an “us and them” attitude to not spreading the virus about)…
https://twitter.com/yougov/status/1269931042728796161?s=21
Peak retail has passed; remains to be seen what residual demand there will be.
There will be high footfall to begin with people looking for 'bargains'; when the discounted stuff has gone - and there will be lots of it - what next?
Shopping centres cannot survive on permanent discounting; who's going to pay full price from now on?
The biggest driver in the future of retail will be what happens in the job market.
I'm very pessimistic about the job market and that feeds directly into my view about retail.
Truth is none of us know; time will tell.
I think there’s definitely a surge on the cards if/when shops re-open. No doubt that there’s a bottled up demand fizzing and waiting to be popped. However, as recession looms, that confidence (if that’s what we can call it) will be short-lived and it’s quite possible that discretionary spending will take a dive again.
Pent-up demand for what?
Crap you don’t need.
The under 25’s will be itching to get into primark for stuff they will wear once and throw away.
Ok grandad, the garden centres have been heaving for a week...
😂
Well thats it then, all over yes? Thanks Mr Hancock, I've got a bunch of M&S vouchers I've been gagging to spend in Westfield next week.
According to the WHO asymptomatic transmission is 'very rare'. If true, good news and Would perhaps explain why kids don't seem to pass it on much.
“We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing,” Van Kerkhove said at a briefing Monday from the U.N.’s Geneva headquarters. “They’re following asymptomatic cases. They’re following contacts. And they’re not finding secondary transmission onward.”
the available evidence from contact tracing reported by Member States suggests that asymptomatically-infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms
.
Did you read all the Marke****ch article? It’s by no means conclusive and goes on to say:
“@WHO communication here not stellar. If folks without symptoms truly ’very rarely’ spread virus, would be huge. But such a statement by @WHO should be accompanied by data. Asymptomatic spread is Achille’s heal of this outbreak. Would love to be wrong. Need to see data.”
Well thats it then, all over yes? Thanks Mr Hancock, I’ve got a bunch of M&S vouchers I’ve been gagging to spend in Westfield next week.
What's he said now then? I tend to avoid national news, it's depressing.
Did you read all the Marke****ch article? It’s by no means conclusive and goes on to say:
“@WHO communication here not stellar. If folks without symptoms truly ’very rarely’ spread virus, would be huge. But such a statement by @WHO should be accompanied by data. Asymptomatic spread is Achille’s heal of this outbreak. Would love to be wrong. Need to see data.”
No I didn't read the Marke****ch article at all. I read the WHO original and linked to Marke****ch (which I've never heard of) because it included video of Maria Van Kerkhove saying it in her own words.
I know the WHO have had a bad press for many good reasons but I assumed their individual experts are world class and if they say they’re not finding secondary transmission onward from asymptomatic cases it would mean something. Checking out the preprints in the responses to Maria Van Kerkhove's twitter post I'm starting wonder if that was a wise assumption.
What’s he said now then?
Words close to and to the effect of “Coronavirus has all but gone from our shores” in Parliament and “Its ok to send your relatives back to care homes” in the daily briefing.
My words are indicative of the general populations likely interpretation, that if it wasn’t the understanding already that the lockdown is unofficially over.
Sorry, he said what? Is he blind/stupid/mad???
The UK is still something like fifth in the world for cases and has triple digit deaths per day from COVID and it is "all but gone"???
Jesus.
I'll just stick to listening to wee Nic instead, far more sensible than the monkey-house-on-the-river.
Well, as I predicted in March, children will not be returning to school in any meaningful capacity until September. Not at all surprised by this, but that must be challenging for the economy.
As for the WHO, they often have a habit of firing from the hip, and when the science is uncertain, this habit comes back to bite you. They’ve dropped the ball with regards to transmission potential based on SARS and MERS, being not very transmissible, didn’t want to create panic, I imagine. Comments on asymptomatic transmission will be the same.
Proper scientists are comfortable living with uncertainty. Anyone who is confidently certain of anything with regards to SARS-COV-2, a virus humans have only known for six months, is likely to be wrong. How they might be wrong is another debate. Politicians are always certain.
triple digit deaths
Well 55. Maybe, possibly, as it was the weekend after all.
Another of the governments intellectual heavyweights weighs in
Not at all surprised by this
No one is. It was a useful tool to bash teaching staff and their unions with while healthcare staff and their unions couldn’t be the government’s target.
[Everyone remembers Cummings history with staff in the education sector, yes?]
That Whately yin is thicker than a whale omelette.
Daughter was told she was switching years and to be back in the classroom on Monday. Then told only 40 kids turning up in the whole school so she's now on reserve. She'd been in doing risk assessments etc and said the restrictions were such that she expected the 40 to decline by the summer.
I've been doing a bit of radio trawling and what's going on abroad is remarkably different: programmes on CV for 30mns to 1hr long in Botswana and the Cook Islands, health alerts on Midwest Radio (Ireland) in English, Irish, French, Polish and Portuguese with clear instructions. Can't imagine why we're not getting that here when we're world beaters.
All the staff at my other half’s school were in, together, weeks ago, preparing for kids to return this month who in reality were never returning this month. One member of staff resigned, as they have a shielding family member in their household and refused to be part of the mingling of staff so early.
But, Cummings has made another step towards turning the public against “the blob”, as many will be blaming teachers, unions, local authorities, and schools for all this… if the fall out was damage to the careers and lives (and possibly even loss of life) for some members of the blob… not only doesn’t he care, he probably sees it as a useful bonus. The man is a career psychopath.
Read about his time at the DfE and afterwards… he has form… this is all his doing.
This government needs to act if it wants an economic uptick, not just weaken advice and hope that magically means a return to full economic activity.
Magical thinking has featured really rather heavily in the past several years.
My expectation is some form of "got covid done" bullspaffery by the current administration, starting quite soon. And then a 1984 to be done on the slow burn of the disease through the elderly and infirm.
Todays excess deaths - epidemic model has converged. Two week half-life for decline is about right. Back to baseline by July (as I stated in April). Some variability in the regions. 70K excess deaths predicted, 90% in the 65+, 50% in the 85+ age group.
Shopping. It’s a national pasttime.
We "measure" our economy by GDP... and we are a net importer.
The more people spend the "better" we can say our economy is...
Measured by GDP it's irrelevant if those people can eat so long as they spend we can claim to have a world class economy.
You’ll have to explain the control there TiRed… it looks very contrived to the untrained eye.
TiReD
Presume your model is not accounting for any ease or removal of lockdown?
The control is the historic mean weekly number of deaths from 2010-2019 (most other analysis use 5 years, but I processed all the ONS data available instead). This is the baseline in green (geometric mean and 95%) confidence limit for the mean. The model is an epidemic model of COVID19 deaths fitted to a simple parametric model (generalized logistic curve fitted to daily incidence), then this is lagged in time and used as a non-linear covariate to predict a multiplicative factor by which baseline all-cause deaths are multiplied.
The model fits the NHS regions simultaneously then aggregates them to count deaths in England and Wales. Model does not account for changes in parameters for ease of lockdown - it presumes things have remained basically fixed from about Mid-March. That turns out to be a pretty good description of the data. It might need relaxing in the tail, but it's not a big effect (yet!)
The further relaxation of lockdown will lead to increased transmission but we just don't know how much.
Who has ACTUALLY had a second wave so far? Iran?
Japan/Singapore have seen outbreaks that have been squashed, but anything more anywhere?
The spike at Wk 12 was brought down by lockdown only to pre-spike levels. Do they really think there won't be an immediate spike with the easing of lockdown? I counted 11 people on the skateboard ramp yesterday. I've seen one person wearing a mask in town. The lack of clarity, obfuscation of statistics and changing and unclear guidelines means that this easing is going to be dangerously shambolic, the Cummings Codger Cull.
I do wonder if the narrative is changing about Boris and his 3hr 'power naps' and playing tennis at the palace is preparing us for his departure on the basis of ill-health? Sunak is keen on the chlorinated trade deal, is popular with big business and what a way to 'address' the racism problem?
Cummings Codger Cull
Deserves recognition.
Next PM odds:
Starmer 7/4
Sunak 5/1
Gove 14/1
Raab 16/1
Hunt, Hancock 25/1
Ignoring the obvious problem for the Tories in that list right there, the job seems Sunak's to lose.