…based on the BMJ article the UK government is absolutely wrong to be gung-ho about the tests, regardless of the clusterfuck it is responsible for. This isn’t about surveillance testing. Nobody is arguing that we shouldn’t surveillance test, and if the proposal was to us sewage testing to make critical public policy decisions then the experts wouldn’t be standing up. But that isn’t what this is about. Not listening to the experts is what got the UK into the mess they are in now, and continuing to go “gung ho” ignoring the experts is going to get people killed.
"Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said health officials when testing a population should focus on the latter. The solution, he says, is testing that is less sensitive, and more frequent. "
I’m not from the UK. It appears that @Banquet_Bear is letting politics get in the way of science.
…I’m not from the UK either. This isn’t about politics. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, isn’t a member of the UK government. A statement made in August of 2020 bears no relation to what the UK government plan to do with rapid lateral flow covid-19 tests now. They are planning on using these tests with close contacts every day for a week - and they will not need to isolate unless they test positive. This is going to kill people. It has nothing to do with politics. They are going gung-ho with a plan that is going to kill people and it appears you are perfectly fine with that.
In case you haven’t seen it
Maybe Biden will take on some of NZ’s ideas.
Bolding mine.
Moderator Note
Don’t cast personal aspersions on other posters in this forum. And in general, dial back the rhetoric.
Colibri
Quarantine Zone Moderator
…Luther wrote that letter in the midst of an outbreak of the bubonic plague in Wittenberg, according to the professor emeritus. He was responding to a Lutheran leader in Breslau, who asked whether a Christian ought to leave a city in the midst of a plague outbreak for someplace safer.
In his [1527] treatise, Luther wrote:
“Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. … See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.”
…
My bold.
Smart guy.
I guess to some Evangelicals, Luther was too far left for his advice to be followed…
England - this just in: a scotch egg may be a substantial meal.
Who cares? you ask. Well, in most of England, anyone who wants a drink in a pub when “lockdown ends” from Wednesday.
Drinkers in tier two areas of England could order a Scotch egg with their pint to keep in line with post-lockdown rules, a cabinet minister has said.
Under new restrictions from Wednesday, pubs in those high risk areas can only open if they function as a restaurant.
And alcohol can only be served as part of a “substantial meal”.
The BBC article also briefly summarises socialising rules for tier 1 (lowest risk; almost nowhere), 2 (high risk; most of the country), and 3 (highest risk; quite a chunk of the country).
However, the jury remains out on the drinking eligibility conferred by a cornish pasty, which has previously been nixed.
Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick has been trying to clear this confusion up.
He told radio station LBC a pasty on its own doesn’t count but if you stick a salad or chips on the plate with it, you could be all right.
Yup, that’s how you clear confusion up. The articles don’t mention it, but in a fast-moving legislative landscape, it appears that you can only drink whilst waiting for or eating your meal - thereafter, no more drinks. Absent England rapidly developing a scotch egg (and maybe pastie) based tapas culture, you can’t help feeling that we’re heading towards a lot of people drinking very fast and eating very little, very slow. Pubs, teetering on the brink financially because of COVID shutdowns, are hardly in a position to turn down alcohol sales. It’s not a great combination.
j
I just realized that, at 5 pm, I had only spoken the words “Hey google, play npr” and “Dude, wanna go outside?” all day. The last part to the dog.
I have many days when I don’t talk a lot, but today was extreme.
I’ve been thinking about that libertarian acquaintance of mine that I’ve mentioned in other posts. His fear of a shooting civil war was one of several reasons he moved from a generally blue state to a generally red state, but as I mention elsewhere, he also indicated his displeasure with virus related restrictions and bought into the medical industry conspiracy idea. So it seems reasonable to assume that when he moved to his generally right leaning area, that he will drop all cautions and be amongst many many others who do the same.
I’m not sure how to feel about this, given his ranting at the mutual friend I mention in my Pit thread. It’s like, I shouldn’t want someone else to get sick, especially with how the virus can be deadly and I believe his wife has lung issues, but at the same time, I’m having a hard time ginning up sympathy or real worry for him because of his conspiracy theories and the way he treated our friend. Further complicating my point of view is that I think I do appreciate his good qualities, and still consider him a fellow community member.
I dunno, it just makes me feel morally deficient somehow. Like I’m supposed to be bigger/better than him.
Today was the first day after Lockdown 2 ended in England. There hasn’t been a huge change at the end of this lockdown - things are still pretty strict - but at least non-essential shops are now open (with the obvious restrictions in place). Mrs Trep has spent Lockdown 2 decorating, so today we went to Dunelm Mill, a homewares store, to buy some stuff. On the door, incongruously, a young woman dressed as one of Santa’s elves was doing COVID security, counting people in and out of the store. “Elf and Safety”, explained Mrs T.
I’ll get my coat.
j
I love this! Cheery, but effective. I think it should be done at the door of every open business on both side of the pond.
.
The sanitation department here announced that beginning today all recycle carts will be emptied as garbage because 25% of their workforce has covid or is quarantined. I really hate that but I guess it’s not unexpected as cases rise. It usually takes me a month or more to fill mine up and that’s when I put it out. It’s about half full now so I’m hoping I can hold out putting it on the curb for a few weeks when and if things get better.
Oh, wow! What general area are you in?
Memphis. It makes me wonder if this is happening anywhere else. It’s sort of a side effect you don’t really think about.
Our city did this back in March. Part was COVID cases, part was the huge upswing in residential trash, as people 1) just spent more time at home and generated more trash there and 2) used the time to clean out closets and garages (I did this!).
There is a bit of an uproar after Taiwan fined a Filipino migrant worker roughly $3,500 US for violating his quarantine by stepping out of his hotel room for…a mere eight seconds.
(The furor isn’t so much the penalty as it is that white foreigners were given far lighter fines for violating quarantine for much longer, while a brown-skinned Filipino was penalized far harder for far less.)
Just now, I sat at my desk and cried for this man I never knew…
Most mornings, Paulino Ramos sat under the small tree at the entrance of a busy Home Depot parking lot near Downtown Los Angeles. Other day laborers hanging around on the corner knew they could find their friend there, waiting in the shade for construction jobs. But in early September, they noticed Ramos, the sturdily built demolition worker, looked weak.
“He lost a lot of weight and he looked sad,” says Fernando Sanchez, a day laborer whose main trade is roofing. He stares at the ground as he talks about Ramos. “I think when someone thinks they’re going to die, they know; they can feel it.”
On the morning of September 7, Labor Day, Ramos was sitting in his spot under the tree with his head down, hunched over in pain. One worker thought Ramos was having a heart attack.
“He was saying, ‘I have pain in my chest,’ and he couldn’t breathe,” says Jorge Nicolás, organizer of the Central American Resource Center of Los Angeles (CARECEN) Day Labor Center, located on the Home Depot parking lot. “One of the workers here took him to the ER. And after that, we never saw him again.”
Ramos, a low-wage day laborer desperate to earn a paycheck, became one of the more than 290,000 people who have died from COVID-19 in the United States. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the country’s Latino population especially hard. In Los Angeles County, Latinos make up 51% of COVID-19 deaths, according to the LA Department of Public Health.
Ramos was 53. He was alone here in the U.S.; he lived apart from his family in Mexico for many years. He often told Nicolás that he was eager to return home to the state of Puebla to be with his wife and three kids, and his grandkids that he’d never met.
He died shortly after he was brought to the ER.
…
Employers are required to provide protective equipment at job sites, but Monge says they rarely do. Even in a pandemic, he says day laborers often go without PPE because workers can’t afford the expense.Employers don’t offer health insurance, and day laborers don’t have access to sick pay. There’s pressure to show up to work, even if an individual is overcome by symptoms of COVID-19, like Ramos experienced. And like many day laborers at this parking lot, Ramos was undocumented.
Mario Guerra, a welder waiting on the corner, says he wonders if he’ll suffer the same fate as his friend. “I don’t know if I’ll ever go home to El Salvador or if I’ll die here,” he says. “I want to see my mom and my daughter but — that’s life.”
Paulino Ramos dreamed of returning home, too. Last week, his remains were sent back to his family in Mexico.
I know his story isn’t unique. Multiply it by hundreds, by thousands of people going about their lives sincerely, earnestly. This man never had a chance–he was the definition of “disadvantaged.” And yet he was working or trying to work up until the minute he died. And Giuliani skips to the front of the line! 
This and @Ann_Hedonia’s story about the friend she thought she knew in the MiniRants thread have knocked the stuffing out of me this morning. I just want to sit and stare at the floor. 
On the lighter side:
Haha! I know the feeling. I also sit there refreshing the tracking site when I’m expecting a package. Thanks for sharing that.
https://www.axios.com/states-covid-cases-media-consumption-babc62e3-3a33-44bb-99c0-90b2707396a9.html
States that voted for President Trump tend to have high coronavirus caseloads compared to how much COVID content they read online, while the opposite is true of states that voted for President-elect Biden, according to exclusive data from social media management platform SocialFlow.
Why it matters: The trend highlights a widespread rejection of coronavirus news and information in states that supported Trump, even in areas where the virus has gotten particularly deadly.
…
This is weird, but I guess not unexpected. People in states with the highest caseloads (who presumably need to know the most about COVID) are reading about COVID the least. Chicken-egg?