China Coronavirus

Started by lurganblue, January 23, 2020, 09:52:32 AM

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marty34

Quote from: JimStynes on March 20, 2020, 03:17:24 PM
Quote from: maggie on March 20, 2020, 02:42:09 PM
Quote from: lfdown2 on March 20, 2020, 02:24:48 PM
And where should the kids of front line staff go?

Where do they go down south?

So don't close the schools then. As it stands we will have about 60% of the school in.

How come 60%?

Doctors, nurses, lorry drivers - who else are allowed to the school?

imtommygunn

Shop workers I would assume too which would be a decent amount of people.

93-DY-SAM

Quote from: imtommygunn on March 20, 2020, 03:21:41 PM
Shop workers I would assume too which would be a decent amount of people.

Wouldn't be every shop worker. But where to you stop with the definition of that?


imtommygunn

Well grocery maybe? Has to be some kind of shop worker in it though.

lfdown2

Quote from: JimStynes on March 20, 2020, 03:17:24 PM
Quote from: maggie on March 20, 2020, 02:42:09 PM
Quote from: lfdown2 on March 20, 2020, 02:24:48 PM
And where should the kids of front line staff go?

Where do they go down south?

So don't close the schools then. As it stands we will have about 60% of the school in.

But is 40% at home not better than 0% at home? Is it not all relative? Btw, I am not saying the action is correct but surely any limiting of contact is better than none?

laoislad

Schools are fully closed here and people are finding a way to work around it, not saying its easy but can't understand how ye can't do the same up North.
When you think you're fucked you're only about 40% fucked.

Ed Ricketts

Quote from: lfdown2 on March 20, 2020, 03:33:42 PM
Quote from: JimStynes on March 20, 2020, 03:17:24 PM
Quote from: maggie on March 20, 2020, 02:42:09 PM
Quote from: lfdown2 on March 20, 2020, 02:24:48 PM
And where should the kids of front line staff go?

Where do they go down south?

So don't close the schools then. As it stands we will have about 60% of the school in.

But is 40% at home not better than 0% at home? Is it not all relative? Btw, I am not saying the action is correct but surely any limiting of contact is better than none?

Yeah. Even if half the kids are still coming in, the effect of the other half being away cuts transmission rates by 50%.

Problem is keeping kids who are off school properly distanced. Drive around Belfast, or probably any town in the north, today and you'll see large groups of teens out enjoying the sunshine together. And parents dragging hordes of primary school age kids around the shops. People, young and not so young, are treating this like their summer holidays.

The message is not getting through. Not even close. We need a shutdown and cops on the street sending people home.
Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom.

screenexile

Quote from: imtommygunn on March 20, 2020, 03:27:27 PM
Well grocery maybe? Has to be some kind of shop worker in it though.

Will be interesting to see how many kids availl of this here. . . there are 3 primary schools in the parish (4 counting the Irish school but it's v small) and although there was suggestion of using one as a "hub" I don't see how that makes sense in terms of social distancing!!

armaghniac

Quote from: Ed Ricketts on March 20, 2020, 03:42:31 PM
Quote from: lfdown2 on March 20, 2020, 03:33:42 PM
Quote from: JimStynes on March 20, 2020, 03:17:24 PM
Quote from: maggie on March 20, 2020, 02:42:09 PM
Quote from: lfdown2 on March 20, 2020, 02:24:48 PM
And where should the kids of front line staff go?

Where do they go down south?

So don't close the schools then. As it stands we will have about 60% of the school in.

But is 40% at home not better than 0% at home? Is it not all relative? Btw, I am not saying the action is correct but surely any limiting of contact is better than none?

Yeah. Even if half the kids are still coming in, the effect of the other half being away cuts transmission rates by 50%.

Problem is keeping kids who are off school properly distanced. Drive around Belfast, or probably any town in the north, today and you'll see large groups of teens out enjoying the sunshine together. And parents dragging hordes of primary school age kids around the shops. People, young and not so young, are treating this like their summer holidays.

The message is not getting through. Not even close. We need a shutdown and cops on the street sending people home.

Banning kids from shops would be a start and some shops in the south have talked about that.
I wouldn't ban them from local shops if someone has to get milk, but certainly from any "shopping expedition" type places.
If at first you don't succeed, then goto Plan B

Tony Baloney

Quote from: Smokin Joe on March 19, 2020, 09:39:16 PM
Quote from: tyrone08 on March 19, 2020, 07:17:16 PM
Quote from: Tony Baloney on March 19, 2020, 07:12:11 PM
Quote from: Smokin Joe on March 18, 2020, 07:37:07 PM
The UK have 104 deaths as of today.  If we / they are tracking at the same rate as Italy the number tomorrow should be approx 145.
Will be interesting to see.
144!

That was very accurate. What's your thoughts on the upcoming days

It'll be approx 190 - 195
184 at the minute. Likely to be close to 195 by end of day.

armaghniac

Quote from: Tony Baloney on March 20, 2020, 04:15:05 PM
]184 at the minute. Likely to be close to 195 by end of day.

You see the impact  of the testing policies on the numbers. The UK has only something like 8 times the number of cases in the ROI, but has  50 times the number of deaths.
Likewise Germany and Spain  have something the same number of cases, but SPain has  20 times the number  of deaths. This does not reflect bad treatmentt so much as  it likely reflects Germany testing lots of people while Spain only counts those reaching hospital, as the UK does. 
If at first you don't succeed, then goto Plan B

imtommygunn

This place is fecking useless LL. I know we can joke but all joking aside absolutely useless. No direction on anything.

seafoid

Apologies for the length but it's important for NI

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/03/20/boris-must-become-socialist-face-nationalising-entire-economy/

Boris must embrace socialism immediately to save the liberal free market
•   AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD
F
There's nothing stopping Boris pulling out all the stops to hold the economy together
The British state can afford to spend whatever it takes to cover lost wages, keep companies afloat, and hold the economy together through the Covid-19 crisis. There is no debt constraint.
To deny funding on the basis of primitive accounting shibboleths is to repeat the errors of post-Lehman austerity strategy but on a greater scale, and with more calamitous effects.
In that episode, public investment was cut to the bone – even though we could borrow at negative real rates – and this pulled down the future economic growth rate. It was based on the false theory of "expansionary fiscal contractions", debunked by the International Monetary Fund, and the nearest thing to witchcraft in modern economic debate.
The result was a higher public debt ratio and smaller GDP than would otherwise have been the case. It achieved nothing of value. It was self-defeating even on its own crude terms. 


The stakes are higher this time because the Covid-19 "sudden stop" threatens to push thousands of valuable and viable companies over the edge and destroy swaths of the free market system, eating into the supply-side foundations of our economy.
We could emerge dazed and blinking from the coming siege – months hence – to discover that we cannot just let the natural process clear "dead wood" (how I hate that term) and then enjoy a V-shaped recovery. Hysteresis would have set it.
Other countries that preserved their industrial and economic base with more provident policies would instead be the ones roaring back to life. While we languished in depression, they would snatch our export markets and eat our lunch.
"This is not just a 'supply shock' that goes away in the third quarter," says Robert Woods from Bank of America. Firms are going smack into a brick wall. Income has stopped overnight. They cannot 'hoard labour'' and muddle through. 
To take the route of passive liquidation – on the basis of Schumpeterian gobbledygook or sovereign debt phobia as some Tory hardliners seem to prefer – is self-evidently untenable. The Government would end up having to nationalise the economy. We would end up sliding into socialism, one disaster after another, week after week, until we reach Corbynism by default and by defaults.


So if we want to avert socialism, we must briefly become socialists. We must spend whatever it takes to save  free market liberalism. It is a war to defeat a virus. It is also a war to save our economic way of life. You cannot pick a trade-off. That is a false choice.
The Government has already committed one grave error by giving up too early on the successful Korea/Taiwan/Singapore strategy on Covid-19 – "test, trace, isolate" – as it dallied with far-fetched theories and told us that it could "time" the trajectory of the epidemic with calibrated responses.
Yet it could not even get the timing remotely right. It built a strategy on claims that we were four weeks behind Italy when anybody following the events in Lombardy could see the lag was only 13 days (exactly as professor Anthony Costello kept warning). It is now beyond doubt that we have let an Italian pattern take hold. Still we dither.
The Government seemed to imagine that it could let British residents die at a much faster rate than in other comparable democracies in the first wave without provoking a ferocious popular and political reaction, and without untold damage to our international reputation. It seemed to think that testing the NHS to destruction was "doable". We'll find some ventilators somewhere.


The strategy reminds me of the Norway campaign in early 1940. It exposed staggering ineptitude. What finished off the Chamberlain government and brought about the national coalition that saved this country was the parade of Tory MPs in full military uniform – the voice of the front line – speaking in the Commons to vent their fury. Doctors this time?
Downing Street must not now make an error of comparable gravity on the economic front by listening to bad counsel. It makes little substantive difference whether the public debt ratio stays at 85pc of GDP or jumps temporarily to 100pc  or even 110pc so long as the money is spent preserving the productive system. Ratios of this kind – in these particular circumstances – are smoke and mirrors.
Bernard Connolly, the high priest of British Wicksellian economists, argues that if the Government provides these subsidies and keeps the nation whole it will lead to a big rise in pent up demand (since nobody is spending much now beyond survival).
This in turn would cause GDP to accelerate in a super V-shaped recovery once it comes. The Treasury could then run a tighter fiscal policy for a while – it would have to do so to avoid overheating – and that would gradually bend the debt trajectory back down. What matters is the trend over time. The snapshot debt ratio is irrelevant.


This week's talk of a Gilts strike, or fight from UK debt, lasted 48 hours and was nothing more than market noise. As soon as the Bank of England stepped in with £200bn of fresh QE – enough to cover a budget deficit of a tenth of GDP for a year – borrowing costs plunged, 10-year bonds yields halved, and sterling surged (to the consternation of the debt alarmists).
What that tells you is that investors will reward rather than punish a proactive regime. It is also clear that joined-up monetary and fiscal policy – call it helicopter money, call it whatever you want – is the new orthodoxy as we go into a global recession without normal central bank buffers. We will all have to print our way out of this.


Old rules do not apply in a world of excess capital, zero rates and chronic deflation. In any case, the UK borrows in its own currency and has sovereign policy instruments. There is no credit risk. Nor do we face a rollover crunch on Gilts over any meaningful time-horizon. The existing stock of debt is on the longest maturity of any major country at more than 14 years.
Those warning that we cannot afford more debt even in an emergency – and therefore implicitly that we should stick to economic business as usual and let the pandemic run wild – are more or less the same people who argued after the Lehman crisis that debt ratios were about to spiral out of control and that QE would lead to hyperinflation. They did not understand the fundamentals then. They are arguing from the same false premises today.
So what should be done? Rishi Sunak was right to push for a £330bn loan package a week ago but that plan was crafted on assumptions of a different pandemic, and events are moving fast. It is no longer enough. "Credit supply is useful only if there is demand. We do not think that will minimise the economic costs of this shock," says Bank of America.


The Chancellor understands this. He has now pledged "significant, direct fiscal action" as he draws up his plan for tonight, but I fear that obstructionists at the Treasury – with pre-modern doctrines of debt sustainability – will put up roadblocks.
He must immediately underwrite wages across vulnerable sectors, take over the short-term costs of businesses that can no longer function, and broadly follow the script of France's Emmanuel Macron that "not a single firm will go bankrupt".
Denmark is covering 75pc of wage costs for companies that would otherwise have to lay them off. Germany already has a longstanding Kurzarbeit system that allows companies to c

ut working hours at the cost of the state during downturns, enabling them to survive intact.
The UK's safety net of £73.10 a week for jobseekers is not the proper tool to deal with a violent unemployment shock beyond anybody's control. The macroeconomic imperative outweighs normal concerns about moral hazard. Savings are too low to tide many people through the crisis. If the state does not step in there will be a cascade of household defaults. We will add a financial crisis to an economic crisis.


I leave it to others to fashion the exact means of injecting fiscal support into the veins of the economy. The Resolution Foundation has published a report – Doing What it Takes – proposing just such a plan. Trade unions have comparable variants. Others suggest a universal basic income. Just do it. The details are secondary.
If this Government commits a second great mistake it will surrender our political system to a proto-revolutionary assault by others waiting to take advantage. If I may borrow from Franklin Roosevelt in his inaugural address: "The nation asks for action, and action now."   
"f**k it, just score"- Donaghy   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbxG2WwVRjU

armaghniac

London hospital already declares crisis while measures have hardly started
https://twitter.com/LawrenceDunhill/status/1241015122858070018
If at first you don't succeed, then goto Plan B

balladmaker

UK government backstopping 80% of salaries up to a max. of 2500 a month ... some statement.