Coronavirus - Overall
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Most of Twitter is utter shite but sometimes there some real gems.
This after Piers Morgan demanded to know who's in charge while Boris is off ill.
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@pakman said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus - Overall:
Those Richmond ladies are known to be stroppy!
I'm in two minds over the whole mess. Can you be pissed off at both the lady and the police simultaneously? I think the mental exercise argument is a fair one, if you don't have a yard and live in an apartment box in the city just stepping away to a park for a bit can do you the same world of good as a bit of a jog and being arrested for it if you've maintained social distancing is appalling..on the same note the young copper is just trying to follow what are probably not very well thought out orders and he is doing his very best not to arrest her.
Just hope this insanity stops soon. Its ugly from all sides.
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@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus - Overall:
Just hope this insanity stops soon. Its ugly from all sides.
A few days ago, the Police started stopping & searching cars and shopping near the Sth Northants village I used to live in. explaining they were "checking the spirit of the lockdown was being adhered to" They even demanded to see shopping reciepts.
Bearing in mind Plod had to be pushed to investigate a series of burglaries late last year, to say this has gone down badly with locals is an understatement.
Can understand Plod had some initial issues policing the lockdown, but the Police leadership need to get a grip on this sort of thing as it's doing some real damage to their reputation.
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@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in Coronavirus - Overall:
I am confused is that supposed to be funny? Or are you highlighting her stupidity?
Probably both.
The "clapping for a nurses pay cap" is bollocks. And BoJo wasn't even an MP when the 1% cap on public sector salaries was imposed after the banking crisis.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus - Overall:
Just hope this insanity stops soon. Its ugly from all sides.
A few days ago, the Police started stopping & searching cars and shopping near the Sth Northants village I used to live in. explaining they were "checking the spirit of the lockdown was being adhered to" They even demanded to see shopping reciepts.
Bearing in mind Plod had to be pushed to investigate a series of burglaries late last year, to say this has gone down badly with locals is an understatement.
Can understand Plod had some initial issues policing the lockdown, but the Police leadership need to get a grip on this sort of thing as it's doing some real damage to their reputation.
That's outrageous!
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@voodoo said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Rembrandt said in Coronavirus - Overall:
Just hope this insanity stops soon. Its ugly from all sides.
A few days ago, the Police started stopping & searching cars and shopping near the Sth Northants village I used to live in. explaining they were "checking the spirit of the lockdown was being adhered to" They even demanded to see shopping reciepts.
Bearing in mind Plod had to be pushed to investigate a series of burglaries late last year, to say this has gone down badly with locals is an understatement.
Can understand Plod had some initial issues policing the lockdown, but the Police leadership need to get a grip on this sort of thing as it's doing some real damage to their reputation.
That's outrageous!
Priti Patel publically slapped down Northants Chief Constable on this sort of behavior late today. "Not appropriate, not in the guidelines and not legal"
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It's pretty bloody difficult policing this shit because it is very much a 'damned if you do and damned of you don't' type scenario - a bit like enforcing school parking restrictions at drop off and pick up.
We are getting jobs where people are dobbing in people for sitting in parks, sitting out the front of their houses talking to neighbours, swimming at the local swimming hole, having too many cars parked outside their address, and we are copping people whinging that we aren't doing enough.
Then, when we attempt to enforce the restrictions we are abused for acting like a police state and Nazis.
Don't ring your cop shop for advice about what you can and can't do. We know just as much as the rest of you and you may end up with a cop who guesses the answer to your question and gives you the wrong advice. Also, I don't want to hear you babble on about why you think you should be allowed to tow your boat up to the Sunshine Coast and park it at your holiday home because my coffee is getting cold and I hate cold coffee. Look up the answer yourself.
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@Crazy-Horse said in Coronavirus - Overall:
It's pretty bloody difficult policing this shit
I can't see why it's any more difficult that other policing. Keep the public on your side, use common sense and enforce the law in a responsible way.
Some of the antics on display by police forces have been pretty appalling and could cause some real damage to relations with the public.
Then, when we attempt to enforce the restrictions we are abused for acting like a police state and Nazis.
Sorry, but searching shopping and deciding what Joe Public is or isn't allowed to buy, and threatening them with fines and a criminal record if they bought the wrong thing is acting like a police state and Nazis.
That a Chief Constable came up with this idea raises serious questions about the leadership of the UK Police
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https://spectator.us/lockdown-please-swedish/
Who would have thought that Sweden would end up being the last place in Europe where you could go for a beer? We have, in our normalcy, suddenly become an exotic place. Other countries are closing their cities, schools and economies, but life in our corner of the world is surprisingly ordinary. Last weekend I went to the gym, met up with friends, and sat in the spring sun at outdoor cafés.
My foreign friends are stunned. They can’t fathom that there are still people enjoying the fruits of civilization, as if the natural reaction to pandemics is to embrace totalitarianism. And they wrestle with another conundrum: how on earth did Sweden end up being the final bastion of liberty? How did this country of mild-mannered conformists end up rebelling against lockdown culture?
In the past, most Swedes felt comfortable with the nanny state giving us orders — telling us how many slices of bread to eat per day, for instance. We still close liquor stores at 3 p.m. on a Saturday. The general idea is that if people were given the freedom and responsibility to figure out these things on their own, anarchy might follow.
We worry about COVID-19 a lot. Many people work from home. Restaurants are open, but not bustling. Keeping two meters apart at bus stops is something Swedes were pretty good at before the crisis: we don’t need much encouragement now. We’re careful. But our approach to fighting the pandemic starts from something more fundamental: in a liberal democracy you have to convince and not command people into action. If you lose that principle, you will lose your soul.
Stefan Löfven, Sweden’s center-left premier, has dismissed calls for a lockdown, saying ‘we can’t legislate and ban everything’. He’s no evangelist for libertarian principles, and may yet bring in harder measures. But so far he’s been saying that ‘we all, as individuals, have to take responsibility’ and not just wait for the government to lock us up.
At the center of our debate is Anders Tegnell, the ‘state epidemiologist’, and Johan Giesecke — an epidemiology don (and one of Tegnell’s predecessors) who has captured the country’s attention with his no-messing attitude. Both advise caution — and common sense. As in Britain and the US, many scientists have appealed to the government to close schools and impose curfews. Unlike in Britain and the US, the authorities have calmly responded by explaining how this wouldn’t really help. They publish their own models of the virus spread. It shows how many people will need hospital care: the system, they say, can cope. And when asked, they say they don’t think Imperial College has made a better call.
Perhaps Tegnell and his team will turn out to be wrong. But their point is that the people deserve policies that work for longer than a month. Managing the virus is a long game, and while herd immunity is not the Swedish strategy, it may well be where we all end up. The theory of lockdown, after all, is pretty niche, deeply illiberal — and, until now, untested. It’s not Sweden that’s conducting a mass experiment. It’s everyone else.
The main advice from Tegnell et al is repeated like a mantra ten times a day: be sensible. Stay at home if you feel sick. Oh, and wash your hands. But individuals, companies, schools and others are trusted to figure out on their own what precautions to take.
This Swedish exceptionalism is about principle, not epidemiology. It’s true that we’re perhaps less at risk due to our high rate of single-person households and low number of smokers. Closing the schools would, as well, have a bigger impact in a country where almost all mums are working mums. But frankly, all these explanations miss the point: yes, they make us different to Italy and Spain, but not to Denmark, Finland and Norway. Sweden simply made the call to take measures that don’t destroy the free society.
Isn’t the real question why other countries aren’t doing the same? Viktor Orbán has just grabbed power from Hungary’s parliament and can run the country by decree — indefinitely. Protests against this ring hollow, because Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel have suspended core freedoms and rights in their own countries. Yes, I know they are different from Orbán, but he’ll ask: how different? Doesn’t Derbyshire now have police drones chasing those who go for a walk?
It’s the first time in my adult life when it is possible to imagine totalitarianism in the West. Equally frightening is the strength of the panic-ridden ‘totalitarian outlook’. There is growing intolerance of dissent; and — as Orwell wrote in ‘The Prevention of Literature’ — people censure themselves because of ‘the dangerous proposition…that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’.
There are many experts in epidemiology and virology who are highly critical of the lockdown strategy. Few are willing to talk on record. There are public health experts arguing that suppression methods will kill more people than the virus. But they struggle to speak plainly, mostly out of fear of the social media mob. Many economists think it is mad to close down entire national production. But they tiptoe around their message because such opinions are threatening the mood of national cohesion.
How long will Sweden hold out for? It’s unclear. We can expect our COVID-19 death figures to rise faster than our neighbors’ — still all within the confines of a bad winter flu, but these graphs can scare people. A fifth of the population wishes us to become like the rest of Europe, with a full lockdown. But the vast majority, for now, want Sweden to keep its cool. We don’t want to remember 2020 as the time when we caused irreparable harm to our liberties — or lost them entirely.
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@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in Coronavirus - Overall:
There are many experts in epidemiology and virology who are highly critical of the lockdown strategy. Few are willing to talk on record. There are public health experts arguing that suppression methods will kill more people than the virus. But they struggle to speak plainly, mostly out of fear of the social media mob. Many economists think it is mad to close down entire national production. But they tiptoe around their message because such opinions are threatening the mood of national cohesion.
It's a balance between reducing deaths from Coronavirus and reducing deaths and illness which comes from the economic consequences of a lockdown, isn't it.
Doctors deal with the balance between life and death everyday with individuals, but today's politicians are making decisions based on potentially thousands of lives lost. I don't envy them - either in Sweden or anywhere else.
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Crazy-Horse said in Coronavirus - Overall:
It's pretty bloody difficult policing this shit
I can't see why it's any more difficult that other policing. Keep the public on your side, use common sense and enforce the law in a responsible way.
Some of the antics on display by police forces have been pretty appalling and could cause some real damage to relations with the public.
Then, when we attempt to enforce the restrictions we are abused for acting like a police state and Nazis.
Sorry, but searching shopping and deciding what Joe Public is or isn't allowed to buy, and threatening them with fines and a criminal record if they bought the wrong thing is acting like a police state and Nazis.
That a Chief Constable came up with this idea raises serious questions about the leadership of the UK Police
What is common sense? What may be common sense to me, may be a load of bollocks to you, and vice versa.
Enforce the law in a responsible way? I have yet to meet a copper who doesn't think he or she enforces the law in a responsible way. Like common sense, we all have differing opinions on what 'enforcing the law in a responsible way' means.
As for keeping the public on your side, which public do you mean? The public whinging about police not enforcing the restrictions, or the public whinging that police are enforcing the restrictions?
While some 'antics' by police have been reported and they don't look good, bear in mind two things. Those antic's being reported may not be the full story, and two, there are hundreds of thousands of interactions between the police and the public that are perfectly harmonious and enforcement action is not taken where technically it could have been. These interactions hardly get reported do they?
What exactly is wrong with pointing out to the public that what they are doing could result in a fine or a criminal conviction? You may see it as a threat, yet it might well have been meant as a 'heads up'. The law often requires police to 'warn' the person that what they are doing is an offence (if reasonably practical) before they are arrested.
I think one just needs to read the many threads on here to see how many opinions there are enforcing the restrictions. From memory there have been a few posts suggesting some rule breakers be thrown in a cell until the virus is gone. Not sure I'd like to see that happen.
One of the other things that makes enforcing the restrictions harder, is that here in Qld/Aus, the rules are wishy washy. They are open to interpretation. For example, in recent days we have had one state come out and say you can't go for a drive purely to learn to drive (Vic), another state say it's ok because you are receiving an education that you can't get at home (NSW) and another that has no idea if you can learn to drive or not and is writing to the Chief Health dude to find out (Qld). The same goes for motorbike riding. Is it a form of exercise or not?
On a local scale, we had a discussion at the station the other day whether taking a small child down to the local swimming hole is allowed. Some said yes, others said no. What if the supervising adult sits down with a picnic while the child exercises by swimming? We basically shrugged our shoulders and said 'fucked if we know.'
If we go up to the said adult and tell them they may be breaking the law, and they get offended and half the interaction ends up on youtube, does that make us Nazis?
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@Victor-Meldrew said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in Coronavirus - Overall:
There are many experts in epidemiology and virology who are highly critical of the lockdown strategy. Few are willing to talk on record. There are public health experts arguing that suppression methods will kill more people than the virus. But they struggle to speak plainly, mostly out of fear of the social media mob. Many economists think it is mad to close down entire national production. But they tiptoe around their message because such opinions are threatening the mood of national cohesion.
It's a balance between reducing deaths from Coronavirus and reducing deaths and illness which comes from the economic consequences of a lockdown, isn't it.
Doctors deal with the balance between life and death everyday with individuals, but today's politicians are making decisions based on potentially thousands of lives lost. I don't envy them - either in Sweden or anywhere else.
So far the Swedish strategy doesn't seem to have caused them a problem. My take is that the main benefit of lockdown is that it forces the populace into social spacing. The corollary being that IF people respected social spacing (and elders/at risk were kept separated) lockdown adds almost nothing. BTW NZ, owing to its isolation is a special case.
Looking towards the relaxation in the UK, the biggest question seems to be how to manage public transport in the cities. Hard to see how the underground can operate with 1.5m spacing. Limit to how much work shifts can be staggered.
On the deaths front, a REAL issue is how many of the deaths 'saved' are only for a matter of months? And are thus assuming undue importance because the politicians everywhere are very swayed by the optics of flow rate.
That will fade in the next three months as economic fears come into focus.
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The worst outbreaks in USA are in New York State (more specifically NYC), so unless everybody with the virus is staying home, this is encouraging:
Fingers crossed...
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@pakman said in Coronavirus - Overall:
That will fade in the next three months as economic fears come into focus.
I hope so, but I am skeptical, people have proven to be very susceptible to govt propaganda and scare mongering in NZ.
I think the govt will skate by on claiming with the lockdown they prevented thousands of deaths, despite it being nonsense. The media will help the govt of course.
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https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12324045
This is what overwhelming the system looks like - having to temporarily bury the dead so they can be buried properly later when the undertakers catch up.