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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.
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@Crazy-Horse said in Coronavirus - Overall:
...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)...
Be good to know.
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@pakman said in Coronavirus - Overall:
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.
I've assumed the usual clinical guidelines have been used as there is enough hospital capacity. I.e a ventilator would only be used if the patient had a good chance of survival.
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Coronavirus: IMF expecting worst downturn since Great Depression
The coronavirus pandemic will push the global economy into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, with the world’s poorest countries suffering the most, the head of the International Monetary Fund said Thursday. “We anticipate the worst economic fallout since the Great Depression,” IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said Thursday in remarks previewing next week’s virtual meetings of the 189-nation IMF and its sister lending organization, the World Bank.
She said that the IMF would release an updated world economic forecast on Tuesday that will show just how quickly the coronavirus outbreak has turned what had been expected to be a solid year of growth into a deep downturn. Just three months ago, the IMF was forecasting that 160 nations would enjoy positive income growth on a per capita basis. Now the expectation is that over 170 nations will have negative per capita income growth this year. Emerging markets and low-income nations across Africa, Latin America and much of Asia are at high risk, she said.
“With weak health systems to begin with, many face the dreadful challenge of fighting the virus in densely populated cities and poverty-stricken slums, where social distancing is hardly an option,” Ms Georgieva said.
Investors have grown fearful of leaving their money in emerging economies that could be hit hard by a global recession. As a result, capital outflows from emerging-market countries have totaled more than $US100 billion over the last two months, more than three times larger than the same period at the start of the global financial crisis, Georgieva noted.
In addition, countries that depend on exporting commodities have taken a double blow because of the steep fall in commodity prices.
Ms Georgieva said there was no question that 2020 would be an “exceptionally difficult” year. She said if the pandemic fades in the second half of the year, allowing the gradual lifting of containment measures and the reopening of the global economy, the IMF was forecasting a partial recovery in 2021. “I stress there is tremendous uncertainty around the outlook,” she said. “It could get worse depending on many variable factors, including the duration of the pandemic.” She said that she and World Bank president David Malpass would pursue at next week’s virtual meetings an agreement to adopt a standstill on debt payments over the next year by the world’s poorest nations, freeing up money they can use for critical health needs.
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@Crazy-Horse would like it twice if I coukd
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We're not talking about grey areas. We are talking about out and out OTT, dumb behavior at street level. And Chief Constables, FFS, openly saying they are going to ignore the law, national police guidelines and advice of government lawyers, and search people's shopping - requiring a public rebuke from the Home Secretary.
The vast, vast majority of interactions with the public are as you describe. It's the ones with stupid authoritarian interactions that people remember - and matter. Telling people having a BBQ to move on or they'll be fined is how it should be. Telling shops what food items they can sell or what heel height woman can wear when going out for a walk, really isn't.
There's been a long, recent history of UK police "antics" turning out to be far worse in reallity than initally thought (google Hillsborough), so this stuff really does matter for effective policing in the UK
One of the other things that makes enforcing the restrictions harder, is that here in Qld/Aus, the rules are wishy washy.
They were here too and you can understand they needed bedding down which is why policing standards were set out for the Police to follow. I get the motorcycle/exercise bit. That's one area that has been handled quite well.
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?
Nope, of course not. That's sensible policing,
But setting up road blocks with the express intention of searching people's shopping for "non-essential items" does invite a fair comparison. (Not helped by the publicity from a recent UK court case where Judges described police behavior as akin to the Gestapo or Stasi)
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On a note about the Police discussion going on.
Two incidents I know of this week through my work of police having to break into properties because neighbours have reported not seeing people for 3 weeks and bosses not being able to reach people after their self isolation period. Police are finding dead bodies. Chilled me to the bone. Community deaths are high at the moment that is another issue completely, dread to think what our actual death toll is.
What a horrible thing to experience though, it can already be a very difficult job and they are also working in a time of high stress and anxiety. I bet they'd love to be working from home but they can't. They get my upmost respect 👏🏻
Edit: you also get tossers and idiots in every job, it's not a representative of the whole
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@R-L said in Coronavirus - Overall:
On a note about the Police discussion going on.
Two incidents I know of this week through my work of police having to break into properties because neighbours have reported not seeing people for 3 weeks and bosses not being able to reach people after their self isolation period. Police are finding dead bodies. Chilled me to the bone. Community deaths are high at the moment that is another issue completely, dread to think what our actual death toll is.
What a horrible thing to experience though, it can already be a very difficult job and they are also working in a time of high stress and anxiety. I bet they'd love to be working from home but they can't. They get my upmost respect 👏🏻
Edit: you also get tossers and idiots in every job, it's not a representative of the whole
Bear in mind 1,500 people usually die each day in UK. I expect quite a lot of the shock is owing to the manner of discovery, rather than the deaths themselves. Of course, everyone is especially sensitive to any deaths reported in today's febrile environment.
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@Baron-Silas-Greenback said in Coronavirus - Overall:
@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.
I do think UK and NZ in different boats.
If after four weeks new cases in NZ are negligible, then, as long as new overseas arrivals spend 14 days in quarantine, hard to see why government could rationally stay at level 4, and maybe even level 3. But if, as I expect, the lack of international tourism and generally more restrained consumer behaviour means the economy gets stuck in a rut, wouldn't Cindy A start to come under pressure?
In UK, closing borders for a prolonged period is inconceivable (at least to me). And I don't think the number of daily deaths will fall below 50 in 2020. So at some point the choice will become stark between social distancing/20% (say) lockdown and 400 daily deaths (two thirds of which are only being advanced by months) OR 80% lockdown and maybe 100 daily deaths.
As people stare in the face companies and the employment they sustain being PERMANENTLY lost I expect sentiment to swing to the former. That would also be consistent with what is said to be the BoJo libertarian overriding philosophy.
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Interesting Economist articlae on potential link between pollution and CV transmission:
The pandemic
Airborne particles may be assisting the spread of SARS-CoV-2Reducing pollution seems to reduce the rate of infection
Science and technologyMar 26th 2020
Editor’s note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For more coverage, see our coronavirus hub
POLLUTION AND disease have long been associated in people’s minds. The very word “malaria”, for example, means “bad air” in Italian. But the germ theory of infection, developed in the 19th century, knocked on the head the idea that it is the air itself which causes illness. Rather, bad smells indicate sources of pathogens, such as sewage, which are best avoided. A paper just published by a group of Italian researchers does, however, posit the idea that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the covid-19 pandemic, might be getting a helping hand from atmospheric pollution.
The paper in question, by Leonardo Setti of the University of Bologna and his colleagues, has not yet been through any process of peer review. Such early releases are, though, becoming commonplace for covid-19-related work, on the assumption that holding ideas back for bureaucratic approval might cost lives. Dr Setti and his associates found themselves wondering why (even allowing for time lags caused by its arrival in different places on different dates) SARS-CoV-2 seemed to spread much faster in Italy’s north—specifically in the wide plain that forms the valley of the Po—than in other parts of the country.
Their hypothesis is that the catalyst was pollution—specifically, small airborne particles that might carry the virus on their surfaces. These are usually far more abundant in the Po valley than elsewhere. In the paper, the researchers cite previous work from other places which suggests that influenza viruses, respiratory syncytial viruses and measles viruses can all spread by hitching lifts on such particles. And they make a good case that, allowing for a 14-day delay caused by SARS-CoV-2’s incubation period, the daily rates of new infections in the Po valley correlate closely with the level of particulate pollution.
An alternative explanation for this correlation might be that, rather than carrying the virus themselves, airborne particles increase susceptibility to infection in those who encounter the pathogen by some other means. Either way, though, a reduction in airborne-particle levels may be a second way, independent of reduced human contact, that lockdowns will help stop the virus spreading around.
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Leeds United legend Norman "Bites yer legs" Hunter in hospital with Cornavirus.
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Coronavirus - Overall