Jun 2020
9:53am, 11 Jun 2020
64,574 posts
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swittle
[there's a lot of it about, DeeGee...;) ]
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Jun 2020
9:55am, 11 Jun 2020
5,472 posts
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Raemond
Folk in NL have zero concept of personal space, though - really, zero. I'm enjoying finally getting a little bit of breathing space when I go out but still find people just barging through and leaning over me without making any attempt to say 'excuse me' or waiting at all for me to move away from whatever it is they want to get at. For a small, quite densly packed, country, I find it really astonishing how little consideration the dutch have for the people around them. |
Jun 2020
11:23am, 11 Jun 2020
27,805 posts
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macca 53
There was an interview on TV last weekend with the Belgian health minister who basically said everyone else is undercounting - they know it and the public knows it. “We always counted everybody even if not confirmed but suspected. Our figure will never need to be revised upwards”
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Jun 2020
12:11pm, 11 Jun 2020
37,744 posts
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LindsD
Only anecdotal and possibly not helpful but OH was in Belgium (his office is there) on 12 March and they closed all the bars and pubs then. At least in Brussels. So earlier than us.
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Jun 2020
12:25pm, 11 Jun 2020
19,366 posts
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DeeGee
That would be about right. Bars and restaurants went down a week earlier than everything else.
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Jun 2020
12:27pm, 11 Jun 2020
37,746 posts
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LindsD
Yes, it really freaked him out; he came home on the Friday and we pulled the kids out of school the following week.
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Jun 2020
12:30pm, 11 Jun 2020
5,477 posts
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Raemond
Yeah, I left Brussels on Thursday 12th and have only been back very briefly twice since, it was all very weird.
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Jun 2020
12:38pm, 11 Jun 2020
23,392 posts
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Johnny Blaze
Just my ruminations here, and ones which may be blindingly obvious to everybody but me, but which I have just come around to. The lockdown did not serve to save any of the lives belonging to people who were infected as at 23rd march. That was a massive number of people and a proportion of those were always likely to pass away - hence why the lives lost peaked as early as 8th April and have just been falling away in a long tail ever since. The lockdown was to prevent further infections and deaths. Lockdown was 80 days ago now so why do we still have more Covid deaths per day than all Europe combined? Is it because of the way we record deaths? Or because the numbers now contain people who were infected after relaxations were made? Or because we have been very good at keeping poorly people alive? Or because we have been indisciplined in our adherence to lockdown? Or because lockdown wan't hard enough? Or because we made a real hash of testing and/or protection of care homes? It's a puzzle to me why we haven't suppressed numbers as well as other countries. Perhaps it is "just" testing? Once we had given up the ghost on that in March we were never going to get back on top of it until infections had reached manageable levels. Have we reached manageable levels? It strikes me that the govt now has to open up the economy despite having fumbled lockdown, fumbled testing, fumbled care home protection and fumbled track and trace - because we cannot lockdown until a vaccine can be found (if it ever is). We have to open up again. If we continue to be incompetent until the autumn my could be in for a heck of a beating. If that happens how on earth can we contemplate a no deal Brexit on top of all that? I can't see Johnson lasting the year unless absolutely everything goes right from this point onwards. When the CEO is an abject failure and the business has belly-flopped as a result it's not uncommon to think you can reset everything by changing the person at the top. |
Jun 2020
12:47pm, 11 Jun 2020
7,594 posts
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jda
Suppression worked about as well as most countries for the most part IMO, certainly at first. A lot of the deaths are care home and hospital infections which we've been worse than most at (though nowhere has really done that well AIUI). But we locked down late meaning a larger infection number when we started and the govt has made a complete cock up of maintaining any sort of discipline for an adequate period of time to wipe it out. For sure the vast majority of current deaths are people who were infected after March. We were never going to stop all infection at that point, the realistic aim was only to cut the numbers over time. So the bigger it started, the longer it was going to take. Abject failure of any attempt at contact tracing is the icing on the cake. I agree it's a complete shitshow and the govt doesn't even seem to have a goal in mind let alone a strategy for achieving it. I've got my own "lifeboat" in the sense of being young and healthy and isolated enough that I'm not really scared of getting it. But I can't do anything for the rest of the country except try to avoid catching (and even more, spreading) it. |
Jun 2020
12:58pm, 11 Jun 2020
1,738 posts
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Surelynot
basicincome.scot A proposed pilot of Universal Basic Income in Scotland. I think this will not get off the ground as the UK treasury will not support it. |
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