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On the ground sitrep from Dan

Covid
#1

Short version: It’s very bad and accelerating. No herd immunity in sight just yet. And yes, we still have a pandemic, and it is causing the worst public health crises I can remember…

London has now got to the point of having filled it’s extra capacity. East London and Essex bad. I think North getting there but South and West better by comparison. A smaller nightingale has ben built at one of the teaching hospitals and I’m covering colleagues who will go there.

The hard limit this time is nurses. They are really broken. The first time everyone picked themselves up and went for it but now many are burnt out. Lots have left over the summer - don’t know whether this is local or general. We can’t expand ICU nursing capacity so elective surgery - which has stopped elsewhere will stop for us tomorrow. This was supposed to be an NHSE red line but predictably we’ve blown through it.

I’ve stopped reading anything about covid so can’t give you any predictions other than what I heard yesterday that hospital admissions (5 days ahead of icu admissions) are still accelerating in our patch so we are going to find the next month extremely hard.

I had a look now. I think nationally the growth situation is similar but probably capacity not reached - our population demographics are against us. If only it was a disease of rich white people - but then you can be sure they would be shooting curfew breakers on sight.

I think the board invoice means we’ve been afloat for 5 years. Hugs and kisses all. Peace and love, dan xxx

#2

I think that whatever the truth about the virus, it’s real dangers and the efficacy of various tactics that have or haven’t been used to deal with it, where we are now is as described by Dan and the Doctor I have linked to below i.e. a crisis in the healthcare system that could have been avoided, if the people making these decisions weren’t a bunch of corrupt frontmen for the plutocratic state the UK has been for well over a century now, if not much longer. I would argue that much of incomprehensible govt policy and media focus on cases since the first wave effectively ended has been deliberately fostered to shield the ruling class from the inevitable consequences of their sociopathic actions, all done at the behest of an ideology that yearns for the social relations of the 19th century, in other words as mass gaslighting of the population. The most eregious example in recent memory is of course the crushing of Corbyn and all he represented but it’s been a slow tightening of the mailed fist around the throat of everyone who’s not in the club for decades now and this situation is the inevitable result of that process. The terrifying thing is that they’re going to get away with it, absent some Damascene awakening amongst the majority and who’s gonna have time for that when they’re working (if they’re working) flat out just to survive. Dark times ahead indeed.

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#3

100% agree with everything you wrote there, Spike.

Our services are gutted and not fit for purpose. This was a deliberate, decades long policy.

Simple, practical measures that would have actually protected people were ignored or even surpressed, in favour of rampant corruption and cronyism.

Cheers

#4

Grim picture from dan. Looks as if London is getting a pasting again, like in Spring. Why London; twice…?

P, here’s a confab between Ivor C and several appropriately-expert colleagues, which - amongst many other interesting ideas - suggests that your hunch of different areas of Britain getting hit differentially, with some places still to feel the full impact, seems to be borne out by the stats (if we are going to give them even threshold-level trust to be un-nobbled :slight_smile: ). Relevant passage starts around 17 mins. Whole discussion well worth following:

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#5

Cheers Rhis, I’ll definitely have a watch. As I’ve said before, IC always worth listening to very carefully.

I still do think that the virus spread has been very patchy. I think there are probably good reasons for that, tied to how the social interventions have worked or not worked, coupled with the somewhat strange way the virus naturally spreads.

I don’t think we’ve seen the worst yet… But I seriously hope I’m wrong…

#6

And PS: Spike, I agree, like P, with your thesis that the NHS is being trashed. Deliberately so, in my reading, since its rabid enemies have been gunning for every chance to take it down, back to the old, bad commercial model, ever since 1948. They’ve always loathed it with a particular venom. I should point out that this will intensify and get much worse now, across the whole board of socially-responsible public provision, for the ever-present underlying reason of the Long Descent.

Much of the unadmitted agenda behind the covid policy-response is about hard-faced elitist chancers of the long-established, self-perpetuating English-raj class pushing forward their long-held purpose: bugger democracy, preferably to death! Thrash the plebs everywhere down into silent, cowed obedience. Treat them, and the rest of the planet as a quarry for WealthPowerStatus for the rajistas, by means of perpetual armed-robbery. The covid scam has been a real earner for that purpose, hasn’t it? To go on being milked for every drop that can be squeezed out of it, as we see right now by the on-going daily ‘news’ panic-mongering, entirely unjustified by the general picture on the ground; this notwithstanding the truly horrible situation that poor dan is having to confront, and him still barely well from the covid himself.

The brief flowering of something approaching real social democracy in Britain, after 1945, seems to be getting buried at last. This was always the long-term purpose of the raj, and now the Long Descent makes it pretty well inevitable - as we’re seeing. The only thing which might stop this unfolding neo-feudalism, and see it replaced with something actually honourable - scarcity socialism - is a big wave of resistance and socio-political transformation of this wretched fag-end of the English empire, the damned rajista-ukstate (SwampAmerika’s bitch); resistance coming up in a revolutionary wave from the plebeian grassroots. The Corbyn phenomenon was an early manifestation of this impulse, which the raj recognised correctly as such. That’s why they moved with such ruthless determination to crush it, and in so doing to disenfranchise, practically speaking, something above half the total British electorate, who now have no party in Paedominster to defend their interests.

At the woodland camp of the resistance to HS2 vandalism, we were discussing yesterday the bare-faced steam-rollering of legally-agreed arrangements for road-closures and heavy-plant movements for the civil engineering work; also the equally outrageous killing and theft-for-profit of many trees which don’t actually need to be removed for the railway works. It’s clear to me that there’s an attitude amongst the gics and many gic-servants of reckless trashing of the rule of law right now in Britain; because the gangsters and their servants perceive that they can get away with it; so they’re making hay whilst the sun shines. The pressure cooker continues to heat up.

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#7

I agree with @RhisiartGwilym and @spike on this. However I have two things to add. First, on Dan’s sitrep.

As fa as I’m aware, Dan has never mentioned the protocols they are using to treat Coroni patients, and there is scant regard paid to the ongoing destruction of the NHS. The shortage of staff due to PCR testing is just compounding the problems and may be one of the main causes of “London has now got to the point of having filled it’s extra capacity”.

And the Ivor Cummings stuff, is really good, however, the actual issue of categorising Coroni deaths as Covid, seems to me to be so fundamentally flawed that it deserved more than mentioning in passing. However what is worth repeting is this.

Twenty two papers shows no correlation between lockdowns and deaths, and one that does show a correlation; wait for it; from Neil Ferguson of Imperial College!!

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#8

Good points, re: treatment protocols, @PatB. On the nurse shortage front, my reading of what Dan said was that nurses are exhausted, traumatised, burnt out and sick. Not simply at home with a positive PCR test. A friend, who is a nurse in the US, has told me that a positive PCR test is not enough to be excused from work - you still go to work, and they just confine you to the covid ward. You are off work only if you are actually sick. I have no idea if we are doing that in London yet.

On the 20 papers point, I’m working my way through reading them. Some of them are interesting, and some are less so. The question of whether lockdowns really help is a very complicated one, and I honestly don’t know what the truth is about that. One thing that’s worth pointing out is that there are lots of papers that examine the impact of different types of non-pharm interventions on the spread of covid. Many of those papers show a positive correlation between imposition of various NPIs and a reduction in the spread, and none of them are in Ivor’s list.

It’s a pretty complex area, but there’s a lot more to be considered than a simple list of 20 cherry picked papers.

PS if anyone wants to also take a look through the list of papers that Ivor had collected, you can find them here:

Latest Ivor: Virtually no difference from previous Winters' AC-mortality