No more pro- or anti- gun discussion please
I predict this will lead to businesses that are partially affected scrambling to arrange their affairs to look as though they would have been laying off their entire staff….
Yes I wonder how they will deal with the obvious fraud potential.
I wonder who except the Chinese is going to fund the trillions of new government debt that will result worldwide.
Peter wrote:
Yes I wonder how they will deal with the obvious fraud potential.
The fraud potential is of course pretending someone is laid off for some time, and still having them work…. which is hard in some industries, easier in others.
But Germany, Denmark and other countries which have “unemployment insurance” have had schemes like this for decades, would be interesting to learn how they manage that.
This isnt intended to be prophetic, but for some reason I am reminded of a phrase that has always stuck in my mind since I did A level history at school.
Our then for Foreigh Secretary, Edward Grey said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life times”.
He was wrong then, and he would be wrong now, but the eary feeling you have listening to the news, never the less reminded me of what he said all those years ago.
My thought this evening is that this covid19 is spreading much faster than we think and we may be – almost all – already infected and in incubation.
Silvaire wrote:
I think the biggest factor into Italy is population density generally and that many people live in high density housing.
And especially, many generations living under the same roof much more frequently than in other countries. Which explains the deadly division of labour – the young people go out and catch the virus, then bring it home and transmit it to the elderly, which then all end up in the hospitals at the same time.
greg_mp wrote:
My thought this evening is that this covid19 is spreading much faster than we think and we may be – almost all – already infected and in incubation.
What if it had already been spreading for much longer than what we think… case numbers would go up with test numbers, but deaths wouldn’t. Italy is a counter-example, but Germany or Switzerland aren’t so far. We’ll soon know.
Another observation: Today’s news are all reporting about striking similarities between a 2012 risk analysis for the German government, which used a pandemic caused by a Coronavirus that originated from an asian animal market as one of two scenarios. The scenario was described by the RKI (the specialist research institute for infectious diseases). Contrary to conspiration theorists, what I’m taking from this is that this was actually a scenario that was given a high likelihood by the specialists for quite some time. Which could also mean that there is a certain confirmation bias in all these experts now, who see the current events through the lense of these scenarios, rather than taking a neutral and open stance as is required in science. I hope I am wrong, but otherwise there is a risk that important clues might be missed if all experts are too focused on these commonly shared scenarios and all just copy each other’s analyses without independent review.
Today our hospital was almost empty. It felt eerily strange. No visitors, very few walk-in patients in the A&E, not much happening in general. It feels extra weird because staff have been ordered to wear protective masks at all times now (the standard kind, not the FFP2 or FFP3 masks which actually protect you from SARS2-CoV…we don’t have enough of those to use them liberally…)
We have our second Covid-19 patient though. Both of them are in intensive care and in their 60s. I’m not personally involved in their treatment. But most of my fellow anaesthesists, including myself, were told today that we will soon recieve refresher training for the ICU and might be sent there rather sooner than later. With most elective surgery cancelled (only cancer- and trauma patients and those with other life-threatening conditions are still being operated), the number of anaesthesists needed is much smaller than usual.
LeSving wrote:
Christ AA, this is not a competition.
Of course not. It was intended as an observation on how difficult it will be to get people to accept long “lockdowns” even if they supported those measures.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Our then for Foreigh Secretary, Edward Grey said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life times”.
What was the context?
