Coronavirus

[Simon Pieman]

Does anyone use Dreamlab? It's an app from the Vodafone foundation which helps with Cancer research and more recently, a COVID-19 research project. The idea is that you charge your phone at night and the app sends calculations/problems to your phone to solve and send back. You don't need to be on Vodafone to use it.

Apparently if 100,000 people do this they can do 1 year of research in 3 months. I've only become aware of it properly today, but seems silly not to get involved.

https://www.vodafone.co.uk/mobile/dreamlab

[Batch]

good idea! sounds like the old seti program.

It got competitive (in a good way) back in the day because they essentially allowed 'clans' to compete to see who could do the most work units.

winner of they have a pc version... I'll check

[Simon Pieman]

good idea! sounds like the old seti program.

It got competitive (in a good way) back in the day because they essentially allowed 'clans' to compete to see who could do the most work units.

winner of they have a pc version... I'll check

No pc version, but you can use the likes of Folding@Home for that.

[Mister Lorenzo]

The government's failings won't be known until the pandemic is over.

Stockpiling PPE early on wasn't a failing. Italy and Spain would have suffered badly. Or is stockpiling bogroll, pasta and longlife milk OK if it's your larder?

Boris letting Ministers do their job isn't a failing. It's impossible for a PM to be PM and do every Minister's job and not even desirable.

Those criticising in such a knee-jerk mode need educating, or more likely, don't need educating as they know only too well what the score is and are acting in a partisan and cynically opportunistic manner, partly as they haven't yet recovered from the general election result.

[pauld]

The government's failings won't be known until the pandemic is over.

Stockpiling PPE early on wasn't a failing. Italy and Spain would have suffered badly. Or is stockpiling bogroll, pasta and longlife milk OK if it's your larder?

Bollocks. We had a stockpile of PPE from the early 2000s for precisely such an eventuality. From 2014, it was allowed to diminish by 40%. Likewise, the govt were told in 2016 after Operation Cygnus that the NHS would not be able to cope with a pandemic, but chose not to act. These are failings.

Boris letting Ministers do their job isn't a failing. It's impossible for a PM to be PM and do every Minister's job and not even desirable.

Straw man argument. Don't think anyone's critcised Johnson for letting Ministers do their jobs. He's being criticised for not doing his. Specifically for faffing about delaying implementing a lockdown, costing thousands of lives; failing to take action early on getting testing infrastructure ramped up, hampering any way of knowing how widespread the virus is, which will either delay us coming out of lockdown or make coming out early riskier than it needs to be; failing to take action to get the diminished PPE stockpile which had been allowed to wither largely by his predecessors ramped up when it became clear that it would be needed. All these failings have demonstrably cost lives and he is rightly criticised for it.

[4D]

Have you written your letter to No.10 yet Paul? 

[pauld]

Have you written your letter to No.10 yet Paul? 

The missus has confiscated my crayons

[swindonmaniac]

Bollocks. We had a stockpile of PPE from the early 2000s for precisely such an eventuality. From 2014, it was allowed to diminish by 40%. Likewise, the govt were told in 2016 after Operation Cygnus that the NHS would not be able to cope with a pandemic, but chose not to act. These are failings.
Straw man argument. Don't think anyone's critcised Johnson for letting Ministers do their jobs. He's being criticised for not doing his. Specifically for faffing about delaying implementing a lockdown, costing thousands of lives; failing to take action early on getting testing infrastructure ramped up, hampering any way of knowing how widespread the virus is, which will either delay us coming out of lockdown or make coming out early riskier than it needs to be; failing to take action to get the diminished PPE stockpile which had been allowed to wither largely by his predecessors ramped up when it became clear that it would be needed. All these failings have demonstrably cost lives and he is rightly criticised for it.

Trouble is it's always easy to be wise after the event.   Had this not occurred people would be saying what a good job the government had done saving money on unnecessary ppe.   No win situation,  I think the government have done reasonably well during these dreadful times,  no matter what they do there will always be some that expect more. Glad I'm not in the driving seat,  you can't please all of the people all of the time.

[RobertT]

The fact that the Govt is reacting is entirely the problem.  There wasn't a plan put in place before the event that we stuck to and we didn't learn any lessons from prior smaller events around the world, or our own dry runs.  February was spent doing the work that we should have had ready before, by which time it was too late for any action other than a full lock down to be effective.  We are not the only country to have done this, by any stretch.  I think I posted quite early on that it was clear we were not working to any sort of scripted plan here, but instead we were trying to react to an evolving situation.

Also - even if we had invoked the same sort of plan that countries like South Korea used (which was the basis of our plans, which seem to have not bothered with), we may still have had to adjust and change as the Pandemic took hold.  It is critical we review now though, and not later, because once the lock down does contain the spread, we need a plan for the weeks after.  It won;t have gone away, not fully, we have to assume it will return before we get a vaccine, so learning now is essential.

[pauld]

Trouble is it's always easy to be wise after the event.   Had this not occurred people would be saying what a good job the government had done saving money on unnecessary ppe

I'm going to treat this as if you're being serious, even though I suspect I might be being whooshed. We didn't need to be "wise after the event", as a nation we had plans that identified a pandemic as one of the top 3 threats to national security, and plans in place to tackle it. The govt failed to implement the measures necessary to implement those plans, even after a test exercise 4 years ago identified clear deficiencies in *implementation* and additionally allowed the stockpile of PPE needed as part of that implementation to run down. I can't imagine anyone would congratulate the govt on saving money on unnecessary PPE unless they're also congratulating themselves on how much money they've saved by not insuring their house, car etc and are presumably also calling for the scrapping of those terribly expensive armed forces.

.   No win situation,  I think the government have done reasonably well during these dreadful times,  no matter what they do there will always be some that expect more.

Yes I expect more. I expect a govt to fulfill it's primary function, to protect it's citizens. We have already recorded the single highest deaths per day in Europe and are well on track to having the highest death toll in Europe, surpassing even Italy and Spain despite having several weeks more warning of how bad it could be than they did as we watched their death toll mount and did nothing. I don't think that constitutes doing "reasonably well" and I do expect better. I think the doctors and nurses in the front line of this awful crisis who are having to treat patients without PPE or with reused or make-do substitutes also expect more. And I think they're entitled to.

[Wobbly Bob]

Could have done with a bit more of the Germanic efficiency gene in some of the Anglo-Saxon bloodlines I guess.

[JBZ]

Question for administrators - is it possible to give each member stats on how many other users have them on 'ignore'? 

[flammableBen]

Question for administrators - is it possible to give each member stats on how many other users have them on 'ignore'? 

Think it used to be. I've got a vague memory of taking myself off other people's ignore lists becasue I'm a cunt.

[JBZ]

Ok noted thanks

[Bob's Orange]

yeah if you click on your profile and ignore user options you can see people who are ignoring you.

I have 3 in total including a bizarre user called eauserscout!!??!! Not sure what I did to Hobnob or Brockelsbury Red mind you