He has tested positive.
Let’s hope that he never comes back.
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Not rven that. Just renewed mine.
Got a red one!
I wonder if he was the person responsible for not joining in on the ordering of PPE with the EU and that is why he is trying to make himself scarce?
Now that really is scary.
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Monbiot’s mention of the tobacco industry reminded me of this Radio 4 programme I happened to catch recently on what might well be that industry’s biggest deception of all - turns out that cigarette filters not only don’t filter, they probably make cigarette smoke even more damaging - and the stain that appears on them does not come from anything they filter out, but is chemically planted there to make people think they are filtering…
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Trouble is they had very little room for manoeuvre after the “light touch regulation” propounded by Gordon Brown helped the UK into a financial crisis. This coupled with the disastrous PFI initiatives led to Liam Byrne pointing out the obvious to the incoming coalition government - “there’s no money left”. Time to wind your neck in Graham.
I remember noticing that people who smoked tipped cigarettes had a tendency to carry on until they had smoked down to the tip. I wondered if the last few puffs were the most harmful.
But I now understand that politicians learned the art of lying from the PR men who assured us that tobacco was “not addictive!”
People in glass houses etc…
PFI contracts were first introduced under John Major’s Conservative government. Under such deals, private consortiums build facilities such as schools, hospitals and roads, in return for regular payments over as many as 30 years
It wasn’t as simple as that - and you know it. World banking events took their toll. The financial crisis was primarily caused by deregulation in the financial industry. That permitted banks to engage in hedge fund trading with derivatives.
“propounded” means to put forward an idea or theory - strange choice of language given you argument 
BTW my neck is firmly secured on my shoulders. Seems yours is a bit wobbly!
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and in the words of Corporal Jones… “they don’t like it up 'em Mr Mainwaring” 
and don’t forget Theresa May cutting Police numbers…
Speaking at the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) conference on 29 June 2010, May announced radical cuts to the Home Office budget, likely to lead to a reduction in police numbers .
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The 2007-8 financial crash was all about the housing bubble in the USA, and the absurdities of anglo-saxon unregulated capitalism in general and the operation of its financial markets in particular.
In hindsight, New Labour should have regulated this much more than it did - this was part of it’s wider failure to even attempt the fundamental transformation of UK capitalism that was and is still needed - very evident in the watered-down final version of the 2006 Companies Act - a huge lost opportunity.
But having said that, Labour did much better than any other UK government at the time would have done - the Tories were even more laissez-faire, and opposed even modest increases in regulation - and there would have been a huge financial crisis whatever the UK did anyway because it was a world crisis driven primarily by the USA.
Brown himself did pretty well handling the immediate fallout.
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Agreed.
This seems pretty damning…
Please don’t mention this to Chief Science Officer Spock…(sorry, I mean Dan Miller,) or he’ll have you pilloried for spreading misinformation about a thoroughly reputable industry, as part of a conspiracy theory
Actually, I partly take that back.
I can see the argument that, given different testing strategies employed by different countries, the death rate is perhaps a more “reliable” statistic.
However, as I said, anyone dying today (and there have been another 260 in the past 24 hours, up 44% on the previous 24 hours) probably became symptomatic 18 days ago and was infected perhaps 5 days before that, so very much “old data”
However, it has been suggested that you can use that data to infer the current true number of infections.
If you assume that the true fatality rate is ~1.0% (and there is evidence that it is probably between 0.5 and 1.0%) then 23 days ago you would have had not the handful of cases we knew about but closer to 26,000
If you then track that at roughly 3.25 days to double then 23 days is 7 doublings
26,000 x 27 = 3,328,000 - so as many as 3 million could already be infected (about 1 in 20 of the population).
There are 2 conclusions you can draw from this (if true, there are quite a lot of assumptions)
If social distancing is working and the new infection rate going down to nearly zero then peak hospital admissions will be in 1-2 weeks and peak deaths in 2-3 weeks.
If it is not then we only need 4.3 more doublings to for everyone to be exposed or about 19 days - so any tightening of the lockdown has to be within that timeframe, in fact probably within 5 days to have any effect.
Now, even as I type them and can see how they are derived I can’t quite see the figures being correct - but who knows?
Yet again the ‘anything less than 20k’ death figure was mentioned in the ‘daily briefing’ as being a good result, that sounds a very scary number to me.
Quite scary, but over 600,000 people die every year in UK (ie 50,000 a month) and some 30,000 from pneumonia. Big population, big numbers.
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Pneumonia tends to be the terminal event in lots of other illnesses - “the old man’s friend” as they used to say.
Yes, we should keep an eye on the fact that Covid19 is not the only and a long way from the biggest cause of death but it is proving to be a significant health problem - it is certainly demonstrating that it is not “not as bad as 'flu”
I am sorry to announce with great dismay the Dominic Cummings has succumbed to coronavirus. The country will be devastated.
https://twitter.com/JasonGroves1/status/1244554527602282496?s=09
He clearly did not run fast enough leaving Downing Street.
He should have learned from Forrest Gump:
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