Millhouse

I see the airport simply closing soon given that they have asked all the emiratis to return home. Once they are back, or accounted for, I think it's lockdown.

More importantly, MAF has decided to only open the malls between 12-8pm. I had no idea you could only catch the bug after 8pm, or in the mornings. So that's helpful to know. I would have thought that reducing the mall hours would actually create a higher density of shoppers in the mall vs. extending the mall hours.

Anyway, it's all unnecessary, community transmission doesn't happen here.

scrubbedexpat141

I'm due to fly back to the UK in10 days for a swift visit. It's a trip I really need to make and don't want to / not sure I can delay too long.

There was a rush on the airport when the visa chatter happened, a friend flew back to the UK and said it was the busiest place on earth. Rest of the time it seems very quiet.

shiraz1

Not sure how anyone thinks the UK govt could not act on advice that projects demand on hospitals being 8 times greater than capacity within 2/3 weeks if strict measures aren't taken.

csdf

No such thing - the average Giuseppe is actually shut in their house, possibly singing from their balcony.

scrubbedexpat141

I wondered if anyone would pick that up. 1 point to csdf.

co durham boy

You may get out , i doubt you'll get back

scrubbedexpat141

Yeah, hence the last minute movement. I think I'll end up going for 24-36hours. In and out quick smart.

Maxima

After seeing so many people praise the lockdown for

1) Allowing people to spend time with their families
2) Allow people time to spend few hours on Netflix
and most importantly
3) Clear up the air as the satellite images of Europe and China show

Any chance there will be calls to let this become the new normal, with governments making cash payments to people to order foodstuff online, while staying home.

I can imagine governments like Iraq and Lebanon and Thailand being very happy to have an indefinite period of lockdowns , not allowing any pesky public assemblies or protests

Millhouse

I totally believe its the start of a new normal. If this goes on for months, and the tech holds up, there is no way people will go back to offices etc. Why rent all that expensive real estate?

scrubbedexpat141

Divorce rates would skyrocket.
I like being in an office and having 'face time' with 'key stakeholders' and all that guff. I like real relationships.
But certainly could be a number of groups of staff, group 1 work Sundays in the office, group 2 mondays etc. Do a really good mix of home and office working.

Maybe, we'll end up with a 4 day week. That's the flippin dream.

DXBtoDOH

Whoa there mate. Why so angry and hostile? You seem to be taking this extremely personally.

I do think this virus is going to make society have to make some serious decisions that we hadn't in a very long time. We can't go into a perpetual shutdown to save same some lives. The shutdown has enormous implications of its own. It's easy for professionals working from home to shrug it off, but I already know people ordered to gardening leave and even made redundant with bars and restaurants cutting back and closing. Corporations can only hold on to staff for a while if work stops coming in. Mass redundancies will happen. It's already starting in the hospitality and shipping sectors. And that leads to people not being able to pay rent or mortgages. Given that the vast majority of people who catch the virus only get up to a mild form of flu and only a tiny minority die outright (increasingly sub 1% once all the numbers are counted), how do we balance that against economically crippling tens, hundreds, billions of people globally? And there's a social cost to that too.

It's a difficult scenario altogether. The old geezer in the article offered a different perspective based on past histories. The world cannot save every possible life. If you divided the global loss of wealth in the past two months by the number of people who have already died, it's quite staggering. As it is, the developed world is heading to a shutdown everywhere. The question is how long can it possibly last without having to scale back to some degree to keep economic activity going. Will it have been worthwhile and really made a difference in the long run? I do hope it does, I can't help but think probably not. It's quite possible we're going about this the entirely wrong way. Instead of massively shutting down everything, why not quarantine off the elderly and sick?

Apparently Japan is reopening schools after concluding that closing them doesn't have an effect on slowing down the virus.

Millhouse

While over in California, they are closing them until September. lol

It's going to be a long walk back with a large public education exercise about how we overreacted.

#Stoptesting

scrubbedexpat141

Because I think it's hugely irresponsible and selfish to dismiss this as an overreaction. If you think that was angry you must be a snowflake

Possibly quarantining the elderly and sick is a VERY good idea. I don't know, might be the best solution? It must have been considered?
I think the responsible thing to do is travel if only absolutely necessary, work from home if you can, avoid close contact with too many people and isolate yourself if sick.
Closing down completely works if the whole world does it and in theory every bit of the disease disappears after two weeks (potentially). It's unrealistic though.
One could argue it demonstrates a real lack of empathy to only consider the numbers of dead so far and not what may still come - it's not over.
Italian newspapers packed with obituaries are a sorry sight. Quarantining people there to stop them infecting others might mean lives are not lost.

There isn't a solution. It's not blind panic to just be a bit more sensible and considerate. If you (not you as an individual) go about daily life as normal and come into contact with people whilst carrying because you're ignoring advice to limit contact and an individual dies after that contact, would you feel responsible or accountable or guilty? I don't want to give it to anyone elderly or unwell - they might be easily avoided but others aren't - lots of the conditions that make people more vulnerable are not visible.

If the international governments and some of the experts have got it really wrong and the protestations against this perceived 'overkill' are possibly shown as right in 6 months then we should all just be grateful really, shouldn't we? We learn a valuable lesson and ultimately managed to avoid something more serious. Using a hammer on an ant might be unnecessary but it works.

The economical damage in terms of the 'global loss of wealth' (which I assume is looking at the markets) is not really something that's easily controlled. The governments announced trillions in support to make this period easier and they still went down. It's been the longest bull market in American history, being ended by this. The big drops came before the governments did anything. People were screaming out for the governments to do something and now people are screaming out they're doing too much. I'm not an expert in viruses, economics or even my own ****ing job at times but a bit of composure and balance to the situation instead of writing it off as an overreaction or under-reaction when we potentially aren't even into it is just ****ing moronic.

DXBtoDOH

Another decent perspective. Argument is partly that we are rushing blindly without really understanding the data or even enough data.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/...reliable-data/
John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.

Maxima

Its not going to disappear even if the whole world shuts down for 2 weeks. It will resurface after people get back to normal, but bit less lethal than before