Re: Lockdown
 

Soon to be Dubai 1 - Covid 19

Re: Lockdown
 

It's not for me chief , i mean you'd be sitting on your Jack looking out the window . I don't see the issue with it though . Life must go on and it will

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I'm actually quite enjoying the myriad of family pub quizzes at the weekend. The time catching up and having a laugh and a beerio together is really great actually. Never spoken to the parents so much....did a football quiz with my old man for 2 hours at the weekend, was brilliant.

Re: Lockdown
 

Many weeks later and having received full pay at the weekend, the silence this week has been deafening. No conversations, no updates, no nothing.

Got the call today. Still employed got given a mighty pay cut until end of summer and 'reduced hours' (good one), also got an apology for the lack of updates which was, you know, something. :rofl:

Putting into perspective, I'm relieved and happy to just crack on as normal.

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Good result, at least they are thinking about life (and work) after the lock down

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Yeah, feels a bit weird to be happy with it but times like this are about digging deep, doing what you need to do and getting busy.

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Well done, Scamp. I’m pleased for you... in a way. It could have been a lot worse.

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Absolutely right mate. Payday end of each month won't be a barrel of laughs but you know, it's bigger picture time.

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You got the next best option available mate , you've got to be pragmatic on this situation . There's some major changes coming to us all in some way shape or form . We've been lucky as we've kept operational but i've been told to put together a mighty restructure proposal for June.

The axe is as sharp as i have seen it for 25 years .

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Absolutely correct.
I think this is bad because there is genuine fear mixed into the known unknowns and huge pile of unknown unknowns.

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What do people know about or think about the Corona Apps that are being released or already live in places?

Do they track you and your movement so if you get infected they can see who (by way of app) you were near in the last 14 days and alert them?
Or are they more manual?

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Bugger off.

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With the apps what happens when people don't have a smartphone? Plenty of workers out there still with very basic phones.

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Lots of suggestions that most are pretty crap with all sorts of bugs and issues. Some only work if the phone is active, others apparently suck the battery like sixpenny tart on a two shilling bonus. Others are flaky and just read all your contacts anyway. The whole data sharing platform is wide open on these things for the most part I think.

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Cool.

Dunno, guess they don't get tracked. Most people seem to though and I think a lot of labourers (let's focus on them) are camp based so I'd hope there are initiatives ongoing to test, isolate and help them as groups?

The ones in China seem pretty impressive from the brief bits I've read. I wonder if you could enforce a download? I mean, I know it's possible because Apple forced me to have some TERRIBLE album from that band fronted by Bono a few years ago...so you can make people have stuff on their phone.

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I installed TraceCovid, but it absolutely murdered battery life so I disabled it. The developers appear to be first language English speakers, for whatever that's worth in terms of quality of construction. I haven't bothered with the AlHosn app because I've no idea how it's any different to that TraceCovid one and in any case, it's likely also to destroy battery life. BTW, in the Android ecosystem you can check what permissions every app has, and apps have to explicitly ask for permission to do anything (i.e. they don't install with all the permissions pre-granted). You can also disable any permissions later on if you want.

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Of course, it's going to need your location at all times, which does that to batteries.

Hmm. I suppose in theory most people aren't making many trips so sort of doesn't matter but remembering to activate / deactivate and app is a faff.

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The Police in the UK would have a field day with that, Did anybody else notice the number of arrests after they were allowed to install that "electronic monitoring" at airports. Ill bet the police cant wait for the airport to reopen. Thanks to corona there is lots of prison space at last.

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https://apnews.com/229e5110ac04fef82734cc125eb5ca39

Whats the opinion on these "sanitization gates"?
Mostly placebo? All they seem to do is disinfect clothes...

Got to love the owner's typical Levatine style exaggeration “If we consider two people, one has a knife and one has coronavirus, the second one is a hundred times dangerous than the first one,” he said.

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So is the local policy now de facto herd immunity? Back of the envelope, assuming 70% infection before herd kicks in, that's about 6 million infections. At a 1% death rate (we're hovering around 0.9% currently, having risen from about 0.6%), 60,000 souls depart this earth. The normal death rate is about 1.5-1.7 per thousand per year, or 14,000/year. So 4x the normal number of deaths.

Re: Lockdown
 

I think ultimately that's the policy everywhere. Going to be interesting to see how this is ultimately achieved with a highly transient population... I wonder if there is a scenario where we never get there.

The strategy for the young has to got to be: get it, survive it, move on. Only one of those parts is tricky to execute.

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Sure, I think it will be the policy everywhere. Edit: quick back-of-the-envelope maths

• Assume about 1000 ICU beds in the country (about 10 per 100,000, because although population is young, it's diabetic).
• ICU rate for people aged 20-44 is about 2% (https://www.statista.com/chart/21173...navirus-cases/)
• That allows a maximum of about 50,000 active cases in the country. We're currently at 10,000. Perhaps this is the calculation.

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Plus the new field hospitals... a few ICUs in there too.

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McGettigans.
What happened there ?

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Morons, in abundance. Turned up because restaurants were allowed to open, ended up queuing quite close together, people inside without masks just getting tanked up. The rest of us just stayed home.

A few other places opened up immediately and were the same.
Some others didn't open immediately to plan a bit better and never got the chance to open. All booze sales were shut down (although Co Durham Boy may know a few watering holes that survived).

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Herd immunity was always going to be the outcome. The shutdowns were just a few months of fantasy war gaming by the epidemiologists before giving in to what we always knew was going to be the real plan, aka Sweden's approach.

Long term death rate is more likely to be between .25% and .5% in the developed countries (less in the developing countries) once again heavily drawn from the same demographic of elderly frail pensioners.

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Hindsight Ltd. is the easiest company to run eh.

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I wonder if the country is geared up to handle 4x the usual number of deaths, spread over a few months rather than a whole year, and concentrated amongst expats whose bodies will require repatriation? I imagine 90% of deaths normally are amongst the locals, as expats generally leave before they get old or sick enough to kark it.

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given the money that can be made in that business, they will be ready.

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I heard an interesting report from a Pakistani colleague, Three plain loads were repatriated form Jeddah to Pakistan and tested on arrival. The infection rate was 50% apparently but no serious cases. My colleague is of the impression that because hygiene is not so developed as it is in the west the populations immune system is more engaged. If true the junk food consumed at the side of a road on the way home from some party or other might yet prove to be a life saver.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that this is a medically proven fact, but it does sound like a theory worth disproving. I didn't like to point out that the sample in question was a labour force selected and medically screened for hard labour in the heat prior to importation and that this might have had some bearing on the result.

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Have you excluded the possibility that they were simply younger than 45 and therefore unlikely to develop serious symptoms?

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No, the data was not made available although it would seem to be a reasonable assumption.

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The developing world is nowhere nearly as badly hit by COVID-19 (in a lethal sense) and it may very well be in part to a much younger average population compared to old countries like Italy and UK. And developed countries also have people living longer lives due to the marvels of modern science allowing elderly and frail pensioners to live longer. At this point the majority of deaths in developed countries are coming out of care homes, which speaks volumes. And it must also be acknowledged that developing countries don't panic or obsess over every old person's death and keep a death count clock on the nightly news.

Scamp may sneer at hindsight but the data was always there from the early days. It's an old person's killer. Or rather, old and unhealthy person killer. And for the first time in history, we're now treating the death of a 80 year old pensioner with comorbodities as a tragedy rather than fact of life.

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Not forgetting that the developing world have also found the cure:
https://www.news24.com/Africa/News/m...issau-20200502

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That's not true. The majority of deaths are people dying in hospitals by a long way.

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Tests in NYC
In factories in South Dakota
In Kabul
In Tokyo

All were done in recent days, and show similar results of anything from 20% to 40% of the sample population having the virus....

Symptoms were present in a minority of cases.

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I sneer at your unpleasant arrogance, but I'm sure I've told you that before.

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That appears pretty consistent with what people around me are saying. I think about 20% of my friends have had it and lets say another 20% to 30% without having shown any symptoms. I think I had it. Although there is no way to tell without testing, that was not available in the early days. So at the current rate we are probably a few weeks from herd immunity. Immunity among the health appears the only real protection the frail have until such time as a vaccine is developed and that might be a year or more away.
In the mean time the frail are consigned to their homes. My own parents are in their 60s and 70s and have not left the house for 2 Months they are consigned to being there until Shristmas at the least, although I hope for their sake and the sake of others like them we get to 70% soon.

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ICUs are now full, apparently. And they're flying in extra staff from India, which is never a good sign.

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I assume you mean here in the UAE?

There were 700+ new cases yesterday.