Mad_Cyril I agree with you here. People demand information, and then they put their own stupid spin on it cos they’re thick as shit.

Another point I would like to make is that Whitty and Valance are both incentivised to err on the side of protecting public health. If no one died from Corona but the economy was destroyed with mass unemployment, no one would point the finger at them for that outcome and they’d have done their job. There should be more economics on show to counterbalance this.

alistair Is that aimed at me?

We have an incompetent shitty government. The Japanese, who were much closer to the outbreak and had much more inbound travel from China have managed to contain the spread and have a functioning economy. The two don’t appear to be mutually exclusive however much the right-wing here present it as a binary choice. People in this country should be asking more questions.

alistair think he may need to update this chart after yesterday’s numbers - the scientist chart actually starting to look accurate 😱

    Re: the numbers. As I mentioned last week (as did Si) they are not presented with any context. I can’t recall reading about hospital or ICU admissions? It just seems to be ‘X NUMBER OF PEOPLE INFECTED TODAY’ over and over.

      gcw try a different news source. The Guardian publishes those figures every day. They do love the hyperbole of headline infections rates mind and that does get on my tits.

        Along_the_Wire I’m trying to actively steer clear of the news tbh. I only hear about the numbers as we have a daily exec meeting at work and they are mentioned there. The media are absolutely revelling in this (as they do on any crisis). It really bothers me so I try to avoid it where I can. If you read the bbc website on a daily basis you’d never leave your house again, when in reality the real world is trying its best to adapt to the situation.

        Along_the_Wire Politically motivated hyperbole from the Grauniad? Who’d have guessed. Still begging its readers to pay for “quality journalism”. The Grauniad and Daily Telegraph are two cheeks of the same arse.

          Along_the_Wire they’re a correction but the trend has become a fair bit more ugly than was the case … 3k per day on average more than published? Whatever it is the idea that cases were flattening doesn’t look to be right

          Anyway, socialising prob over for me for a while, crap as that may be. Daughters school year just been forced to study from home too due to a case.

          Hows your dad Grant?

            Jules72 Hows your dad Grant?

            He’s doing okay - he’s over a week in and symptoms are still mild. Feeling a lot more chipper about it - thanks for asking mate

              alistair The Guardian has got much worse over the last year or so - large chunks of it are unreadable.

              I don’t think there’s anything wrong with their subscription or payment model either - news isn’t free. What would you suggest they did?

                The Guardian’s reporting is generally good in my opinion. Its opinion pieces are absolute drivel sometimes. Peak Guardian for me was an article by Steven Thrasher that was something like “Why, as a gay black man, I have a moral dilemma about using nail salons”. I still like Marina Hyde, probably the funniest sketchwriter in the business.

                I read the Guardian, read the Telegraph when they sometimes drop the paywall or when they give it out free with a bottle of water at railway stations, but I mostly read The Economist. Well worth its subscription price mostly because it doesn’t treat its readers as total imbeciles.

                  Along_the_Wire I don’t have a problem with subscribing for content that I really want (FT and The Athletic for football). The Guardian will never meet that bar.

                  bosstrabs But there are more and more of the moral dilemma about using nail salon bollocks. There was something in there last week about creating a new pantone for the colour of periods.

                  • Amps replied to this.

                    The Guardian seems to be suffering from a permanent identity crisis. The left (by which I mean Corbynites/Momentum wonks) viscerally hate the paper because derp neoliberals…. They all read Novara media anyway now.

                    Then you have the likes of Owen Jones putting the traditional readership of geography teachers off their bovril.

                    Seems like they aspire to be some kind of Washington Post investigative paper with the Panama stuff. Fuck all money in that though and no one seems to give a toss.