Covid-19 Megathread

[courageous]

3 hours ago, SuperBacon said:

Be angry at the utter utter cunts who have fucked this up, not the public

little from column A, a little from column B

 

Sorry, but at this point if you are still too thick to realise the current gov. is entirely incompetent and/or corrupt then fuck you - just don't drag me & my loved ones down with you

I will not hold voting Tory or even Brexit against anyone... you were lied to and you were the victim; but if you still can't see it after all this, then you are part of the problem

 

 

*you as in the theoritcal, not aimed at you SB

Edited July 5, 2020 by courageous

[FLips]

It's a split really isn't it? Government giving out bizarre contradictory guidelines, and then the majority of the British public who are generally stubborn and thick and dying for a reason to go get pissed.
It's not just now when the pubs are open, it's been the entire time. Family coming over for birthdays when everyone was meant to be locked in, just popping round a mate's house but forgetting to keep distance. Barely anyone has listened this entire time but it doesn't help that the rules they have to listen to are nonsense made up on the spot.

[The King Of Swing]

Almost as if the government never actually wanted any kind of shut down in the first place and wanted everything "back to normal" as fast as possible, consequences be damned.

[Astro Hollywood]

I wasn't bowled over with shock to get up this morning and immediately see a video on local FB of squad cars and what looked like a riot van pulled up outside Wetherspoons in the high street to deal with the pissed-up fights.

[ElCece]

23 minutes ago, Astro Hollywood said:

I wasn't bowled over with shock to get up this morning and immediately see a video on local FB of squad cars and what looked like a riot van pulled up outside Wetherspoons in the high street to deal with the pissed-up fights.

Fucking police spoiling some solid Bantz.

[CavemanLynn]

It's all so relentlessly predictable. 

The reason that the reason for the failures of lockdown is split between the government and the public is that the government has done nothing but kowtow to public opinion the whole way through. Heaven forbid you take a hard line on quarantine measures, for fear of a drop in the polls. So instead of rising above, they gave out fudged, ambiguous advisories, that they then proceeded to ignore, and then tried to excuse instead of just owning the fuck up.

I long to be positively surprised, but this government keeps clattering into the low bar they've set themselves.

The moment I had an ounce of political awareness, I turned liberal. I've no doubt I'm the kind of liberal left-of-centrist handwringer that Jonathan Pie earns his living lampooning. When Trump got in, I figured, okay, maybe he's just a spokesman for a Republican team. But then it became clear he wasn't.

At least he seems to have control and power. Boris Johnson has had opportunity after opportunity to upend his public shtick of the plummy buffoon, but every time he's demonstrated that he is exactly what he appears - an over privileged, under qualified, self-interested shirker, a puppet poseur avoiding responsibilities while parroting and thumb-pointing the words of rich PR men.

250 people a day are still dying from Covid. They've stripped the NHS of the emergency staff they parachuted in, while they MUST have known there'd be scenes like yesterday. There's no vaccine imminent, and reinfections globally are on the rise. The whole thing has been an absolute cods. And all with Brexit on the horizon, where it's become clear "get Brexit done" is synonymous with "be PM while Brexit happens regardless".

Edited July 5, 2020 by CavemanLynn

[Chris B]

We were told, for months, that the pubs would reopen when it was safe to do so. And instead of the message being 'drink carefully', the message has been SUPER SATURDAY WHEYY! . It was obvious this was going to happen.

Sure, there was some 'Please drink responsibly' messaging, but then that's on signs in every fight-filled shithole you've ever been into. 

Instead, the pubs are only reopening because any delay would be an admission that this was mishandled, and it's more important that Johnson etc save face than it is that they do the right thing.

[David]

Not that I'm a fan of Johnson or the 'Tories, but isn't it more a case of having to get back to some semblance of normal sooner rather than later?

I mean, how long can we realistically expect to keep pubs and the like shut before we start seeing businesses collapse and people who are already paid very little for the shite they have to put up with ending up on the unemployment line?

Or do we think the government can just keep paying people to stay home? That isn't a feasible answer.

Apart from that, as someone has already said, we've seen beaches full of people, we've seen protesters completely disregard the lockdown and social distancing, so it's not as if this weekend can be held up as an example of why the infection rates rise.

Anyone getting all indignant over this weekend, yet staying silent on the matter during the protests is a hypocrite. The social distancing situation was fucked long before "Super Saturday."

[ReturnOfTheMack]

13 hours ago, Doog said:

It’s not a great example of following the rules however it’s no different to what happened with the protests and packed beaches over the last month or so and they’ve had no effect on the cases and deaths, both have consistently gone down in fact, so whilst it’s not ideal I don’t think there’s a massive need for scaremongering over it

There was a slight increase after the whole beaches fiasco. 

[Guest]

38 minutes ago, David said:

Anyone getting all indignant over this weekend, yet staying silent on the matter during the protests is a hypocrite.

Are you actually comparing the importance of a Saturday night piss-up with protesting racial inequality?

[CavemanLynn]

29 minutes ago, David said:

Not that I'm a fan of Johnson or the 'Tories, but isn't it more a case of having to get back to some semblance of normal sooner rather than later?

I mean, how long can we realistically expect to keep pubs and the like shut before we start seeing businesses collapse and people who are already paid very little for the shite they have to put up with ending up on the unemployment line?

Or do we think the government can just keep paying people to stay home? That isn't a feasible answer.

Apart from that, as someone has already said, we've seen beaches full of people, we've seen protesters completely disregard the lockdown and social distancing, so it's not as if this weekend can be held up as an example of why the infection rates rise.

Anyone getting all indignant over this weekend, yet staying silent on the matter during the protests is a hypocrite. The social distancing situation was fucked long before "Super Saturday."

Getting back to "normal" is absolutely not what should be happening, when people's health is still at such high risk, and the measures in place to counteract or mitigate it are woefully inadequate.

Furthermore, there was nothing stopping businesses adapting. Restaurants including locals adopted distanced takeaway and delivery policies. Many retailers upped and improved their online options. In fact, based on what I've seen via the company I work for, the retail marketers that's tanked are the ones that decided to wait things out rather than adopting new strategies. The company I work for deals with both financial and retail sectors, foresaw retail hitting the skids, and reorganised itself through restructuring and furlough to still stay on budget.

Yes, there's an element of chickens coming home to roost, in terms of exposing the systematic underfunding of public services, and the fragility of the current economic system that a few months of lockdown can punch holes in the nation's economy. Let's not forget that UK billionaires have gotten £25 billion richer over the lockdown period so far, which is enough to have furloughed over 2 million people a month at the £2500 max, so clearly business isn't that bad. But, unless I've misinterpreted your last comment, shrugging and saying "oh well, it was already fucked anyway" isn't reason enough to plow on regardless.

My point is, there were ways this most recent easing could have been done, and billing a cautious relaxation as a celebratory knees-up wasn't one of them.

[SuperBacon]

13 minutes ago, Uncle Zeb said:

Are you actually comparing the importance of a Saturday night piss-up with protesting racial inequality?

(Snakebite and) Black Lives Matter.

[Chris B]

55 minutes ago, David said:

I mean, how long can we realistically expect to keep pubs and the like shut before we start seeing businesses collapse and people who are already paid very little for the shite they have to put up with ending up on the unemployment line?

Or do we think the government can just keep paying people to stay home? That isn't a feasible answer.

Removing the support and forcing businesses to open at this time is exactly why so many places are going to shut because their businesses will collapse. We've seen more retail businesses close since they couldn't rely on furlough in the same way. A second wave, and people avoiding the pubs, and that's going to lead to it.

What we should be doing is targeting the wealth-hoarders and taxing them far more.

[David]

17 minutes ago, Uncle Zeb said:

Are you actually comparing the importance of a Saturday night piss-up with protesting racial inequality?

Of course not, but the end result is the same, isn't it? COVID-19 doesn't give a fuck if you're protesting racial inequality or enjoying a pint of cider. 

1 minute ago, Chris B said:

Removing the support and forcing businesses to open at this time is exactly why so many places are going to shut because their businesses will collapse. We've seen more retail businesses close since they couldn't rely on furlough in the same way. A second wave, and people avoiding the pubs, and that's going to lead to it.

What we should be doing is targeting the wealth-hoarders and taxing them far more.

As much as I'd love things to be that simple, you can't just tell wealthy people to pay more tax. Well, you can, but they inevitably won't. Do you think they're going to just accept that? With wealth comes power and influence, and it's incredibly idealistic to think that anyone who comes close to a position where they could stage a financial coup on the extremely wealthy is going to be allowed to carry out such a move.

Life doesn't work that way, sadly.

We'll see the fine line between what's needed economically and what is viable medically tread over the coming months. There'll be surges in COVID cases, and further declines, but that's to be expected. 

I expect the economy is already fucked to a certain extent anyway, but there's going to have to be some sort of recovery implemented, and that's going to require people being back at work and paying taxes.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, David said:

Of course not, but the end result is the same, isn't it? COVID-19 doesn't give a fuck if you're protesting racial inequality or enjoying a pint of cider.

Same risk, different reward.

I think we all, to varying degrees, have felt uncomfortable about the BLM protests coinciding with a pandemic - but we get it. We understand the compulsion to strike while the iron's hot, in the hope of turning this uniquely widespread strength of feeling into unprecedented results.

The "need" to abandon all social responsibility for the sake of a pint is so far from being the same thing, that to accuse people of hypocrisy for not dishing out equal criticism requires either a special kind of intellectual dishonesty, or just being a genuine twat.