Jimmy_D

So you think the government should make a habit of basing policy on unverified scientific evidence?

https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa119/5807958 This was the earliest one I saw, the weekend of the races. Happy to be corrected if there was earlier evidence published.

It’s easy to say things should have been done differently with hindsight. No doubt that weekend of big events has cost lives, but at the time, it was thought that it probably wasn’t transmissible without symptoms. That one single ability is what made this so much more dangerous. Without that, people would have an indication that they needed to lock themselves down and it would have been as effective as the current measures locking everyone down, as well as giving an indication to other people that thay need to distance themselves from someone, people remembering they’d been near someone with symptoms etc.

I don’t suppose when WWII started, anyone was expecting to have to deal with that being reality for six years. You’re going to have to get your head around the fact that we’ll be dealing with this for as long as it takes, because it really doesn’t care what we think of it. It just ‘is’. You might be happy to take your chances, but the restrictions are in place to protect everyone else from you, as well as to protect you. Why does the fact that someone has an underlying health condition mean that you’d be willing to let them die from this? Trying to pretend that this isn’t happening and everyone has overreacted isn’t going to help you. Pretending that everything is going to suddenly go back to normal isn’t going to help you.

Unfortunately it looks like we’re going to get a real world example of what it looks like to just ignore it, judging by what’s happening in Brazil.

True, not everyone is benefiting from that effect, I can't imagine what it must be like to be in that situation. Overall though, road traffic accidents are down, according to fitbit, people's resting heart rate is reduced, air pollution is down, A&E departments are facing a vastly reduced demand... etc.

We're currently effectively in a total war situation. All the resources we have can possibly muster are being thrown at healthcare at the moment. Social distancing and lockdown measures are in place, which is not only vastly reducing the effect of COVID-19, but is vastly reducing the risk of other causes of death as a side effect. Despite this, deaths are still vastly higher than they were over the same period last year. You're not comparing like with like when looking at those figures, and it's giving you a false picture that COVID-19 isn't as bad as it is. Going back to normal would be false economy anyway, the effect of COVID-19 unchecked would wipe out any benefit from restarting the economy and then some. It's not going to happen.

Would the matches between the winners of the Football League and the winners of the Southern League have been filmed? We were in a few of those back then.

Even with all the measures put in place we're likely to see this kill as many people here as the Blitz did. I've only heard people pointing out that the measures probably didn't go far enough. The 500,000 figure is real. It's what would likely have happened without those measures. Yes, they're wrecking the economy, but every country in the world has decided it's worth it to put measures like that in place. If you're facing possibly losing your income due to this, then I'm sorry, it's a horrible thing to happen, and I hope it turns out ok for you. The best advice I can give you is to make sure you're aware of what you'd need to do to claim financial support, just in case you need it, and find out whether there's anything you can do to mitigate or delay outgoings if you need to. I've already been doing this myself. Unfortunately, hoping that everything can somehow suddenly all go back to normal isn't likely to help you much.

I assume from your comments that coronavirus wouldn't affect you or anyone you know then?

I don't think we're likely to be able to play for a fair while yet. Like I said, the rules can be changed ahead of a new season to take into account the possibility of the need to extend the season or decide on the results of a curtailed season, as well as the rules around registration of players, changing the transfer window, required clauses in players' contracts etc. Unfortunately, trying to press ahead as if conditions have improved enough to safely play football isn't going to make it real. I think we need to face up to the prospect that football is going to be on the back burner for a while yet.

The difference between what happens with the current season and what happens with next season is that this season was started with absolutely no provisions in place for what should happen in the event that something stopped the season from completing. So we now have a situation where there's absolutely no way to fairly complete the current season under the rules that it was started under. Most sports under those conditions would declare an event null and void, but there's so much money in football that it poses an existential threat to clubs and maybe even to leagues themselves to miss out on that money, so we might end up with some sort of unhappy compromise to try and retain as much of that as possible. Next season could have new rules in place to cover what should happen in the event of something massive preventing the end of a season, with the agreement of all teams, as well as the TV companies, in advance.

Go back to 'normal'? What do you think that would look like at the moment?

In the current climate, I'd imagine everyone will be waiting and seeing what happens before actually moving forward with anything like buying a football club.

From the limited information that there is, my guess is that someone guessed their password and used their account as a convincer for a fake fundraiser.

Seems like exactly the sort of decision someone would be making with our future relationship with the EU still uncertain.

We'll have to keep an eye out for Amazon delivery drones flying over St Mary's Hopefully the people that kept an eye out for Paul Allen's yacht are still around.

I take it you haven't read the Pompey Takover Saga thread then.

At our recent peak, we played well enough to win 9 times out of 10 in a League Cup final against Man Utd and finished above Liverpool in the league. Hardly 'far' better.

Didn't Koeman have a victory over every other team in the league during his time at Saints?

95/96 was a better escape for us in my book. https://www.premierleague.com/video/single/626001

Steve de Ridder looked pretty good on his full debut, got the fans behind him, but then never really lived up to that start.

It's not that difficult to understand. They've reserved a certain amount of capacity for COVID-19 patients. Those will not be used for non-COVID-19 patients because it'd be putting them at risk. Meanwhile, a combination of factors are reducing demand on the rest. Partly, it's that most people are staying at home and so at less risk of needing hospital. Partly it's that people that need treatment are staying at home because they don't want to put extra pressure on the NHS. What exactly do you expect would happen if the lockdown was lifted?

The Y2k bug is an interesting one actually, I owned a computer that was affected by the Y2k Bug. The date on my computer went back to 1900. It's not in question that it needed to be fixed, if that had happened in computers dealing with databases that handled transactions, it would have been catastrophic. Payments wouldn't have gone through, for example, and banks would have had to revert to paper records, because it simply wouldn't have been possible to set the correct date on affected computers. As far as affected computers were concerned, the correct date didn't even exist. They fixed it because they knew they had to, and the fact that people question whether it needed to be done, because 'nothing happened', is proof of how good a job was done to avert it. Our preparation for COVID-19 this seems to have just been enough, in terms of critical care beds and ventilators at least. A combination of the lockdown and increasing capacity kept us just ahead of the curve. When you're rapidly increasing capacity like that and you don't know what you're up against, you'll always overshoot the exact numbers you need, and you wouldn't want to have capacity too close to the line because it that would mean you had to rely on luck to get the numbers right. In terms of PPE, it seems like we had enough, but our logistics was too slow to get up to speed. Partly I guess because our logistic capability was itself hit by COVID-19.

It's worth remembering at this point, that different countries will have different criteria for counting deaths by COVID-19. For example, some don't count any with underlying conditions. Some include probable deaths. Some will have far better detection rates than others. Each country's figures are good for comparing how that country is doing now compared to how it has been doing, but aren't necessarily good for comparing how they're doing compared to other countries.