Covid 19 exposes the special relationship: Lies, bloody lies and more lies.

At Trump’s press conference on March 13th , he said, “Google is going to develop a website — it’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past — to determine if a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location. We have many, many locations behind us, by the way.” Trump said, “Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now,” and that they’ve made “tremendous progress.” These statements are have since been proven to be lies.

I can build this website in a day or two using the Google API and I haven’t been programming in earnest for 15 years. In fact I could do it with GMB in a few hours and it would work reasonably well.

If one wonders why people in the U.S. have been panicking, it’s because the information Americans receive from government can’t be trusted. It is via information that people can make decisions and this is more acute at times of crisis. This is not happening.

Trump since claimed that the U.S. has “total control over the virus.” another lie. In the past wasted six weeks, the US government could have been testing people and enforced social distancing. Pence claimed on TV that every state has accessible testing, but that is not true either. Some have

What we know:

Almost nothing.
We have anecdotal evidence that users of ibuprofen make the virus much worse. Diabetes, Hear disease and any respiratory complaint can make the illness more dangerous and more painful.

WHO urges governments to do more as virus infects more than 184,000 people and has killed at least 7,500 worldwide. That amounts to just above 4% of infected cases dead

The situation in UK

According to Sir Patrick Vallance, the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser, 60% of the population would have to get infected in order to achieve the goal of “Herd immunity”.
We know that globally more than 4% of those catching the virus die and contrary to early signs, this is most definitely not just those with health conditions or the elderly. I’m going to allow for an improvement as we learn more about treating it and use 3% as the death rate

Now you hopefully don’t need a calculator to know that 3% of 60% of 67 million is 1.2 million or thereabouts dead.

Were we wrong to accuse Boris Johnson of Nazi like plans to exterminate a large number of the population. Well the evidence speaks loudly.

Graham Medley at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine chairs a group of scientists who model the spread of infectious diseases and advise the government on pandemic responses. He now says that “Herd immunity” was not the goal and the actual goal is the same as that of other countries: flatten the curve by staggering the onset of infections.

I don’t believe you Graham and apart form the interviews and releases: here is why; if this were the case, the UK would do as other nations are doing and shut the schools, the prime source of spread of virus of all sorts. These kids run around hugging each other and spiting all over each other and then carry it all home to their families. This is not news to anyone let alone an epidemiologist. A responsible government would have shut schools and Universities.
A government behaving responsibly would have brought in guidelines and legislation sooner to empty bars and large gatherings. It only considered these options when there was strong public rebellion on social media.
I think they were advised by” the nudge boys” down by Tory HQ that this dog wont hunt and they’d netter change tack. So the soundbites have changed, but has anything really changed apart form the rhetoric? Well going by past performance, I’d say probably not.
ITV News reported that the government will soon tell people over 70 to isolate themselves for four months, either at home or in care facilities. More sounding us out, but no real action and a continuation of the “do feck all” approach as father Ted so eloquently put it.
Under duress they are slowly announcing small measures for the most obvious and politically expedient cases and of course businesses. Under scrutiny, Sunak has most likely built in a good margin for the banks in his loan guarantee scheme.

Here is the most telling question. What is happening about the severe lack of respirators? These things are the central breaking point for all Covid 19 outbreaks. They are the only thing that will keep you alive when you get ill and we don’t have them. When Johnson announced that he was throwing us all to the wolves, he knew this information. That is beyond any doubt.

So let’s summarise this.

We know very little as yet other than a well established rate of infection to death, around 4% and a good indication of the number of ill needing intensive care with respirators.
We now the infection rates form Italy, a country that took early measures to lock down and distance people and has since announced that their measures were too weak initially and too late.
We know that a reasonable estimate is 1.2million deaths in UK unless we find a way to reduce infection and reduce death rates.
The above figures assume we have solved the equipment issues in time to treat the seriously ill rather than just put them to sleep to reduce their misery.
We don’t have enough respirators in UK for the usual winter flu and LOB uses, let alone for a pandemic. That is a key pivot point and the one serious bottleneck in any strategy.

We know that in all cases time and cooperation brings more insight and better treatments, reduced fatality and sooner or later effective immunisation.

Morally,we do not, any of us, have the right to sentence others to death, not even for murder, let alone for a perceived common good, or rather economic margin.

The advice any sane and humane person would give is to buy time, Davi Sridhar, a public-health specialist at the University of Edinburgh said; “We can use that time to get personal protective equipment in, to get beds ready, to get trainees trained properly. In the United States, there’s a vaccine trial. There are trials of antivirals in China, medicines, skills, knowledge and equipment will improve. Not to buy time is effectively to elect yourself god and condemn perhaps half a million people to die unnecessarily.

It’s past time to send the message to these people that there time is up. The Tories and the Nudge Unit, the Facebook database and the numerous spook agencies who spend their days scheming to control and manipulate us need to be told who works for whom and what the consequences might be.

Lessons learned from Italy
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/608113/italy-coronavirus/