Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

I'm back in the office for the first time in 7 weeks. We have to wear masks all day and had to get individual permissions from the district government to be allowed in (in addition to our normal citywide QR codes). We're not meant to touch each other or have the air conditioning on (both these rules have been broken).

No new cases in Shanghai for some time now, other than a few from Italy and Iran. The other day Wuhan had a day with no new cases! Their local government has said they need to have 14 consecutive days with no cases before they're allowed to ease the quarantine, so that's a long way off. On the plus side, Xi Jinping went to Wuhan yesterday and spoke to people via video link, if that doesn't make people feel better then I don't know what will.

My partner works for a major multi national. She was supposed to go a conference in Las Vegas in a few days with over a thousand other employees.
The company cancelled after booking tickets, hotels, meetings all on a few days notice.
This pandemic is going to have huge impacts on the economy.

My company of c1000 people in the UK/Europe region have all been told they can WFH if willing and able.
Large population of the firm are based in Czech and they've closed schools down

The enormous multinational I work for has been quite slow at communicating with staff in the UK. Just been told that it’s up to us to decide if we want to go in or not which seems a bit mealy-mouthed. But there were about 30 people in on floor that seats 350 yesterday. All our colleagues in Italy have been working from home for a couple of weeks.

Finally got round to putting some money in a stocks and shares isa last month. Great timing! (Sadly/thankfully not enough for a golf club thread membership I think)

Nadine Dorris has got it! She has been hanging out at Downing Street.

Absolute witch.

base interest rate reduced, golf and homeowner reacts only!

I’m on a fixed rate, so no benefit to me.

And I spoke too soon. Valencia finally caved and has postponed Fallas.

That’s some €900 million the city will lose.

fixie rate surely ^^

Attendance was 10% down .. they just announced.
Great showing considering I reckon

My local supermarket here has sold out of own brand quick oats and rolled oats ... only the organic and pricey ones left.

Is there a way to substitute toilet paper with oats?

Tomorrow is trial work from home day for us lot. See if the technology can cope.

Our admin staff (with laptops) are doing this Weds/Thurs, but I feel sorry for our branch staff who have no choice but to face handling large quantities of cash from the mostly elderly (building society) customer base that use branches...

Surely gloves would protect them?

signed a new 2 year fixed rate last week, yay!

Somewhat interesting article:
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/03/09/covid-19-triage-in-a-pandemic-is-even-thornier-than-you-might-think/

Surely age and history of health issues are pretty easy metrics to use. I can’t see much to reason against triaging of covid cases anyway.

I think the issue is the sheer number of expected old unwell people making it hard to differentiate who will be worst affected.

Of course but you can also divide the resource.
Borderline cases will always be difficult.

Edit; also can get too bogged down in search of perfection over just better.

gf has returned from Italy into isolation. Her small town has had its first case - a guy who came down from northern Italy on the train and then got public transport to A&E. Also, loads of students studying in northern Italy have decided they don't want to miss the Easter holidays, so have fled back home to the South.

People in 'selfish reckless idiots' shocker.

If you actually read the first document you linked to, it says (for the handwash): "Duration of the entire procedure: 40-60 seconds". If you watch the NHS video in your second link, you will see it is 41 seconds long (41 is a number between 40 and 60, by the way). The 20 seconds refers to the part where you rub your hands together; the video even times it and plays Happy Birthday twice!

I stand corrected. In my defence, however, if the public are constantly being told "wash hands for 20 seconds" surely many if not most take said timespan to refer to the duration of the entire procedure and won´t bother with watching NHS vijeos?

“Wash hands for 20 seconds” = “Yeah I can spare 20 seconds, I’ll do that” and you end up with at least some hand washing happening.

“Wash hands for 40-60 seconds” = “That’s fuckin ages, I’ll not bother washing at all”.

Gloves only help if you don't touch your face when wearing them. If you're not used to avoiding touching your face (I had it drummed out of me when working in catering but have slipped in the 20+ years since then) then it doesn't matter whether you do it with a gloved hand or not. You might be more aware of touching your face if you're wearing gloves but it doesn't stop you from doing it.

Wearing gloves gives no more protection than washing your hands properly whenever you'd change the gloves.

The transmission isn't into your hands, it's from your hands and onto your face and into your body through mouth, nose or eyes. Wearing gloves doesn't do anything to prevent this.

If you pick up a dog shit using a gloved hand and then touch your face your hand may be clean but you've still got traces of dog shit on your face.

TBH the rates are so cheap that cuts now make little difference. The interest part of my mortgage repayments are a fifth of the repayment part.

(Years ago I remember thinking I was lucky getting a 5 year fixed rate of 5.09%)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/03/11/this-one-lesson-shows-how-isolation-can-stop-the-covid-19-coronavirus/amp/

May be a repost. Interesting also.