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

Doesn't the UK test about x7 more than South Korea? Tests per million pop I mean.

I thought the 100 billion was for the creation and scaling of a completely new test that would give you near instant results, hence a moon shot.

Presumably because SK had their shit sorted from the start and had good conditions and capability and experience to swerve the worst of it. i.e. you don't need a huge system if your population isn't (yet) riddled with it.

Willing to bet my hat that precisely no Korean will rock up for a test so they can go and see their uncle at the weekend though

Details on hat please, before I go all bellingcat to prove you wrong...

T&Cs apply. Korean must be a resident of Korea, not have a criminal record etc etc

Hat obviously in a fetching metallic hue and somewhat conductive.

I thought the 100 billion was for the creation and scaling of a completely new test that would give you near instant results, hence a moon shot.

No, the Moon Shot was a Cummings driven announcement to deflect media attention from the fact that they promised to do X by date Y and hadn't done that so rather than admit that they promise to do 100X by date Z and kick the can further down the road.

I thought the 100 billion was for the creation and scaling of a completely new test that would give you near instant results, hence a moon shot.

Maybe. But not sure that is worth £100bn compared to the already existing tests that you can turn around in < 30 minutes. They're already using them at Rome airport.

I'm not sure what result these people are hoping to get from their test, but then people aren't rational when it comes to these kinds of decisions.

How do you know you didn't need a test without having a test ?
'better safe than sorry' is probably the rationale.

Meanwhile in Scotland

Ms Sturgeon said the Scottish government had therefore decided "after careful consideration" that visiting other people's homes will no longer be permitted.

Presume this includes family. Fucking hell.

Oh yeah, definitely not, its a crazy amount of money and most of it will get funnelled to completely inappropriate tory donors I imagine.

How do you know you didn't need a test without having a test ?
'better safe than sorry' is probably the rationale.

More the point that, by the time you get the negative result a few days later, you could be positive, contagious and either pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic.

But, yes, 'better safe than sorry' is how we use our ONS results to decide when we go to visit elderly relatives. If we've made the decision to go and see them then going shortly after getting the negative result is the 'least unsafe' time to do so, and we've still got to be careful about our movements/interactions in the week between being tested and seeing the relatives.

(Note I use 'least unsafe' rather than 'safest'. There are much safer mitigations such as just doing it on Zoom or not going at all.)

I had my third test yesterday (here we have tests on requeSt, contact tracing requests and a mass test program). 12 hours from test to text telling me I didn’t have it. No drama at all.

I'll just leave this here:

There is a complete hiatus in [Labour’s] logic. They are talking absolute nonsense. Testing and tracing has very little or nothing to do with the spread or the transmission of the disease. The spread and the transmission of the disease is caused by contact between human beings and all the things that we are trying to minimise.

Guess who said those words?

jokes on you, i use the one square of paper over the finger / fold into a triangle to clean the fingernail SADF approved approach to sanitary maintenance.

Does anybody know how UK spending on covid testing compares to other countries? I couldn't find much stuff online.

Would be interested to see how much the French, Italians and Spanish are ponying up.

Just had a 140 mile round trip to get tested. I would think very carefully about doing so again.

Sorry sir, you tested positive. You are now no longer allowed to travel.

The kitchen fitter we had working in our house a few weeks back, got sent for a test by his boss, we live in Devon and he had to go to Newport in Wales for his test which about a 200 mile round trip. Arrived at the testing centre only to be turned back because he was from outside Wales. Didn't matter that he had all the documents and the txt message.

I'm thinking they did that for shits and giggles, he boss made him post a picture as he thought he was bullshitting .

Yeh, Wales are loving that they have regions in a proper lock down and the system is sending people there for tests from huge distances away outside of the restrictions

Yeah just check and Newport is on the list of local lockdown areas in Wales.. Fu*king genius system

Am I being cynical thinking calling the army in means that serco et al have failed to deliver. Again.

Nothing that sophisticated, it's just red-meat for their base, who love a bit of "send in the army" rhetoric, whilst being 100% ignorant about what our armed forces could really achieve in terms of coercing the entire population of the UK to do something that it doesn't want to do.

We don't have the state capacity in the UK to force the populace to obey orders, it has to be by consent - the army and police combined are just too light on numbers to do it.

Also, both organisations might be reluctant to do so, but that's a distinct issue.

Only since a couple of hours ago to be fair (not that that justifies a 160 mile round trip)

Willing to bet my hat that precisely no Korean will rock up for a test so they can go and see their uncle at the weekend though.

Lots of Koreans will go for a test so they can go and play golf though!

The example of South Korea is really interesting as they REALLY didn't have things under control for a while (superspreaders at mega churches) but they got a handle on it quickly. But while SK has a similar population size to the UK, it's different in almost every other way. For all the kpop etc, it's an extremely traditional society that lives on a war footing. In any case, it's not come out of it unscathed as its economy is fucked (partially self-induced thanks to trade war with Japan). OT ramble over...

But while SK has a similar population size to the UK, it's different in almost every other way. For all the kpop etc, it's an extremely traditional society that lives on a war footing

Oh yeah, absolutely. Why the whole ‘SK are doing it why can’t we?’ grinds my gears - different country, culture, capabilities.

Still, would have been nice if we had a government that could play a bad hand well.

Still, would have been nice if we had a government that could play a bad hand well.

I had this chat with one of my international colleagues yesterday. He was expressing disbelief for the way our government conducts itself.

Its to be expected that the party you didn't vote for wins an election and practises politics you don't agree with. What you don't expect is that party to be inept at the basics of being in government.