If anyone is under the illusion this will be 'going away' this year, then I'd be interested to know how they've come to that assumption.

Especially in light of the fact the testing kits that everyone seems to be hanging their hats on even now are massively hit and miss, both for confirming and attempting to show antibodies are present.

The link/image below sums that particular issue up nicely written by someone who works in the labs ->

General summary of that if you can't be bothered to click is

• Labs don't have spare space, despite what is being portrayed
• There are nowhere near enough analysers to handle 500-1000 tests a day
• People are forgetting this is a brand new virus
• You can't just run a test for a new virus without proving that it does what it says it does – it takes considerable time
• All this against a background of stripped back and closed labs, understaffing and so on (now and historical)
• False positives and false negatives are the issue
• Put yourself in our shoes before you have a massive s*** on us

The false positive/negative thing is the most interesting. Having false positives is OK in the context of do you have the virus or not? But obviously false negatives are disastrous. And in the case of this virus, I'd suggest even a super low return of false negatives would be enough to reject a test kit.

False positives on antibody tests similarly a big FAIL.

Everyone is looking for a silver bullet rather than wait 12-18 months for a vaccine and it ain't going to happen fast, or at all.

My view?

Lockdown until end May, to varying degrees of strictness
Some easing of measures for June-August
Sep-Oct cases start rising again
Back to lockdown over winter
Easing into spring 2021
Vaccine? (BIG QUESTION MARK)
Time to implement vaccine across entire population
Social measures still in place in some form until Spring 2022
Everyone vaccinated
New pandemic starts(joke)

It's going to be a long road

Edited by SW19 CPFC (03 Apr 2020 12.35pm)

Not sure the make up of the passengers but a daily flight from Cluj is bizarre. My wife is working there tomorrow I will try to find out and let you know

Trust me. Some of the twitter based, uncorroborated garbage that gets posted here on a regular basis without context, and stated as fact is staggering.

At least preface some of this nonsense with 'my take / my opinion is' rather than just stating things as fact because you read them on a propaganda stream on twitter (DANGERMOUSE, every post, ever) or only chose to use one source rather than comparing across many.

FOR EXAMPLE

So yes, I think patronising is appropriate, considering the audience. (In the main, there are exceptions)

I'm not an economist myself (can't stand them generally because they seem to have the answer to everything, but only after it's happened - and are incredibly pompous about it) but check out Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) on Google or wherever. Far too complicated to go into but it basically suggests that (all lifted directly from Wikipedia)

MMT's main tenets are that a government that issues its own fiat money:
Can pay for goods, services, and financial assets without a need to collect money in the form of taxes or debt issuance in advance of such purchases;
Cannot be forced to default on debt denominated in its own currency;
Is only limited in its money creation and purchases by inflation, which accelerates once the real resources (labour, capital and natural resources) of the economy are utilized at full employment;
Can control demand-pull inflation[5] by taxation and bond issuance, which remove excess money from circulation (although the political will to do so may not always exist);
Does not need to compete with the private sector for scarce savings by issuing bonds.
These tenets challenge the mainstream economics view that government spending is funded by taxes and debt issuance

Because the government can issue its own currency at will, MMT maintains that the level of taxation relative to government spending (the government's deficit spending or budget surplus) is in reality a policy tool that regulates inflation and unemployment, and not a means of funding the government's activities by itself. The approach of MMT typically reverses theories of governmental austerity. The policy implications of the two are likewise typically opposed.

Bare bone? The NHS has the 5th highest number of employees in the world with a budget of £140 bn.