bojo mask
UK coronavirus: PM says situation will be 'bumpy' to Christmas; Scotland's Covid hospital cases double in a week - as it happened

Boris Johnson rejects idea UK will be locked into rolling lockdowns for years to come; 210 people in hospital in Scotland with coronavirus.


Comment: That's reassuring. Although we all know by now that politicians reassurances aren't worth much.


Summary
  • Boris Johnson has admitted the UK public are furious at the continued coronavirus restrictions, but said scientific advice suggested a vaccine or mass testing would be possible by spring. He was speaking in an interview with the BBC's Andrew Marr.
  • The Covid-19 app that launched on 24 September - more than four months later than initially promised - has been downloaded 15m times, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has told the virtual Conservative party conference.

In his Q&A at the online Conservative conference (see 3.27pm) Matt Hancock, the health secretary, also said he wanted to see a greater sense of "shared responsibility" between individuals and the NHS for preventing people getting sick. He said:

"I think for too long the NHS has [been] picking up the pieces when things go wrong and instead we need more of a sense of shared responsibility - individual people, everybody, responsible for their own health as well as the NHS taking responsibility to keep people healthy in the first place."

Looking to firmly establish Tory tanks on Labour's lawn Hancock added: "The Conservative party is, without, the party of the NHS." He went on:

"We protected the NHS during its hour of most need during the peak of the coronavirus and we are going to deliver on those key commitments - 50,000 more nurses and 40 new hospitals - but we need to protect the NHS in the long term as well."


Comment: By their own admission the Tory's have plans to sell off the NHS - and it's likely that Labour in its current incarnation would do the same.


As well as providing historic challenges the pandemic had proved that positive change could happen very quickly, said Hancock, who added that while people should be able to get a face-to-face appointment with a doctor if they wanted to, video consultations were "more convenient and easier" for many people.

About 50% of visits to the GP and 50% of outpatients visits were done by telemedicine, up from under 10% before the crisis, he said. "It's good for patients, it's good for doctors."


Comment: It's neither good for patients nor doctors, however it may be good for technocrats. Lest we forget that excess deaths soared because of the lockdown.


Asked how he would encourage more people to enter nursing, he said a "massive" programme was underway.

"We have to make the NHS a more fulfilling place to work, we have to make sure it is at all level open to new ideas so that people who want to improve it get the encouragement to do that, and we are going to hire more nurses and keep on doing that until we have what we need in the NHS."


Comment: The main complaint of nurses is being overworked due to lack of staff, caused by underfunding and poverty pay.


In a Q&A at the Conservative online conference earlier, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said that the army would be involved in distributing a coronavirus vaccine when it became available. Describing a vaccine as the "great hope", Hancock said:

"The prime minister said this morning there will be some bumpy months ahead but we are working as hard as we can to get a vaccine as fast as is safely possible.

The plans are in train. A combination of the NHS and the armed forces are involved in the logistics of making this happen, making the rollout happen."


Comment: Considering the already dystopian nature of the lockdowns and the recent law that government agencies can plan and commit 'secret crimes', the involvement of the armed forces is a significantly disturbing development.


Hancock also said the NHS Covid-19 app has now been downloaded 15m times. "It's gone off the shelf like hotcakes, like digital hotcakes," he said.

And in Northern Ireland 462 new coronavirus cases have been recorded, and one further death, according to the latest update from the Department of Health in the region.


Comment: 462 cases in a country of nearly 5 million people - surely that's an example of hysteria.


Public Health Wales has recorded 432 more coronavirus cases, but no further deaths.

Scotland's Covid hospital cases have doubled in past week, latest figures show

The Scottish government has recorded 758 new coronavirus cases, but no further deaths. Of all people being tested, 12.1% were positive.

The figures for positive cases are almost exactly the same as they were yesterday (764 and 12.1%).


Comment: Bearing in mind these tests are faulty, and most are asymptomatic, so the numbers are likely even lower.


The latest update also says there are 210 people in hospital in Scotland with recently confirmed Covid and 22 people in intensive care.

As these figures show, these numbers have more or less doubled in a week. Last Sunday there were 105 people in hospital, and 12 people in intensive care.

In his interview with Andrew Marr, Boris Johnson claimed that his critics did not have any better ideas for handling the coronavirus crisis. (See 11.52am.)

That might have been broadly true at one point, because in his early months as Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer quite deliberately did not try to propose an alternative Covid strategy. He argued that that would be confusing for the public.

But in an interview in today's Observer Starmer has set out a five-point plan for the government to adopt. It would involve:

- following the German government by publishing criteria it uses to inform people when local restrictions are introduced and lifted

- improving public-health messaging by expanding the NHS Covid-19 app so people can type in their postcode and get information about the restrictions in their area


Comment: This is a rather tyrannical way to live.


- fixing the test and trace system by investing in NHS and university labs to expand testing, and putting local public-health teams in charge of contact-tracing in their areas

- ensuring routine regular testing for high-risk workplaces and high-transmission areas with results within 24 hours to improve infection control, including for NHS staff and carers

- outlining a programme to ensure the manufacturing and distribution of any vaccine that is approved

Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor for Greater Manchester, has also come up with a five-point alternative strategy. In a new release this afternoon he says he wants the government to adopt a simplified three-tier system for Covid restriction. This would only only three sets of restrictions being in place, and every area placed in one of the three tiers, instead of rules varying all over England. The government has not denied reports it is considering this.


Comment: Undoubtedly, as in Madrid right now, it will be the poorest areas that will find themselves under the strictest of restrictions.


Burnham says, alongside a three-tier system, five other changes should be in place. The first two were also on Starmer's list but other are different. Burnham is calling for:

1) Clear thresholds for entry/exit from the different tiers

2) The ability for local areas in tiers 2 and 3 to request local control of the test and trace system, with resources transferring from the national system

3) Agreed levels of extra financial support for councils in tiers two and three

4) A package of support for local businesses affected by local restrictions

5) A local furlough scheme where businesses are required to close

Burnham says the government could lose the support of the public in the north unless it changes its lockdown policies. He says:


Comment: Notably it's the northern areas of the UK that are also the poorest and have been locked down more often.

Without urgent change, the north of England will be thrown into one of the most difficult winters we have ever experienced, with the risk of significant harm to health and our economy. It's that serious.

We are heading into the winter months with a test and trace system which is still not working and the risk of redundancies rising sharply as the furlough scheme comes to an end. Without extra support for individuals, business and councils, it could be a winter of dangerous discontent.


Comment: Luckily the government have already called in the army...


I remain ready to work with the government to build public support for its approach to local lockdowns, but that requires meaningful consultation and proper support for the areas affected. That is not happening at the moment.

We have now reached a point where there is a real risk of the government losing the public in the north because of the perceived unfairness of its local lockdown policies. We can't let that happen. There is still time to put in place better measures to protect communities across the north this winter but time is running out.
NHS England has recorded a further 28 coronavirus hospital deaths. It says the people who died were aged between 69 and 94 and all had underlying health conditions. The detail are here.

In an interview on Sky's Sophy Ridge on Sunday earlier Prof Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at Edinburgh University and an adviser on coronavirus to the Scottish government, said that lockdown fatigue was likely to be an increasing problem. She explained:

"I think the large majority of people are still following the rules but of course fatigue is setting in ... I think that's where local lockdowns have a role to play if there is actually a strategy behind them, so they were used for example in Australia or in Vietnam or in New Zealand for just one or two weeks or a few weeks, to crush the curve. Basically, to get rid of the virus and that was the aim they were heading towards. You could tell people it is going to be a few weeks ... and then you get your normal life back.


Comment: Let's not use totalitarian Australia as the desired standard: Victoria police filmed handcuffing PREGNANT beachgoer as state authorities consider extending lockdown rules


So, I think the longer this stretches on, the worse it is actually going to be."

She also said that it was a mistake to think lockdowns were the only way to suppress the virus. Test and trace, border controls, and voluntary compliance with social distancing advice could be just as important, she suggested.

But she said the government's admission yesterday that thousands of positive cases had been left out of the daily figures suggested the system was not working. "A lot of these results from yesterday were backdated and that means your tracing is not going to work rapidly enough because for the test, trace, isolate system to work, test results have to be returned within 24 hours," she said.


Comment: It means the numbers claimed are wrong and they're being used to scare the population into accepting government diktats.


The Mail on Sunday has also published 10 pages from the new biography of Boris Johnson by Tom Bower, the veteran investigative journalist. The extracts focus on Johnson's upbringing and his private life, and the paper splashes on the revelation that his father, Stanley, once hit Johnson's mother and broke her nose. It was a one-off incident which Stanley deeply regrets, according to Bower's account.

Bower has published many unauthorised biographies and generally they have been seen as thoroughly-researched hatchet jobs. But, according to the Mail on Sunday, this book - Boris Johnson The Gambler - "invites sympathy for the prime minister by painting a portrait of a young boy who turned into a self-contained loner as he battled despair over his parents' divorce and his feral childhood." The Mail on Sunday story goes on:

"Boris, by this account, grew up unable to forge close relationships with men so sought out women as his soulmates instead, which explains his notoriously prolific love life, in which he recklessly poured out his heart to lovers in poems and letters, even threatening suicide to deter women from abandoning him."


Comment: Hatchett job or not, the majority of those in leadership positions today are ponerized: Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil adjusted for Political Purposes