Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Swing for the moment. How the country shifted at GE2019

1246710

Comments

  • glwglw Posts: 9,535

    Extending travel ban to UK & Ireland....on Monday

    Ban to UK or ban from UK? Or both?
    We have to wait for the inevitable corrections and clarifications after Trump has finished blathering.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    No. It's definitely the terror of having to use a newspaper. Or your fingers.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,124
    rcs1000 said:

    Tonight I will be making Tofu Garam Masala.

    Fortunately, I like to cook, and have reasonably well stocked cupboards, so mostly my children will be having to deal with my new culinary adventures.

    Yuk!
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    Pulpstar said:

    glw said:

    Floater said:

    shopping report - no toilet or kitchen roll - or bin bags strangely enough

    Very limited soap, pain killers and rice

    Everything else ok

    I tell you one thing that has gone, thermometers, online and in-store they have disappeared.
    Got mine on order, should be arriving wednesday.
    Puzzled by that as I ordered two yesterday on Amazon, no issues, delivery next Tuesday.

    Still plenty available on Amazon apparently.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Just idly checking, and the dollar's strengthened a lot versus the pound. Was $1.32 a few days ago, now it's $1.23, which is what I expected, to be honest (I did say so at the time of the change to $1.32).

    Wonder if that'll continue.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    When this is all other, Trump reaction is going to be talked about for 100s of years to come. It will be worse than Neville Chamberlain policy of appeasement.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540

    Extending travel ban to UK & Ireland....on Monday

    Ban to UK or ban from UK? Or both?
    If its like the other bans it will be "anyone who has been in the UK or Ireland for 14 days" before arrival into the US - so basically if you want to go to the US you now have to go to Canada for a fortnight before you go to the US.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    Andy_JS said:

    Trump desperately needs a moderator or MC at these press conferences (if he's not going to do it himself).

    Oh no, not another one... Guess that's our share price down another 10% come Monday morning.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,760
    felix said:

    justin124 said:

    Had the election been delayed until March, how different would the result have been? I doubt that 'Getting Brexit done' would have had anything like the same resonance as was the case in December. The NHS would surely have been much more central to the campaign - and surely to Labour's advantage. Would the Red Wall have crumbled anything like as dramatically?

    I can say with confidence that Labour would have lost many more seats. The reason: Jeremy Corbyn
    Good grief, yes. Imagine if he’d been fronting for Labour instead of Ashworth.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,719

    isam said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    I stayed in last night, just spoke to a mate who went out.. the pub was rammed, couldn't get to the bar, and there was only one table free in the curry house after. I had genuinely expected him to say it was like a ghost town!
    Give it a couple of weeks.
    Positive experience: went to a fish restaurant in Clacton yesterday lunchtime. About half-full, everyone..... normal for Clacton ...... elderly. Wouldn't recommend the restaurant, though

    Negative: U3a colleague, supposed to be at a Group meeting early next week. Says that early last week she had relatives with her for the evening. When going into work next day (at Canary Wharf) one was told by the company to self-isolate for at least 7 days as one of their employees had tested positive for the virus. My friend isn't showing any symptoms but will also self-isolate for a few days 'just in case'.
  • justin124justin124 Posts: 11,527
    felix said:

    justin124 said:

    Had the election been delayed until March, how different would the result have been? I doubt that 'Getting Brexit done' would have had anything like the same resonance as was the case in December. The NHS would surely have been much more central to the campaign - and surely to Labour's advantage. Would the Red Wall have crumbled anything like as dramatically?

    I can say with confidence that Labour would have lost many more seats. The reason: Jeremy Corbyn
    Very unlikely - polls showed Labour ahead on the NHS even with Corbyn as leader. The mere fact that Brexit had disappeared from day to day debate would likely have denied the Tories many seats.
  • GideonWiseGideonWise Posts: 1,123
    TOPPING said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    This is faulty thinking eadric. We know the age adjusted mortality rates give or take. There is no point chucking that knowledge away based on a chat with a cab driver, with all due respect to him.
    LOL @eadric's latest report from the front line proving too much for at least one of his fellow preppers.
    You back to being a naughty boy Topping?

    I genuinely fear for you if you haven't done your own prep.

    Even the slowest witted amongst us in society have at least a couple of bog rolls and some tins of beans by now.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    Pulpstar said:

    glw said:

    Floater said:

    shopping report - no toilet or kitchen roll - or bin bags strangely enough

    Very limited soap, pain killers and rice

    Everything else ok

    I tell you one thing that has gone, thermometers, online and in-store they have disappeared.
    Got mine on order, should be arriving wednesday.
    Puzzled by that as I ordered two yesterday on Amazon, no issues, delivery next Tuesday.

    Still plenty available on Amazon apparently.
    But at vastly inflated cost.
  • MyBurningEarsMyBurningEars Posts: 3,651

    RobD said:

    RobD said:

    Just remembered: today's Bog Roll Watch. The other Mr Rook was in town this morning, none available anywhere (Tesco Express, Morrisons or Savers.) Also, a notice on the door of Savers to the effect that they've already had to call out the local constabulary twice to break up fights between irate customers, and will not hesitate to do so again.

    If the supply of Andrex isn't normalized again by the end of the week I fear that anarchy may ensue. And I say that only half-jokingly.

    I wonder if the behavioural insight team successfully modelled it would be bog roll that people went mental over, rather than feeding yourself for 3 months, having drugs to manage flu like symptoms or perhaps not going to locations where you were most likely to catch it.
    What I want to know is if you aren't eating anything, what are you going to be wiping? :o
    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.
    I think my parents are set. Whenever I go home there are always cupboards stocked to the brim with tinned food and other non-perishables, and a chest freezer full of the frozen stuff. I think they took protect and survive to heart.
    To be perfectly honest, if I had space to seriously hoard food I would be getting very tempted by now. But we live in a one bedroom flat so, unless one were to construct a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of a stack of tins in the corner of the living room, I can't.

    I reckon there's about enough in here to keep us going for about a fortnight were we to be locked in, provided that we were disciplined and didn't resort to boredom-induced snacking. That will have to suffice.
    I do wonder how many of these new hoarders are going to end up simply consuming way more food.

    As a student, I used to have a Macro card and I remember taking a friend there, who couldn't believe you could buy mega packs of 48 Twixs etc. The silly idiot went and bought all these sweets and then spent the next month eating 4 Candy Bars a day and having giant bowls of cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
    Perhaps. More likely much of the surplus will end up sitting in the back of a cupboard for several years and then being discarded with the rest of the rubbish.

    If anyone keeps detailed annual statistics on food wastage then they may see a visible Covid-related spike in 2022.
    Food wastage stats for the UK mostly come from the charity WRAP - this is their latest round-up. I had a chat with an analyst at WRAP fairly recently. They reckoned some of their most useful research was when they took samples of people's bin bags and then worked through them to figure out exactly how much food of what type was being thrown away, but that is a very labour-intense and expensive. (Also smelly and unpleasant but those aren't the main constraints!) They therefore haven't done it for a couple of years. They think it takes time for the composition of food waste to change, so they'll only do it again in a few years' time (if they can get additional funding for it). Without such in-depth analysis, there'll only be aggregate figures, so that would likely be enough to pick up on a post-horde spring-clean spike but not detailed enough to identify that it mostly consisted of dry pasta or whatever.

    As an aside, WRAP are trying to encourage more consumption of tinned food, which they reckon has gone out of fashion compared to the trend for "fresh", despite having many of the same nutritional benefits as fresh food. If Covid changes tastes away from fresh food that's often at least partly disposed of because it goes off so fast, it may also reduce food waste. We shall see...
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,760

    TOPPING said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    This is faulty thinking eadric. We know the age adjusted mortality rates give or take. There is no point chucking that knowledge away based on a chat with a cab driver, with all due respect to him.
    LOL @eadric's latest report from the front line proving too much for at least one of his fellow preppers.
    You back to being a naughty boy Topping?

    I genuinely fear for you if you haven't done your own prep.

    Even the slowest witted amongst us in society have at least a couple of bog rolls and some tins of beans by now.
    Rubbish.

    Baked beans never cross the threshold of my house.
  • TGOHF666TGOHF666 Posts: 2,052
    Anyone moaning about Boris should be grateful they aren’t American.

    Pence on the other hand was very assured.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,286
    edited March 2020
    Germany: at least 4,181 cases and just 8 fatalities. Their health service is performing extremely well so far.

    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
  • isamisam Posts: 40,731
    eadric said:

    Trump's idiocy makes Pence look like a titan of intellect, and a man of sainted calm.

    The honest best bet for America is Trump being "retired" by coronavirus, and Pence taking over.

    Ooh haha!


  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950

    TOPPING said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    This is faulty thinking eadric. We know the age adjusted mortality rates give or take. There is no point chucking that knowledge away based on a chat with a cab driver, with all due respect to him.
    LOL @eadric's latest report from the front line proving too much for at least one of his fellow preppers.
    You back to being a naughty boy Topping?

    I genuinely fear for you if you haven't done your own prep.

    Even the slowest witted amongst us in society have at least a couple of bog rolls and some tins of beans by now.
    You fear for me not having any bog roll?
  • matthiasfromhamburgmatthiasfromhamburg Posts: 957
    edited March 2020
    eadric said:

    Trump's idiocy makes Pence look like a titan of intellect, and a man of sainted calm.

    The honest best bet for America is Trump being "retired" by coronavirus, and Pence taking over.

    "Honest best bet"? Calm down and go for a walk.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774

    rcs1000 said:

    Tonight I will be making Tofu Garam Masala.

    Fortunately, I like to cook, and have reasonably well stocked cupboards, so mostly my children will be having to deal with my new culinary adventures.

    I can't get my head around Tofu. I've had it in an Indian restaurant and it was superb. Whenever I cook it, it tastes like flavoured slug.
    My wife's an episcopalian, so I don't cook meat very often.
  • kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    No. It's definitely the terror of having to use a newspaper. Or your fingers.
    If it does come to newspaper a handy hint is to roll it between your hands first, make it into a ball or sausage shape. Then unroll it and use it as desired. Makes it much softer, less prone to sharp creases that can bring a tear to the eye. Less smearing as well.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    Pence confirming Trump's UK/Ireland ban midnight (EST) Monday night.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    RobD said:

    RobD said:

    Just remembered: today's Bog Roll Watch. The other Mr Rook was in town this morning, none available anywhere (Tesco Express, Morrisons or Savers.) Also, a notice on the door of Savers to the effect that they've already had to call out the local constabulary twice to break up fights between irate customers, and will not hesitate to do so again.

    If the supply of Andrex isn't normalized again by the end of the week I fear that anarchy may ensue. And I say that only half-jokingly.

    I wonder if the behavioural insight team successfully modelled it would be bog roll that people went mental over, rather than feeding yourself for 3 months, having drugs to manage flu like symptoms or perhaps not going to locations where you were most likely to catch it.
    What I want to know is if you aren't eating anything, what are you going to be wiping? :o
    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.
    I think my parents are set. Whenever I go home there are always cupboards stocked to the brim with tinned food and other non-perishables, and a chest freezer full of the frozen stuff. I think they took protect and survive to heart.
    To be perfectly honest, if I had space to seriously hoard food I would be getting very tempted by now. But we live in a one bedroom flat so, unless one were to construct a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of a stack of tins in the corner of the living room, I can't.

    I reckon there's about enough in here to keep us going for about a fortnight were we to be locked in, provided that we were disciplined and didn't resort to boredom-induced snacking. That will have to suffice.
    I do wonder how many of these new hoarders are going to end up simply consuming way more food.

    As a student, I used to have a Macro card and I remember taking a friend there, who couldn't believe you could buy mega packs of 48 Twixs etc. The silly idiot went and bought all these sweets and then spent the next month eating 4 Candy Bars a day and having giant bowls of cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
    Perhaps. More likely much of the surplus will end up sitting in the back of a cupboard for several years and then being discarded with the rest of the rubbish.

    If anyone keeps detailed annual statistics on food wastage then they may see a visible Covid-related spike in 2022.
    Food wastage stats for the UK mostly come from the charity WRAP - this is their latest round-up. I had a chat with an analyst at WRAP fairly recently. They reckoned some of their most useful research was when they took samples of people's bin bags and then worked through them to figure out exactly how much food of what type was being thrown away, but that is a very labour-intense and expensive. (Also smelly and unpleasant but those aren't the main constraints!) They therefore haven't done it for a couple of years. They think it takes time for the composition of food waste to change, so they'll only do it again in a few years' time (if they can get additional funding for it). Without such in-depth analysis, there'll only be aggregate figures, so that would likely be enough to pick up on a post-horde spring-clean spike but not detailed enough to identify that it mostly consisted of dry pasta or whatever.

    As an aside, WRAP are trying to encourage more consumption of tinned food, which they reckon has gone out of fashion compared to the trend for "fresh", despite having many of the same nutritional benefits as fresh food. If Covid changes tastes away from fresh food that's often at least partly disposed of because it goes off so fast, it may also reduce food waste. We shall see...
    I am a tinned food fan, although to be fair to myself I'm also good at not throwing away much fresh stuff.

    There are currently rather more tins in the flat than I would normally store in one go, but even if we don't need to self-isolate at any point it's all stuff that will get used in good time.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Tonight I will be making Tofu Garam Masala.

    Fortunately, I like to cook, and have reasonably well stocked cupboards, so mostly my children will be having to deal with my new culinary adventures.

    I can't get my head around Tofu. I've had it in an Indian restaurant and it was superb. Whenever I cook it, it tastes like flavoured slug.
    My wife's an episcopalian, so I don't cook meat very often.
    Your wife's an Episcopalian, which pretty much makes you an Episcopalian.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575
    ydoethur said:

    TOPPING said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    This is faulty thinking eadric. We know the age adjusted mortality rates give or take. There is no point chucking that knowledge away based on a chat with a cab driver, with all due respect to him.
    LOL @eadric's latest report from the front line proving too much for at least one of his fellow preppers.
    You back to being a naughty boy Topping?

    I genuinely fear for you if you haven't done your own prep.

    Even the slowest witted amongst us in society have at least a couple of bog rolls and some tins of beans by now.
    Rubbish.

    Baked beans never cross the threshold of my house.
    You eat them cold on the way back from the store ?
  • GideonWiseGideonWise Posts: 1,123
    Andy_JS said:

    Germany: at least 4,181 cases and just 8 fatalities. Their health service is performing extremely well so far.

    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

    All that spare capacity doing well so far.

    The bucket will fill soon enough though.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,915

    rcs1000 said:

    Tonight I will be making Tofu Garam Masala.

    Fortunately, I like to cook, and have reasonably well stocked cupboards, so mostly my children will be having to deal with my new culinary adventures.

    I can't get my head around Tofu. I've had it in an Indian restaurant and it was superb. Whenever I cook it, it tastes like flavoured slug.
    You sure it wasn't paneer you had in the restaurant? I've never seen tofu served in an Indian restaurant. Paneer is much tastier.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    The United States of America ain't looking like a great argument for the United States of Europe right now....

    United States of Europe? I was talking about the EU.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,088
    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
    Most peculiar.

    Go check his comment record. You might be surprised.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,731
    edited March 2020
    TOPPING said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Tonight I will be making Tofu Garam Masala.

    Fortunately, I like to cook, and have reasonably well stocked cupboards, so mostly my children will be having to deal with my new culinary adventures.

    I can't get my head around Tofu. I've had it in an Indian restaurant and it was superb. Whenever I cook it, it tastes like flavoured slug.
    My wife's an episcopalian, so I don't cook meat very often.
    Your wife's an Episcopalian, which pretty much makes you an Episcopalian.
    Say "Why was Angela Merkel's immigration policy so bad?" again.

    I dare you, I double dare you... :p
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774
    eadric said:

    For anyone doubt THE ALBANIAN CABBIE and his story of sudden mass cremations, this seems to offer some corroboration

    https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-italy-doctors-forced-to-prioritise-icu-care-for-patients-with-best-chance-of-s

    "In Bergamo, the worst-affected province in Italy with 1,815 cases and 142 victims, Corriere della Sera reported that the church of Ognissanti has been transformed into a huge mortuary chamber, with at least 40 coffins with corpses waiting to be cremated.

    Until last Thursday, the crematorium - the only one in the province - still worked normal hours, but the municipality has ordered that it must work 24 hours a day.

    But even it is not possible to keep pace with the terrible mortality of the virus: 146 people in five days.

    Even working day and night, between death and cremation it is now necessary to wait five days, some of the bodies have been transferred to nearby Varese."

    The rest of the report is arguably even more alarming, so read it with caution.

    They only have one mortuary in a province of 1.1 million people?
  • Andy_JS said:

    Germany: at least 4,181 cases and just 8 fatalities. Their health service is performing extremely well so far.

    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

    All that spare capacity doing well so far.

    The bucket will fill soon enough though.
    Yes, it will. No doubt. But still good to have a bigger bucket.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    Latest Waitrose sitrep from N Dorset:

    Delivery slots fully booked through to next Thursday - unheard of, normally there are plenty avail for the next day. So...

    Decided to risk it and take a trip to the front line:

    Turned out to be quite busy (not sure if that's normal for a Saturday though, not a day we'd normally shop on). No empty shelves except toilet rolls (not on our list anyway). Quite a few shelves looking a bit depleted but not empty. We got everything on our list, including dried pasta. No fighting in the aisles. Food bank collection box overflowing with contributions, which is nice to see.
  • kyf_100kyf_100 Posts: 3,911

    Trump now saying that maybe we should give up shaking hands in the long term as it passes on germs.

    I think he'd prefer the Roman salute.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774
    isam said:

    eadric said:

    Trump's idiocy makes Pence look like a titan of intellect, and a man of sainted calm.

    The honest best bet for America is Trump being "retired" by coronavirus, and Pence taking over.

    Ooh haha!


    I wonder which PBer has written multiple times about Pence as next President???
  • eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Trump's idiocy makes Pence look like a titan of intellect, and a man of sainted calm.

    The honest best bet for America is Trump being "retired" by coronavirus, and Pence taking over.

    "Honest best bet"? Calm down and go for a walk.
    The alternative is Biden, who I think is on the verge of serious dementia. Watch his many strange speeches.

    It would be great if there was some brilliant politician waiting to win in 2020, but there isn't. It's Trump or Biden, neither of whom are up to the job.

    So, yeah, my honest opinion is that America would be better off if Trump keeled over, and Pence assumed the role. He has an air of authority, gravity and command (even if he does some odd things).
    I'd be willing to make a blind bet on Biden's VP.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    kyf_100 said:

    Trump now saying that maybe we should give up shaking hands in the long term as it passes on germs.

    I think he'd prefer the Roman salute.
    Hitler was ahead of his time.
  • GideonWiseGideonWise Posts: 1,123

    Andy_JS said:

    Germany: at least 4,181 cases and just 8 fatalities. Their health service is performing extremely well so far.

    https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

    All that spare capacity doing well so far.

    The bucket will fill soon enough though.
    Yes, it will. No doubt. But still good to have a bigger bucket.
    Yes. Well done for having a bigger bucket.
  • Richard_TyndallRichard_Tyndall Posts: 30,846
    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
    Don't you think it rather strange that Eadric is the only one who seems to ever have these encounters? Time and time again through all the different world events of the last few years it has been him who has managed, by pure chance, to be the only person on here who has been accosted or driven or served by the very people who confirm his own apocalyptic view of the world.

    Things are serious enough without eadric and his 'sky is falling' act
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    No. It's definitely the terror of having to use a newspaper. Or your fingers.
    If it does come to newspaper a handy hint is to roll it between your hands first, make it into a ball or sausage shape. Then unroll it and use it as desired. Makes it much softer, less prone to sharp creases that can bring a tear to the eye. Less smearing as well.
    I don't know about anyone else, but it won't come to newspaper in this household. If we can't re-stock then I shall simply come home at lunchtime, break into one of the neighbours' houses whilst they're out at work and steal theirs.

    One must use proper bog roll. This is a civilised society, after all.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,915
    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2020

    Latest Waitrose sitrep from N Dorset:

    Delivery slots fully booked through to next Thursday - unheard of, normally there are plenty avail for the next day. So...

    Decided to risk it and take a trip to the front line:

    Turned out to be quite busy (not sure if that's normal for a Saturday though, not a day we'd normally shop on). No empty shelves except toilet rolls (not on our list anyway). Quite a few shelves looking a bit depleted but not empty. We got everything on our list, including dried pasta. No fighting in the aisles. Food bank collection box overflowing with contributions, which is nice to see.

    Better class of hoarder in Waitrose :-)
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    There are 20,226 cases in the US but the country has not yet “reached peak” of outbreak, according to top infectious disease expert Fauci.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/mar/14/coronavirus-live-updates-uk-us-australia-italy-europe-school-shutdown-sport-events-cancelled-latest-update-news
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575
    rcs1000 said:

    isam said:

    eadric said:

    Trump's idiocy makes Pence look like a titan of intellect, and a man of sainted calm.

    The honest best bet for America is Trump being "retired" by coronavirus, and Pence taking over.

    Ooh haha!


    I wonder which PBer has written multiple times about Pence as next President???
    Only if Trump dies before November.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Trump's idiocy makes Pence look like a titan of intellect, and a man of sainted calm.

    The honest best bet for America is Trump being "retired" by coronavirus, and Pence taking over.

    "Honest best bet"? Calm down and go for a walk.
    The alternative is Biden, who I think is on the verge of serious dementia. Watch his many strange speeches.

    It would be great if there was some brilliant politician waiting to win in 2020, but there isn't. It's Trump or Biden, neither of whom are up to the job.

    So, yeah, my honest opinion is that America would be better off if Trump keeled over, and Pence assumed the role. He has an air of authority, gravity and command (even if he does some odd things).
    I'd be willing to make a blind bet on Biden's VP.
    Hillary! :smiley:
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2020

    There are 20,226 cases in the US but the country has not yet “reached peak” of outbreak, according to top infectious disease expert Fauci.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/mar/14/coronavirus-live-updates-uk-us-australia-italy-europe-school-shutdown-sport-events-cancelled-latest-update-news

    I don't think it has even reached the ramp yet, but don't tell Trump because he clearly believes he is wining.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774
    eadric said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eadric said:

    For anyone doubt THE ALBANIAN CABBIE and his story of sudden mass cremations, this seems to offer some corroboration

    https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-italy-doctors-forced-to-prioritise-icu-care-for-patients-with-best-chance-of-s

    "In Bergamo, the worst-affected province in Italy with 1,815 cases and 142 victims, Corriere della Sera reported that the church of Ognissanti has been transformed into a huge mortuary chamber, with at least 40 coffins with corpses waiting to be cremated.

    Until last Thursday, the crematorium - the only one in the province - still worked normal hours, but the municipality has ordered that it must work 24 hours a day.

    But even it is not possible to keep pace with the terrible mortality of the virus: 146 people in five days.

    Even working day and night, between death and cremation it is now necessary to wait five days, some of the bodies have been transferred to nearby Varese."

    The rest of the report is arguably even more alarming, so read it with caution.

    They only have one mortuary in a province of 1.1 million people?
    Yes it's odd. I don't know what they precisely mean by province. This is euronews, and their command of English is not always perfect.

    But it does prove the main point that the Italians are having to process a lot of bodies very quickly in a rather ruthless way, so my Albanian cab driver cannot be dismissed.
    I suspect they mean the City of Bergamo (population 120,000), rather than the Province of Bergamo (population 1.1 million).
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    If it does come to newspaper a handy hint is to roll it between your hands first, make it into a ball or sausage shape. Then unroll it and use it as desired. Makes it much softer, less prone to sharp creases that can bring a tear to the eye. Less smearing as well.

    This is genuinely useful.

    Going to try it before I actually have to - can then tinker as necessary and feedback.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,712
    Clear swing against the Tories to the LDs in the south and Labour in north London.

    Clear swing to the Tories in most of the rest of England and Wales and especially in East Anglia, Yorkshire and Humber and the North East
  • kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!
    If sterling falls much further, we'll be using all our remaining £20 notes to wipe our bums.
  • GideonWiseGideonWise Posts: 1,123
    HYUFD said:

    Clear swing against the Tories to the LDs in the south and Labour in north London.

    Clear swing to the Tories in most of the rest of England and Wales and especially in East Anglia, Yorkshire and Humber and the North East

    LOL. Never stop being HYUFD.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,719
    eadric said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
    Don't you think it rather strange that Eadric is the only one who seems to ever have these encounters? Time and time again through all the different world events of the last few years it has been him who has managed, by pure chance, to be the only person on here who has been accosted or driven or served by the very people who confirm his own apocalyptic view of the world.

    Things are serious enough without eadric and his 'sky is falling' act
    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).
    Drunken passengers on a plane FROM Saudi?
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047
    edited March 2020

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!
    If sterling falls much further, we'll be using all our remaining £20 notes to wipe our bums.
    Sadly they switched them to plastic.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,915

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!
    If sterling falls much further, we'll be using all our remaining £20 notes to wipe our bums.
    It will. Much more flight to safety to boost USD in weeks ahead. The government's new plan for us all to get herd immunity by having a worst outbreak than anyone else won't help either. And then there's the no deal Brexit at the end of the year. The new plastic notes are hardly fit for purpose on the bum wiping front though, I would imagine.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!
    If sterling falls much further, we'll be using all our remaining £20 notes to wipe our bums.
    Sadly they switched them to plastic.
    So we can wash them after use?
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043
    "Atmosphere of panic" in local Sainsburys txts a mate.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,774

    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).

    Drunken passengers on a plane FROM Saudi?

    That's looks like a Saudi Arabian Airlines plane from the colour scheme, so whatever those passengers are, they're not drunk.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!
    If sterling falls much further, we'll be using all our remaining £20 notes to wipe our bums.
    It will. Much more flight to safety to boost USD in weeks ahead. The government's new plan for us all to get herd immunity by having a worst outbreak than anyone else won't help either. And then there's the no deal Brexit at the end of the year. The new plastic notes are hardly fit for purpose on the bum wiping front though, I would imagine.
    If Johnson has really grown up and started listening to experts then he would well advised to extend the transition. He has perfect cover now. Who in their right mind cares when the Brexit transition ends now?
  • MyBurningEarsMyBurningEars Posts: 3,651
    kyf_100 said:

    Trump now saying that maybe we should give up shaking hands in the long term as it passes on germs.

    I think he'd prefer the Roman salute.
    On that subject, have a look at the Bellamy salute if you don't already know it. The whole "hand over heart" while pledging allegiance to the US flag only came in during WW2, when raising your right arm was looking a bit dodgy...
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274

    "Atmosphere of panic" in local Sainsburys txts a mate.

    Run out focaccia bread?
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    edited March 2020

    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!

    I like the Titanic analogy for this. When it hit the 'berg there was for a time no panic and no obvious need to panic. But the chap who built the ship, knowing how and where it had been holed, and understanding the structure of his ship and the science of fluid mechanics and stress transference, knew - he KNEW - that in 2 hours that baby was going down to the bottom of the sea. So, here, with the epidemiological modelling. The virus is coming. It's coming to get us.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    rcs1000 said:

    eadric said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eadric said:

    For anyone doubt THE ALBANIAN CABBIE and his story of sudden mass cremations, this seems to offer some corroboration

    https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/12/coronavirus-italy-doctors-forced-to-prioritise-icu-care-for-patients-with-best-chance-of-s

    "In Bergamo, the worst-affected province in Italy with 1,815 cases and 142 victims, Corriere della Sera reported that the church of Ognissanti has been transformed into a huge mortuary chamber, with at least 40 coffins with corpses waiting to be cremated.

    Until last Thursday, the crematorium - the only one in the province - still worked normal hours, but the municipality has ordered that it must work 24 hours a day.

    But even it is not possible to keep pace with the terrible mortality of the virus: 146 people in five days.

    Even working day and night, between death and cremation it is now necessary to wait five days, some of the bodies have been transferred to nearby Varese."

    The rest of the report is arguably even more alarming, so read it with caution.

    They only have one mortuary in a province of 1.1 million people?
    Yes it's odd. I don't know what they precisely mean by province. This is euronews, and their command of English is not always perfect.

    But it does prove the main point that the Italians are having to process a lot of bodies very quickly in a rather ruthless way, so my Albanian cab driver cannot be dismissed.
    I suspect they mean the City of Bergamo (population 120,000), rather than the Province of Bergamo (population 1.1 million).
    The subject is too grim to research right now, but Italy is pretty big on burial vs cremation - a Catholic thing, at a wild guess - so crematoria may be thin on the ground.

    I went to a funeral in Cornwall the other day where the crematorium was an hour's drive from the memorial service.
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,719
    edited March 2020
    rcs1000 said:

    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).

    Drunken passengers on a plane FROM Saudi?
    That's looks like a Saudi Arabian Airlines plane from the colour scheme, so whatever those passengers are, they're not drunk.

    My thoughts exactly.

    NB: Somewhere or other vanilla is scrambling quotes.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    kinabalu said:

    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!

    I like the Titanic analogy for this. When it hit the 'berg there was for a time no panic and no obvious need to panic. But the chap who built the ship, knowing how and where it had been holed, and understanding the structure of his ship and the science of fluid mechanics and stress transference, knew - he KNEW - that in 2 hours that baby was going down down down to chinatown. So, here, with the epidemiological modelling. The virus is coming. It's coming to get us.
    The analogy is all wrong though, unless you are suggesting the government are simply ignoring the advice of their scientists?
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    eadric said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
    Don't you think it rather strange that Eadric is the only one who seems to ever have these encounters? Time and time again through all the different world events of the last few years it has been him who has managed, by pure chance, to be the only person on here who has been accosted or driven or served by the very people who confirm his own apocalyptic view of the world.

    Things are serious enough without eadric and his 'sky is falling' act
    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).
    Drunks - on a flight from Saudi Arabia?!?! I'm surprised they weren't all dragged off by the religious police and beheaded.

    I've seen precisely no-one, either here in town or visiting Cambridge, wearing a silly mask since this all kicked off, and I don't expect a fad for mask wearing to take off either. Besides anything else, from where is the British population meant to source an additional 66 million surgical masks? We can't even buy bog roll at the moment.
  • AndreaParma_82AndreaParma_82 Posts: 4,714
    Italy

    New cases: 2795 for a total of currently infected of 17750 including +190 in intenstive care (for a total of 1518)
    Deaths: 175 for a total of 1441
    Healed: 527 for a total of 1996
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2020

    Italy

    New cases: 2795 for a total of currently infected of 17750 including +190 in intenstive care (for a total of 1518)
    Deaths: 175 for a total of 1441
    Healed: 527 for a total of 1996

    That is higher daily increases than previous 2 days right?
  • AndreaParma_82AndreaParma_82 Posts: 4,714
    edited March 2020

    Italy
    New cases: 2795 for a total of currently infected of 17750 including +190 in intenstive care (for a total of 1518)
    Deaths: 175 for a total of 1441
    Healed: 527 for a total of 1996

    That is higher daily increases than previous 2 days right?
    Yes. It was 2.2 and 2.1 in previous days. 1865 of the new ones are in Lombardy.
    Daily number of deaths has not increased though.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,165
    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
    Don't you think it rather strange that Eadric is the only one who seems to ever have these encounters? Time and time again through all the different world events of the last few years it has been him who has managed, by pure chance, to be the only person on here who has been accosted or driven or served by the very people who confirm his own apocalyptic view of the world.

    Things are serious enough without eadric and his 'sky is falling' act
    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).
    Drunks - on a flight from Saudi Arabia?!?! I'm surprised they weren't all dragged off by the religious police and beheaded.

    I've seen precisely no-one, either here in town or visiting Cambridge, wearing a silly mask since this all kicked off, and I don't expect a fad for mask wearing to take off either. Besides anything else, from where is the British population meant to source an additional 66 million surgical masks? We can't even buy bog roll at the moment.
    Plenty of Londoners are now wearing masks.
    Bollocks.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274

    Italy
    New cases: 2795 for a total of currently infected of 17750 including +190 in intenstive care (for a total of 1518)
    Deaths: 175 for a total of 1441
    Healed: 527 for a total of 1996

    That is higher daily increases than previous 2 days right?
    Yes. It was 2.2 and 2.1 in previous days. 1865 of the new ones are in Lombardy. Daily number of deaths has not increased though.
    Crickey. It really must have been circulating in that region for many many weeks undetected, but clearly hadn't spread widely across Italy. Very much like China.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    edited March 2020
    RobD said:

    The analogy is all wrong though, unless you are suggesting the government are simply ignoring the advice of their scientists?

    It's a nice analogy in the sense of at the moment there is nothing much to see, but the science says with virtual certainty that pretty soon there will be big trouble.

    The government is about managing the trouble (which IS coming) in what in their view is the optimum way.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,915
    kinabalu said:

    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!

    I like the Titanic analogy for this. When it hit the 'berg there was for a time no panic and no obvious need to panic. But the chap who built the ship, knowing how and where it had been holed, and understanding the structure of his ship and the science of fluid mechanics and stress transference, knew - he KNEW - that in 2 hours that baby was going down to the bottom of the sea. So, here, with the epidemiological modelling. The virus is coming. It's coming to get us.
    That is one of the best moments in one of the best films.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,760
    RobD said:

    kinabalu said:

    The thing about bog roll is that, for most people at least, there is no acceptable substitute. It's not like pasta, where you can eat rice instead. Plus once you know other people are panic buying it makes sense for you to stock up too - the same logic as a bank run. Luckily I knew this was the #1 panic buying item so have been buying a pack of nine every week for the last few weeks. New Cross Gate Sainsbury's was busier than I have ever seen it today, with shortages of many items. Not toilet roll, thanks to the staff more or less forming a human chain to keep the shelves stocked. A carnival atmosphere but with a slight undertone of panic. Reminded me of the early scenes in "Titanic" after it hits the iceberg. We know how that movie ends!

    I like the Titanic analogy for this. When it hit the 'berg there was for a time no panic and no obvious need to panic. But the chap who built the ship, knowing how and where it had been holed, and understanding the structure of his ship and the science of fluid mechanics and stress transference, knew - he KNEW - that in 2 hours that baby was going down down down to chinatown. So, here, with the epidemiological modelling. The virus is coming. It's coming to get us.
    The analogy is all wrong though, unless you are suggesting the government are simply ignoring the advice of their scientists?
    Perhaps more pertinently, it’s wrong unless one of Eadric or kinabula devised the virus.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,760
    tlg86 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
    Don't you think it rather strange that Eadric is the only one who seems to ever have these encounters? Time and time again through all the different world events of the last few years it has been him who has managed, by pure chance, to be the only person on here who has been accosted or driven or served by the very people who confirm his own apocalyptic view of the world.

    Things are serious enough without eadric and his 'sky is falling' act
    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).
    Drunks - on a flight from Saudi Arabia?!?! I'm surprised they weren't all dragged off by the religious police and beheaded.

    I've seen precisely no-one, either here in town or visiting Cambridge, wearing a silly mask since this all kicked off, and I don't expect a fad for mask wearing to take off either. Besides anything else, from where is the British population meant to source an additional 66 million surgical masks? We can't even buy bog roll at the moment.
    Plenty of Londoners are now wearing masks.
    Bollocks.
    Surely trousers would do that just as well?
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,286
    edited March 2020
    Eadric might be interested in this:

    "Wearing a face mask 'not a good idea' says senior medical officer
    “In fact, you can actually trap the virus in the mask and start breathing it in.”"

    https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/wearing-face-mask-not-good-17910949
    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-news-face-masks-increase-risk-infection-doctor-jenny-harries-a9396811.html
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,961

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    No. It's definitely the terror of having to use a newspaper. Or your fingers.
    If it does come to newspaper a handy hint is to roll it between your hands first, make it into a ball or sausage shape. Then unroll it and use it as desired. Makes it much softer, less prone to sharp creases that can bring a tear to the eye. Less smearing as well.
    A squaddy mate showed me how to use a sweet wrapper to wipe your arse, in extremis....
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    edited March 2020
    tlg86 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
    Don't you think it rather strange that Eadric is the only one who seems to ever have these encounters? Time and time again through all the different world events of the last few years it has been him who has managed, by pure chance, to be the only person on here who has been accosted or driven or served by the very people who confirm his own apocalyptic view of the world.

    Things are serious enough without eadric and his 'sky is falling' act
    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).
    Drunks - on a flight from Saudi Arabia?!?! I'm surprised they weren't all dragged off by the religious police and beheaded.

    I've seen precisely no-one, either here in town or visiting Cambridge, wearing a silly mask since this all kicked off, and I don't expect a fad for mask wearing to take off either. Besides anything else, from where is the British population meant to source an additional 66 million surgical masks? We can't even buy bog roll at the moment.
    Plenty of Londoners are now wearing masks.
    Bollocks.
    @eadric wears a mask some of the time. Not seen anyone else with one on apart from the odd teenage Asian woman.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,165
    edited March 2020
    eadric said:

    tlg86 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IanB2 said:

    eadric said:

    eadric said:

    Just had a fairly terrifying black cab ride across London (I'm now taking black cabs because they are bigger and there is a divide between you and the driver - better than Uber (one of a trillion unexpected ramifications of the Virus))

    The driver was a very smart Albanian guy, late 30s, who previously lived in Milan for 18 years, where he was a semi pro football player. All we did - he and me - was talk corona, it is all that anyone talks about, now.

    He had a few startling anecdotes.


    1. He said it is bollocks that only old people get really ill and die. He said in his old football academy in Milan he knew four people with corona, one of which had died, and two were still very ill. They are/were in thei r30s like him. Super fit athletic types. Quite a few young people get this as well and sometimes they get it very very bad. And even die.

    No kids tho, thank fuck.

    2. He described the experience of a cousin in a small town. Let's call him X. This guy X is early 40s, unmarried, was living with his two elderly parents. First X's dad got coronavirus, badly, and when the ambulance drivers came and saw how bad X's dad was, they said to X: Say goodbye now, he'd not going to survive, he won't even be treated.

    So they took X's dad away and sure enough he died three days later.

    Then X's mum got ill, and the exact same thing happened: the medics came and shook their heads and said Say goodbye now, she's going, you won't see her again. So X - this time emotionally prepared - told the locals to come round and wave through the window to his mum, because she was about to go to hospital and she wasn't coming back. The neighbourhood came and waved goodbye.

    A few days later X's mum died.

    X then rang and asked about the bodies and he was told "Your mum and dad and have been taking to Special Crematorium XP4 (or whatever) they where have been burned with many other bodies. We cannot bury people as the virus lives on in corpses."

    Now, the cab driver might have been making all this up. I do not believe he was.

    I agree, I dont think it was the cab driver making all this up either.
    Oh F off. Why would I lie about this? What's the point? Some kind of evil glee in frightening people?

    This is what he said. He was very well informed about the virus, he knew all about containment and delay, and "flattening the curve". He was frightened for his young family, but he was smart, calm and articulate, and, I believe, telling the truth as he had perceived it.

    I spoke to a young couple out with their dog in the park earlier. They didn’t know anyone who has been ill. They aren’t worried about the virus. They don’t have any cousins whose parents have been left to die at home.

    Are you any the wiser from reading my anecdote?

    No.
    Are you secretly terrified that eadric has a bigger thingy than you, or something? You may not like him/think he is really somebody else/disapprove of people who write books for a living (ugh!) but I am afraid that for months he has been right time after time after time both on the gravity of the general situation and on key specifics, when nobody else has been. The sniping is just tedious, and misses by a country mile. This latest attempt fails really badly, because whoever said or thought that "man bites dog" is rendered less interesting by "other man does not bite dog"? You need to brush up on information theory.
    Don't you think it rather strange that Eadric is the only one who seems to ever have these encounters? Time and time again through all the different world events of the last few years it has been him who has managed, by pure chance, to be the only person on here who has been accosted or driven or served by the very people who confirm his own apocalyptic view of the world.

    Things are serious enough without eadric and his 'sky is falling' act
    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).
    Drunks - on a flight from Saudi Arabia?!?! I'm surprised they weren't all dragged off by the religious police and beheaded.

    I've seen precisely no-one, either here in town or visiting Cambridge, wearing a silly mask since this all kicked off, and I don't expect a fad for mask wearing to take off either. Besides anything else, from where is the British population meant to source an additional 66 million surgical masks? We can't even buy bog roll at the moment.
    Plenty of Londoners are now wearing masks.
    Bollocks.
    I took a delivery from a guy yesterday: wearing a mask.

    My wife went on a tube journey across London yesterday, she reported roughly one mask in every carriage, in a strangely empty train.

    There was a guy in M&S the other day, wearing a mask.

    https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/britain-coronavirus-outbreak-preparations-stepped-up-as-deadly-illness-spreads-in-europe-from-italy-a4371666.html

    That report was from two weeks ago.

    It's still a small percentage of Londoners, but in a city the size of London, a small percentage means "plenty of people", which is precisely what I said.
    BiB - she walked through the whole train? Presumably this was on the sub-surface lines? And it clearly wasn't that empty if there was one passenger wearing mask in every carriage
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,286
    edited March 2020
    There's never been a better time to have a Japanese-style toilet.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458
    edited March 2020
    Sigh: Holiday of a life time to USA in 6 weeks looking doubtful, wife's trip to Spain in 2 weeks looking very doubtful and my daughter's university effectively just closed, all in the space of 5 minutes.

    Trump's speech made all his previously ones look, well positively presidential. How the hell did he get the job?
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,760
    kjh said:

    Sigh: Holiday of a life time to USA in 6 weeks looking doubtful, wife's trip to Spain in 2 weeks looking very doubtful and my daughter's university effectively just closed, all in the space of 5 minutes.

    Trump's speech made all his previously ones look, well positively presidential. How the hell did he get the job?

    Because he wasn’t Hilary Clinton.
  • GideonWiseGideonWise Posts: 1,123
    Wonder if Simon Calder is still recommending snapping up some bargains?

    I might send him a tweet.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    No. It's definitely the terror of having to use a newspaper. Or your fingers.
    If it does come to newspaper a handy hint is to roll it between your hands first, make it into a ball or sausage shape. Then unroll it and use it as desired. Makes it much softer, less prone to sharp creases that can bring a tear to the eye. Less smearing as well.
    A squaddy mate showed me how to use a sweet wrapper to wipe your arse, in extremis....
    He showed you? What an actual demonstration? And you watched?
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    kjh said:

    Sigh: Holiday of a life time to USA in 6 weeks looking doubtful, wife's trip to Spain in 2 weeks looking very doubtful and my daughter's university effectively just closed, all in the space of 5 minutes.

    Trump's speech made all his previously ones look, well positively presidential. How the hell did he get the job?

    My mother and stepfather were meant to be going to Tenerife this month, rescheduled it to late May when this whole thing started to kick off because they were worried about being stuck out there (he's due in hospital in about ten days' time for elective surgery.)

    We were discussing this yesterday, along with planning for self-isolation. He might get his op, but I think their holiday's toast. I doubt that any plans of that kind are worth anything until July at the earliest, and then you'll only be travelling if your hotel and/or airline haven't gone bust in the meantime.
  • MyBurningEarsMyBurningEars Posts: 3,651
    Andy_JS said:

    There's never been a better time to have a Japanese-style toilet. (I don't have one).

    I'd have thought so too, but hmm...

    Coronavirus forces Japan to rethink its view of toilet roll, by Leo Lewis
    https://www.ft.com/content/397bd2a4-5d35-11ea-b0ab-339c2307bcd4 (paywall but use google to get full article)

    By last weekend, with shops across Japan sold out of the precious tissue and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe preaching against panic, TV news shows collated more ominous signage from around the country — some snarling that in-lavatory larceny would bring a police response, others closing their restrooms altogether, defeated by the crime spree.

    But it was the images that appeared on Monday, of toilet paper rolls bound to their dispensers with bicycle locks, that finally told a nation that Japan had descended into Lord of the Flies-style depravity. “Bicycle locks on a ¥50 toilet roll?” writhed social media. In a country where even bicycles sometimes don’t need locks? Are we humans or beasts? ..

    For all of its extraordinary and pioneering technology, Japan’s largest toilet maker, Toto, confirmed this week that the company has never claimed that its machines provide an alternative to toilet paper.
    So if my dream of importing a Japanese toilet doesn't work, what are the (sane, hygienic) alternatives? And would any PBer admit to using them?
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074
    edited March 2020
    Re @eadric’s Albanian cab driver in his late 30’s, who lived in Milan for 18 years and then moved to Britain and took the Knowledge before becoming a black cab driver (estimated to take 2 - 3 years), I’m intrigued.

    At what age did he move to Italy? When did he become an Italian citizen? When did he move to Britain and why? How did he earn his living while doing the Knowledge? And how long has he been a taxi driver?

    Would be the questions I would have asked him had I been sat in the back of his cab.
  • northern_monkeynorthern_monkey Posts: 1,493
    edited March 2020

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    No. It's definitely the terror of having to use a newspaper. Or your fingers.
    If it does come to newspaper a handy hint is to roll it between your hands first, make it into a ball or sausage shape. Then unroll it and use it as desired. Makes it much softer, less prone to sharp creases that can bring a tear to the eye. Less smearing as well.
    A squaddy mate showed me how to use a sweet wrapper to wipe your arse, in extremis....
    Oh is it the ‘poking your finger through it’ method? That’s an army and trawlerman trick to use just the one sheet: stick your finger through the middle of a single sheet of shit paper, wipe your arse with your finger then use the paper to wipe your finger.

    Never needed that method but I can vouch for scrunched up newspaper.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,286
    Simon Calder's latest piece in the Independent, from yesterday.

    "Hitch-hiking, you may be surprised to learn, still works despite the growing fears about coronavirus. I base this on my experience on Tuesday afternoon, when I successfully thumbed my way from the Israeli resort of Eilat to the Egyptian border."

    https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/coronavirus-travel-warning-border-closed-advice-pandemic-a9396316.html
  • dr_spyndr_spyn Posts: 11,279

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    No. It's definitely the terror of having to use a newspaper. Or your fingers.
    If it does come to newspaper a handy hint is to roll it between your hands first, make it into a ball or sausage shape. Then unroll it and use it as desired. Makes it much softer, less prone to sharp creases that can bring a tear to the eye. Less smearing as well.
    A squaddy mate showed me how to use a sweet wrapper to wipe your arse, in extremis....
    Kingsley Amis once mentioned employment of sweet bags as paper ended when a boiled sweet caused problems for user.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,961
    eadric said:
    But if you want to wipe your arse on Hillary Clinton, only £2.50 a roll. About a third of the price of Andrex Silk.....
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited March 2020
    eadric said:
    Slightly premature profiteering - periodic crises of demand but supplies of them apparently increasing to take account in some areas, and shops restocking.

    Italy

    New cases: 2795 for a total of currently infected of 17750 including +190 in intenstive care (for a total of 1518)
    Deaths: 175 for a total of 1441
    Healed: 527 for a total of 1996

    That is higher daily increases than previous 2 days right?
    Deaths went up yesterday, but today's total the second lowest in the last four days. Numbers reported healed also up around ten times since Wednesday, I think. I'm still not entirely sure what the latter figure means, and whether it relates to healing from severe symptoms, but more positive nonetheless.
  • GideonWiseGideonWise Posts: 1,123
    eadric said:

    Wonder if Simon Calder is still recommending snapping up some bargains?

    I might send him a tweet.

    lol. Yeah. He's one of the worst Just The Fluers. Worse than some on here.

    To be fair, he is trying to protect his industry - tourism and hospitality - which is about to take the biggest hit since World War 2. I can cut him some slack, even if his advice is mad. There are 50 million people who work in travel around the world, many of them are gonna lose their jobs.

    I've personally written off the chances of any international travel til the Autumn.
    Yeah I understand he has a conflict of interest. That's why I was rather cross listening to him advise elderly people with health problems to travel to Venice/Italy two and a half weeks ago.

    I think he will actually be a case study in future university courses.

  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458

    kjh said:

    Sigh: Holiday of a life time to USA in 6 weeks looking doubtful, wife's trip to Spain in 2 weeks looking very doubtful and my daughter's university effectively just closed, all in the space of 5 minutes.

    Trump's speech made all his previously ones look, well positively presidential. How the hell did he get the job?

    My mother and stepfather were meant to be going to Tenerife this month, rescheduled it to late May when this whole thing started to kick off because they were worried about being stuck out there (he's due in hospital in about ten days' time for elective surgery.)

    We were discussing this yesterday, along with planning for self-isolation. He might get his op, but I think their holiday's toast. I doubt that any plans of that kind are worth anything until July at the earliest, and then you'll only be travelling if your hotel and/or airline haven't gone bust in the meantime.
    The University news was the biggest shock. Suspended as of today (by email to students) for rest of academic year.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,961
    edited March 2020

    kinabalu said:

    Its just mad. When I prepped my parents, yes we got some toilet rolls, hand wash etc, but the real focus was on getting two freezers worth of frozen fruit, veg and meat.

    Bog roll mania seems to have become a Thing. It's really taken off. It could be that there is in each of us a deep-seated fear of what running out of it could lead us to resort to, but I'm not so sure it's that. I sense many - perhaps most - people are joining in simply because this is what you do when something becomes a Thing. It's a way of bonding. And in times such as these, we do need to bond - if free of the virus, obviously, otherwise it's the very opposite.
    No. It's definitely the terror of having to use a newspaper. Or your fingers.
    If it does come to newspaper a handy hint is to roll it between your hands first, make it into a ball or sausage shape. Then unroll it and use it as desired. Makes it much softer, less prone to sharp creases that can bring a tear to the eye. Less smearing as well.
    A squaddy mate showed me how to use a sweet wrapper to wipe your arse, in extremis....
    Oh is it the ‘poking your finger through it’ method? That’s an army and trawlerman trick to use just the one sheet: stick your finger through the middle of a single sheet of shit paper, wipe your arse with your finger then use the paper to wipe your finger.

    Never needed that method but I can vouch for scrunched up newspaper.
    Fold it in four, pull off the corner as a quarter circle (save it), use hole created to insert finger and wipe arse. Then you use the saved bit to clean under your finger nail.

    Then gut fish/opposing squaddies as required.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,286
    edited March 2020
    I don't mean to sound callous but I'd really start worrying if someone in the UK dies from the virus who's relatively young and/or doesn't have any underlying medical conditions. It's difficult to find any information on whether there have been these types of cases in Italy or elsewhere (apart from China and Iran).
  • Gabs3Gabs3 Posts: 836
    rcs1000 said:

    You are free to ignore me if you think I am lying.

    THIS is something else that I predicted. People will get violently angry when someone coughs or sneezes at them, without a mask. We saw it in China, now it is being exported.

    https://twitter.com/WarsontheBrink/status/1238870270066200578?s=20

    Soon there will be intense social pressure to WEAR a mask, as against the mild embarrassment of wearing one (which fades daily).

    Drunken passengers on a plane FROM Saudi?
    That's looks like a Saudi Arabian Airlines plane from the colour scheme, so whatever those passengers are, they're not drunk.

    My experience of Saudis suggests they might just be drunk on their own arrogance and entitlement.
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 66,760
    kjh said:

    kjh said:

    Sigh: Holiday of a life time to USA in 6 weeks looking doubtful, wife's trip to Spain in 2 weeks looking very doubtful and my daughter's university effectively just closed, all in the space of 5 minutes.

    Trump's speech made all his previously ones look, well positively presidential. How the hell did he get the job?

    My mother and stepfather were meant to be going to Tenerife this month, rescheduled it to late May when this whole thing started to kick off because they were worried about being stuck out there (he's due in hospital in about ten days' time for elective surgery.)

    We were discussing this yesterday, along with planning for self-isolation. He might get his op, but I think their holiday's toast. I doubt that any plans of that kind are worth anything until July at the earliest, and then you'll only be travelling if your hotel and/or airline haven't gone bust in the meantime.
    The University news was the biggest shock. Suspended as of today (by email to students) for rest of academic year.
    Which university is that?
This discussion has been closed.