CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
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Tens of thousands of new arrivals to the UK will be able to go food shopping, change accommodation and use public transport from airports during a 14-day quarantine imposed to prevent a second wave of coronavirus, under draft plans to be laid before parliament.
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@ ejstubbs The Regulations have been changed 3 times now. The latest amendment added "to take part in outdoor recreation—
(i)alone,
(ii)with members of their household,
(iii)with members of one other household" to the list of what a reasonable excuse includes. (it is not exclusive so maybe a Court would accept other excuses)
Apart from that, I agree that the mixture of regulations, guidance and announcements are misleading.
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The latest contract was awarded directly to Faculty without other firms being given an opportunity to make a competitive bid. The ministry said there was an “urgent need to bring in additional analytics support to help inform our response to the coronavirus pandemic”.
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Statistics watchdog criticises government's testing data
Britain’s statistics watchdog has again warned the health secretary, Matt Hancock, that figures on coronavirus tests remain “far from complete and comprehensible”.
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"Two charged after 60-mile trip to climb mountain" (with culpable and reckless conduct)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-52892409
Bit of a Rubicon if MRT calls now result in this.
That was my thought - clearly they were being very foolish but I'm not sure this is the best message to send. SMR seems supportive though.
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Prof Neil Ferguson, the head of the outbreak influential modelling group at Imperial College London, said he was shocked at how poorly care homes had been protected from the virus and that infections in UK care homes and hospitals were now feeding into the epidemic in the wider community.
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@Murun Buchstansangur: Bit of a Rubicon if MRT calls now result in this.
AIUI to contact mountain rescue you dial 999 and ask for the police, and then you ask the police for mountain rescue. So the police are aware of the MRT call at the outset and may:
a) have collected your details when you first called, and/or
b) have followed up with the MRT as to the outcome.
Is it such a huge leap from that to the police being able to charge you with a breach of the lockdown regulations/guidance? Or indeed any other offence that they may believe to have been committed in relation to the need for rescue, lockdown or not.
@slowcoach: The Regulations have been changed 3 times now.
Thanks, I wasn't aware of that. I should have been more careful and read the "as revised" version rather than the original. Will aim to pay better attention in future.
I would say, though, that if the new rules have already been passed in to law, what did the FM mean by: "If there is continued evidence of even a minority not abiding by those guidelines...we will have to put those guidelines into law." That seems to imply that they're not currently the law, yet it appears that in fact they are. Do I see on the horizon that slippery slope of trying to make something 'more illegal' than it already is?
Obviously police will know of MRT callouts directly or indirectly, and be involved, but up to now I believe the MRT line has been that even the most egregious of the guttie brigade on the Ben shouldn’t see legal ratifications, in case it deters someone who really needs help from calling, or because of parties getting into worse trouble trying to self-extricate. Probably the police had to act, bit sad at the MRT comments
@Murun was a hot and not too windy day. Who knows what trouble they got into
Possibly provoked the MRT with their stupidity exacerbated by lockdown?
In normal times the rule of not naming stupidity is a good one pour encourager les autres
But at the moment everyone is being asked to stay local even stupid people
Or not get caught not staying local??
Museum of Parliaments making MPs queue round the block to register votes.
Really incredibly stupid imho. Rain might stop votes! Lots of laughter as they lark about trying to stay 2m apart.
Could you imagine if that proceedure was used anywhere else? Great advert for changing the way we are governed.
Came across the European Mortality Monitor site. For the statisticians here this might be old news. Animated map shows virus arriving in Italy and Spain and onwards to our island. Shows UK nations - Northern Ireland has lowest 'excess mortality' as mentioned here a few weeks ago.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
"Scotland's excess death rate is said to be higher than many other countries that have been hit badly by the deadly virus, including Italy and the United States."
https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/scotlands-coronavirus-death-toll-one-18347461
Who owns Edinburgh Live. Why would they want to spin a story like this?
Don't know, but we always seem happy to decry the UK excess death rate as among worst in the world. Why isn't it appropriate to do the same for the various countries - presuming the figures are accurate?
Don't shoot the messenger, gembo - the figures are factual. But The Times is mentioned so NewsCorp perhaps if people are looking for a scapegoat
The Sun url misses “among”, which is in the headline.
From Herald -
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He told The Sunday Times that the excess death rate of people in Scotland, which tracks deaths above the normal level, is higher than Italy and the United States, however is lower than the UK as a whole.
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I don’t think any of that is “news” to anyone who has been paying attention.
The UK figures are terrible, Scottish figures not much different.
Whether Scotland could/should have done better as part of the UK is a good question (reliable answer unlikely to be available any time soon).
It seems likely that the UK COULD have done better.
Whether Scotland could have done better as an independent country or (perhaps more relevant) whether SG could have done better under devolution is (probably) going to be hard to quantify.
It suits people (and papers) with political allegiances to select/highlight certain ‘facts’/statistics.
One troubling area is the suggestion that care home deaths are much higher in Scotland.
It has therefore been suggested that ‘English figures must be less accurate’.
Maybe, maybe not.
Without testing and accurate diagnosis and death certificates, the precise details will never be known.
(This is not just a UK issue).
@Murunbuchstansangur Don't shoot the messenger, gembo - the figures are factual.
Is EuroMoMo factual as well showing that England has done very badly?
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps
That's the spirit. So long as England is worse than us, it doesn't matter how bad we are.
THe story was spun from Scotland least bad in UK to Scotland worse than Italy. I am not disputing the facts I am querying the origin of the Spin, that’s all.
Scotland’s poverty mildly offset by rurality. Our mild version of lockdown also more likely to kill people this year rather than next year. I get all that.
I also have no problem with Spin, I myself will spin to the left and others will just as predictably spin to the right. i just like to know what I am getting. I know what I am getting from regular posters on here.
How can comparing a country to other parts of the world be spinning left or right?
It's about determining how well our Govt has dealt with the Pandemic. If we want to compare with rUK, all we can really determine is that they have been equally bad.
Messenging has clearly been better here, but we are working off the same pandemic plan as the rest of the UK, and the death and devastation highlights that pretty well.
"THe story was spun from Scotland least bad in UK to Scotland worse than Italy."
Spin? Talking of (ScotGov?) spin, Scotland's never been "least bad in UK" right the way through this. Its excess deaths are significantly worse than Wales (which had a dreadful start to crisis) and NI, and not far behind England
https://www.ft.com/content/a3fe315f-610a-4086-a6bc-a466a7f33aa1
@baldycyclist - The organisation has been collecting data since 2015.
If this organisation showed that Scotland was worse than rUK then would it be a trusted source?
Its week by week animated map showing the spread indeed shows that the island of Great Britain was hit badly.
Messenging has clearly been better here, but we are working off the same pandemic plan as the rest of the UK, and the death and devastation highlights that pretty well.
Once we get some thorough analysis on this (would be nice to have that now, but I suspect a lot of the people who could provide it are pretty busy at the moment), it will be interesting to see to what extent Scotland could have done things differently to rUK.
I assume (but I don't know) that the NHS in Scotland is structurally reasonably similar to that in the rUK and, like you say Baldcyclist, we were working to the same pandemic plan. Also, the care home "sector" seems to be similarly (badly) structured. On that basis we should probably expect a similar outcome.
Is the Scottish Government still institutionally or structurally tied to broadly following the rUK approach? When you're starting from pretty much the same place, I guess you can only diverge by so much.
Timing of lockdown seems to be a (the?) key factor in controlling the virus, but to what extent could Scottish Government have pre-empted rUK on that (had it wanted to)?
A significant concern would presumably have been the SG's inability to fund emergency economic measures. The UK Treasury holds the purse strings for that sort of stuff, and there are already noises (don't know if legit or not) that it isn't minded to fund further lockdown in Scotland if England keeps loosening. I wouldn't like to be the Scottish Government that told everyone to shut down but couldn't provide any compensation.
"Timing of lockdown seems to be a (the?) key factor in controlling the virus, but to what extent could Scottish Government have pre-empted rUK on that (had it wanted to)?"
I think this *is* key, we locked down too late, and are now releasing too early.
Scotland would have had the power to Lockdown earlier if it had wanted - as it released slightly later, and it could continue to be in lockdown now if it so chose. There are fair arguments that there was no financial support from WM in place to support that though.
However Scotland usually isn't shy in shouting for things when it thinks it is in it's interest, and ScotGOV wearen't shouting for a Lockdown in the run up to it. It wasn't making any of those arguments in Febuary or March...
@Laidback I'm sure their data is sound, that's not the point I was making.
However Scotland usually isn't shy in shouting for things when it thinks it is in it's interest, and ScotGOV wearen't shouting for a Lockdown in the run up to it. It wasn't making any of those arguments in Febuary or March...
Yes. It will be interesting to see why this was the case. Institutional inertia? It makes me think that it will make SG even more keen to think for itself in future (and seek the financial powers that are necessary to allow it to act on those thoughts).
Trying to compare the performances of a sovereign government with a subordinate one in a single phyto-sanitary zone just underlines the extent to which devolution has become a prism through which Scotland is viewed as at once independent and not independent. It is not independent.
Her Majesty's Government and the Scottish Government clearly do not get on well and barely communicate. The Scottish Government also appears to be deeply committed to devolution despite the apparent dysfunction inherent in Scotland having two governments pulling in often diametrically opposed directions. It doesn't seem like a healthy state of affairs to me.
“Timing of lockdown seems to be a (the?) key factor in controlling the virus”
Almost certainly, but one problem has been the ‘quality’ of lockdown and the surrounding (mixed) messages.
‘Stay at home - except for food, medicine and exercise’.
‘Keep 2 metres apart - except where you can’t’.
So, jam the supermarket aisles and buy whatever is for sale.
Don’t go anywhere unless you wrote the rules and can interpret them better than anyone else.
Things revised to ‘drive where you want for exercise, but perhaps not more than 5 miles’.
I may or may not have mixed up English/other rules - which is another part of the problem.
Other big factors were PPE.
Did ‘England’ really commandeer the bulk of what was available and direct to hospitals before care homes and within the English borders first?
SO MANY things could have been done better.
UK ministers are incompetent and seem to be trying to convey ‘we know better than you and we are only telling you what we feel like’ which is neither appropriate nor convincing.
SG doesn’t seem to have dealt with hospitals/care homes ‘balance’ at all well - in spite of actually having direct responsibility/control and (perhaps) a less ideologically damaged NHS than south of the border.
I don’t think SG handled the ‘Nike outbreak’ at all well. The idea that ‘people could have been identified’ seems spurious. MORE IMPORTANTLY, highlighting this event - at the time - might have improved contact tracing (potentially reducing CV spread) and made people realise this was HERE and SERIOUS and needed strong action and ‘buy-in’.
Massive missed opportunity.
SG doesn’t seem to have dealt with hospitals/care homes ‘balance’ at all well - in spite of actually having direct responsibility/control and (perhaps) a less ideologically damaged NHS than south of the border.
This also wasn't helped by the way we do residential care in the UK. The profit motive does not sit well with the need to be prepared for and take swift action in relation to pandemics.
Again, to what extent has the Scottish Government just inherited that approach from the UK, had its hands tied because that is the model that fits with the funding model, or did it think it the best way to do this sort of thing?
"I don’t think SG handled the ‘Nike outbreak’ at all well. The idea that ‘people could have been identified’ seems spurious. MORE IMPORTANTLY, highlighting this event - at the time - might have improved contact tracing (potentially reducing CV spread) and made people realise this was HERE and SERIOUS and needed strong action and ‘buy-in’."
Indeed - especially when Shetland seems to have self-organised effective contact tracing to head off its own incipient outbreak
"This was crucial, Dickson says, after the first positive test results came in. "When that call went out from the Public Health teams to say we need to do this now, there wasn't a debate. People came in on their Sundays and said 'Right, let's start, let's get on with this.'"
The nurses in visors and PPE suits who came to test the Malcolmsons took the names of everyone they had come in contact with and tested them too.
According to Dr Susan Laidlaw, NHS Shetland's public health consultant, staff from other NHS departments were drafted in to phone contacts. "We had a week of very long hours and intense work following up the contacts, identifying new cases and getting them tested and isolated," she says. "Although difficult at the time, this did help to contain the initial outbreak.""
The coda to which is curious, showing the dangers of centralisation, whether Scottish or UK, and not using local advantages and knowledge: "Shetland is ready to resume contact tracing - which was halted in late March, as in the rest of the UK - and Laidlaw says the islands are well prepared for the next phase."
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