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[Starver]

Well, exactly, your children are only co-bubbling with the children whose parents are already co-bubbling with you at work, that's surely no worse than co-bubbling with so many others at school. Humour aside. And I resisted the urge to demonstrate the 'benefits' of children being there if you're a refuse-collection operative, ambulance driver, high-rise window-cleaner, pathologist, lumberjack, NASCAR driver, masseuse, undercover cop...

[Eschar]

I resisted the urge to demonstrate the 'benefits' of children being there if you're a [...] undercover cop...

"Are you a cop?"

"No."

"Yes he is!"

[scriver]

To the crook: "My dad could beat up your dad!"

[hector13]

That reminds me of a joke on Mock The Week by Frankie Boyle.

They must have been discussing gay marriage at the time.

It’ll be different in the playground with these arguments over who has the hardest dad:

“My dad could beat up your dad.”

“Oh yeah? Well my dad’ll shag your dad... and your dad’ll like it.”

[nenjin]

Local pool and billiards hall was running a pool tournament, and wasn't enforcing the city mandate to have people wear masks.

People reported them to the city. Cops came down, county health department told them they had to shut down.

They decided they were just going to ignore that. Continued to stay open, didn't make anyone wear masks.

Cops come down AGAIN, order them to close, then posted State Patrol officers out front to make sure they obeyed it.

Now there's "protestors" out front of them building.

[feelotraveller]

Eight ball in the top right pocket.

[Starver]

So, if I heard the radio correctly, England's set of Contact Tracers is being slimmed down and switched to door-knock8ng duties (instead of telephoning).

Does that even sound sane?

[Reelya]

Here, there was a report that the cops checked on known positives, and a full 25% of people weren't home at the time. If you have that many known-infected people breaking quarantine on average on any particular day then you can it's herding cats to try and get everyone to do the right thing at the same time. It was only the knowledge that the cops were coming to check on people that probably got more of the actually infected to even adhere to the isolation rules.

The government here is copping a lot of flak simultaneously about not being able to control cases while also copping flak over being overly-draconian in their mandates. I give them the benefit of the doubt here, basically they can't win because many people are short-sighted selfish assholes or delusional, and you have to double-down with restrictions on everyone else to make up for that.

So you get a lot of people who aren't where they say they are and are flouting the rules. So i don't know: if you don't door knock you actually don't have any information about how many people are actually staying home or not, but gathering that information needs you to have actual humans to check, since a large proportion of people are clearly already lying that they're adhering to the rules.

[Starver]

Though the people you Contact Trace (onto) aren't people yet told to quarantine themselves, so that's not doing anything.

When I went to the barber and left my name and mobile, if anybody had made that listed information necessary to use then they could probably use one of the CTs to try (and likely succeed, even if I'd be wary of an unknown number) to contact me, tell me the 'worst', get me to bunker down except for a trip to a local testing site...

Now they have fewer people doing that (never mind that they were terrible at setting it up, such that at first it seemed half the CTs had no work to do, by now they ought to have or the system is even more broke), less people in a position to phone me, nobody knows my address until they phone me (or tap into my mobile company's DB, but this is a long-held PAYG that I probably bought - if with any address at all - when I was elsewhere, so good luck with that), and even if they were completely able to send someone out to wherever I happened to be, the latency between mine and prior/later doors-knocked is much higher due to travel (unless my street is due to be hit with a mass-alert on the same day,vwhich is unlikely).

So I still question the sanity of a system that seems still not to be working at full necessary potential now being downsized and throttled.

Later on, listening to a repeat of the item, it seemed they were looking for "local knowledge". But the importance of that doesn't seem to match the needs of a nationwide "whackamole", and sounds like they're just telling local authorities to do things now, to get the whole process off the books of the Treasury and plausibly abdicate responsibility for any failures that then occur.


(Plus, while I'm here: it is a "moral responsibility" to get children back into schools? That absolutism implies that al those who are cautious about doing so are immoral. I have no problem looking toward trying to make return to school a plausible situation, but all the language has been "it will be done, and we will brook no arguments about it". Which is decisiveness too far.)

[Reelya]

Though the people you Contact Trace (onto) aren't people yet told to quarantine themselves, so that's not doing anything.

It does something, you get accurate stats on the proportion of people actually staying home, which then gives you better modelling.

[Starver]

That's not a task for Contact Tracers, who necessarily target people who have (openly, and without attempt to ambiguate themselves) gone into public. It misses out how many people do not feel safe going to pubs, into hairdressers, to the lido, etc, and it misses those who did all that, but gave their name as Dr John Smith and number as (03141) 592653.  edit: or, more to the point, those that go to places that should not be open, that effectively do not record their visitors in any useful manner, that don't do anything to mininmise the risks...

If you want to know how many ordinary people are staying home, some other taskforce should send door-knockers to survey random[1] streets in random neighbourhoods of random districts, all across the country.  This aint that.

[1] In a representative way.

[wierd]

You need known positive cases, to measure compliance rate of positive people staying home.

Self-reporting is well known to be woefully inaccurate in basically any and all areas it could be used.

Ideally, you would want to know about people like me (since now I have crow plague at work, and have occupational exposure basically daily) as well.  Not positive, but known exposure.


Regardless, I am going to have to start relying on Amazon food delivery.

[Starver]

I don't think you're talking about Contact Tracers but, lest we be confused, Contact Tracers take the information provided by every (willing and cooperative) person who is tested Covid+ about all the people and places they remember being in contact with, and then contacting all those probably-undiagnosed people (named, or discovered by extrapolating a location's other passers-through, when you talk to someone there) to tell them to get tested and/or precautionarily isolate themselves (as per current guidance).

The 'legwork' is vastly of hunting down as many undiagnosed contacts as you can, for each diagnosed case.  This ideally includes finding out where the initial contact got their case from, which might be a symptom-free individual who has never thought to take a test or isolate, so has not stayed at home at all, might or might not be home now, might or might not need to stay home now, having already done all the damage they were silently doing and now is beyond that stage, with the time taken to hop to the pre-diagnosed case who maybe (by now, after the wait for the results and then the wait to be Trace-contacted) is themself much less of a personal danger.

[hector13]

In Scotland, the education secretary (who also happens to be the deputy first minister) is facing a vote of no confidence from the Conservatives after the exam results fiasco. Basically, exams were cancelled for the first time ever, and the organization that deals with exam results adjusted the results of around a quarter of students based on the past performance of their schools, and folk got pissy for many reasons.

They changed the results for schools in lower prosperity areas more than higher property schools. They also, for some inexplicable reason, didn’t use the results of prelims* in the vast majority of cases, which kinda makes the prelims seem a bit pointless.

They seemed to have ignored teachers’ judgement of what grade their students would get too, which is sensible on the one hand (teachers get kudos for high achieving students, presumably) but not so sensible on the other (teachers see their students every day, and probably have a good grasp of what they can achieve).

The rest of the UK are getting their results on Thursday this week, so I’m intrigued to see how this fiasco affects that, and how those results affect the politics of the situation in Scotland.

*in Scotland, at least for Highers, you sit a prelim exam a few months before the real one, and if you get a lower grade in the real one than in the prelim or miss the exam or whatever, you can appeal to get the grade for the prelim instead. Coincidentally, I had to do this for one exam ‘cause my nose decided it was more important to incessantly leak blood instead of sit an exam.

[scriver]

Oh hector, you and your sany fetishes