Suffererof1crankymofo

@ NullVoid - Incorrect. During the early weeks of lockdown, several supermarkets were robbed/vandalised in more than one location in the UK. Lincolnshire had a spat of burglaries, with reports of many key workers returning from shifts to discover their belongings had been nicked. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11242006/thugs-loot-iceland-vans-supplies-coronavirus/ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8102491/Britain-enter-delay-phase-coronavirus-measures-eighth-death-confirmed.html https://www.lincolnshirelive.co.uk/news/local-news/shane-simpson-charged-skegness-burglary-4184952 Above links chosen at random but sadly, there is more crime going down than what is being reported in the mainstream media, it ain't all as nice 'n' cosy as they would like you to believe.

@ Beans&Jam Hate to say it, but have you considered the fact that the shed might not survive a Shetland winter? You are probably going to be better off buying a shed in Shetland.

Incorrect. In Scotland, you can still move house if you haven't been able to negotiate new dates. In England, you can move house if you are moving into a new build; if you're in a chain and new dates can't be negotiated, you can still move. In England, viewings by those interested in buying are not permitted but surveyors are allowed to conduct urgent surveys with certain measures in place. Not sure what it is in Scotland as per usual, Scot.Gov. website isn't as easy to navigate as Gov.uk. This is what bugs me, is the amount of people who assume certain work isn't permitted when it is, such as landscaping, gardening, etc.

@Nullvoid - They can't keep the £10k, it's up to £10k permitted to claim in expenses! Yes, many firms are up against it and many of my colleagues are working from home, with additional telephone calls being reimbursed, for starters.

@ Urabug, sitting at home may well incur additional costs for some MPs, such as additional heating and lighting and depending upon where they live, those bills could easily amount to more than their travel costs. That said, their constituency offices should be using less light and heat but their staff's homes will be using more. Given that many MPs have more than one member of staff these days, do you not feel that their staff should be reimbursed for additional costs associated with working from home?

People are allegedly also dying at home in the UK from this - where are those figures? At least one other country has GPs travelling around their country to check on those people and assess them, whereas in the UK it seems to be that if you are told by NHS helpline to get back in touch if your symptoms worsen, some are too sick to fill in the form online or even lift up the telephone to ask for help/dial 999.

@ Muckle Oxters Not all illnesses are curable. Not all illnesses cause death. Some treatments and drugs can, however, lead to death; few medicines are without side effects and the permissible number for the 'collateral damage/deaths' is higher than what you might think. People have also died during drug trials. I have an incurable disease. The official medical advice is to stay on the medication during this outbreak, it's low grade chemo and no, it's not for cancer. I have an auto immune disease. I spoke with my consultant. I'm now off the medication. I tend not to get ill with coughs, colds, viruses, etc., when I'm off the medication; hell, I went over 10 years without even a cold. On the medication, different story. Even though I'm off the medication, it'll take months for it to work out of my system. My consultant agreed that there are a few (not everybody) who develops complications with COVID-19 whereby their immune systems turn on themselves and attacks all healthy cells, not just the virus. But nobody knows with what I have if my system will continue to attack the same areas it attacks now or if I'll be one of the few developing complications. Catch 22. So, between my consultant and I, we've decided the best approach is to come off the medication and give my immune system the chance to go back to how it is off the medication. Speaking to other people with the condition, I know that they have done the same after speaking with their consultants; so we're all basically going agains the standard NHS guidelines on this. Well, they don't exactly want a large number of people suddenly having their prescriptions changed, do they, swapping from one sort of medication to another because they couldn't cope with the workload. So yeah, I'm increased risk. I'm not a pensioner. I'd rather none of us died prematurely but I sure as hell wouldn't want a prolonged death either but as pointed out earlier in this thread, assisted dying isn't permissible in the UK. It's the non-acceptance of death being part of life that gets me, with many people seemingly being under the illusion that 'we'll all live forever'.

So, you think trying to save a 90 year old who contracts this virus who will have little or hardly any decent immune system left, prolonging their death by 2-3 weeks is a good idea when that ventilator could go to say a 30 year old asthmatic? I've got news for ya, dying of old age isn't a preventable but for some reason, many folk seem to think it is.

but forget government loans via some banks if you have property, even as an individual, but they'll offer you a few million instead of silly high rates.

@ Colin, bus drivers have apparently been asked also to ask passengers if journeys are essential and to let the police know. One bus driver posted on Failbook. I think the Police and Zettrans are overstepping the mark here. If they want to pull over a bus and ask the passengers, fine, but some people seem to accept that bus drivers have a legal right to ask you. I can't see anything in the legislation that gives bus drivers that power. If anything, it shouldn't be a bus driver on Failbook telling folk but ZetTrans should. Quizzing passengers just builds resentment and doesn't protect anyone. If they want such draconian measures, either go for the 'papiere bitte schnell schnell' approach or stop acting like the blooming gestapo. I'm not a fan of our civil liberties being tossed aside so lightly and accepted by so many.

100% agree. And the knockon effects of health services being inundated with coronavirus cases is other more 'routine' treatments being affected. And if we hit saturation with coronavirus, other urgent cases will be competing for resources. For the people on here advocating the 'survival of the fittest' approach', spare a thought for the health professionals who would be left with the hellish decision of who would receive treatment and who would be left to let nature take it's course. Many hospitals up and down the UK already take practically that approach with QALYS and DALYS. Day in, day out, we see operations cancelled and if two people's clinical needs are identical but their ages aren't, the younger person with the better chance of survival will get the operation. It's nothing new. What is new is this pandemic bringing to the forefront of people's minds that this does happen. Hospitals try to save everybody. My first thought would not be with the health professionals, but with the actual patient. If you were in your eighties, would you want to be treated in intensive care for two to three weeks, despite the fact that your chances of survival were incredibly low? Many in their later years have not survived this disease, and that's where you end up with hospitals being saturated and unable to cope with the sheer numbers requiring hospitalisation. It's horrid, as is one of the alternatives of not treating anyone over X age. It isn't a dignified pain-free death but then what death is?

@ Windwalker - Nobody wants to lose anybody, but whether we like it or not, people die all the time around the world. This isn't the world's most deadliest pandemic - fact. It is the first many people have any experienced in their lifetimes, yes. The flu, TB, etc., also affect people of all ages. The majority of people have recovered from the virus, something the media seems to want us to ignore. Not conspiracy theories, just plain facts. Go on John Hopkins University website if you don't believe me.

Some people ARE panicking, look at the state of the shelves in Tesco's over the last few weeks. If they weren't panicking, they wouldn't have been panic buying. The cries on social media to shut down construction sites, shut down this, shut down that; the economic fall-out from this is going to be huge. Many companies do not qualify for assistance if wanting more than £250,000 as directors are having to give personal guarantees and if they have already used company assets as security on other loans, they won't get a penny. We will know within the next two to three weeks just how deathly or not this pandemic is. The media is partially to blame for whipping up fear into a frenzy, instead of accepting that people's immune systems do deteriorate with age and older people do die yet the majority of people will survive. We don't live forever. Society has a problem on the whole with accepting that death is part of life. Never mind, let's try to protect everyone, have no jobs to return to, be bankrupt, have no food and die of starvation. As Ghostrider has pointed out, sooner or later we have to reach critical mass. Italy is reported to have had problems a couple of years ago with a normal flu outbreak, their hospitals couldn't cope back then. Italy is on the verge of social unrest with people starving there and folks have no savings left. Lockdowns can only last for so long. Governments need people working in order to provide services, etc. And when folk have had the virus, recovered, they are going to want to return to work IF there is a job remaining for them.

@ Davie P 11;15 mins onwards

Airborne viruses differ from farts and fag reek in that: * viruses are (usually) suspended in relatively heavy droplets (commonly propelled by coughs and sneezes) which fall under their own weight but can live on the surfaces they fall on, whereas * farts and fag reek are a combination of gasses and aerosol suspended particles The recommended 2m distance, combined with handwashing (in case you've come into contact with infected surfaces) should be fine in most instances, unless of course someone coughs or sneezes directly at you. If coronavirus could exist in aerosol form, the situation would be much more serious Except COVID-19 does exist in aerosol format, according to the Korean professor. He was recently interviewed as he is a leading expert, having previously been at the forefront with SARS and MERS. He is also actively involved with COVID-19. According to him, the reason why so many were infected at the Korean mass wedding ceremony a short while back, is because we all spit to a degree, even minutely, when we speak. When you sing or all speak at once in a confined space, COVID-19 can be spread in aerosol format. That's one reason why outdoor gatherings were permitted previously because in a confined space, aerosol format does exist and has already been proven to exist but all evidence is anedotal because evidence is not being gathered in scientific labs.

Diamond Princess was not following standard quarantine procedures. Yes, it was in quarantine at the port but on-board, passengers were still able to exercise on their balconies and go to other decks but they limited the time they could do so and the numbers permitted to be on another deck at the same time; in essence, the ship was in quarantine but those on-board were not under ultra-strict quarantine, which is one reason why so-called experts are saying it affected so many passengers. The virus is air-borne so by permitting passengers to exercise on their balconies, they ran the risk of catching the virus from those in say the next cabin even! According to the BBC, the cruise liner had 3,711 passengers on-board and at least 621 people later tested positive for the virus. Those with a higher risk of dying (may they RIP) are those with underlying health conditions and older people. So before you go onto your 'We're all DOOOOOOOMED!' rant, you need to consider that cruise liners these days tend to have a high percentage of pensioners as their main customer base. Wotcha gonna do to stop it winging its way over here in a storm then, have a word with God? If we get it, we get it but hopefully the virus will have burnt itself out by spring.

It would seem that the Post Office have previously been the subject of a rather longish debate in Westminster and how they have a habit of whilst TUPEing over employees, their pension is not TUPE'd over. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why the current employees do not wish to take up employ with Conochies?

^ That report isn't worth the paper it's typed on, a quick look at the Methodology outlines that it is basically full of holes. It is absolutely meaningless when it doesn't even do a comparison with deaths of the 'non-homeless'. For example, it uses addresses by local authorities to house homeless people. People in Shetland can have temporary agreements with Housing but that doesn't mean they are all long term homeless. Some addresses might well have been used to house homeless people in the past but then the temporary agreement can be followed by a secured tenancy agreement. Besides, are they now insinuating that a 'homeless death' means more than a 'non-homeless death'? Didn't see rehabilitation centres mentioned. Way to go in trying to hide the high number of drug-related deaths. May they all RIP.

Wouldn't TUPE Regulations apply if they were going to be doing the same job?

Boris is a tad livelier than May, that's for sure!

@ George, I'm on about a link to the article referred to by the OP, not your link.

What article? Link?

Capeesh, there is at least one member of the EU not in the Euro; namely the UK. There are others who aren't in the Euro. Is it not the case that any new members would have to join the Euro because there were several press reports with EU representatives stating that all new members would be expected to join. In addiion, Sturgeon got the cold shoulder from the EU when she wasted money going over there trying to get EU folk to listen to her. JCJ knew full well that of course they wouldn't force countries to join the Euro, with the upshot being that they couldn't join the EU.

Capeesh, it does NOT state "Scotland meets the criteria". Do you even know what it means when you put something in quotation marks? It means you are giving a direct quote as I've demonstrated below. "The first step is for the country to meet the key criteria for accession. These were mainly defined at the European Council in Copenhagen in 1993 and are hence referred to as 'Copenhagen criteria'. Countries wishing to join need to have: stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect for and protection of minorities;a functioning market economy and the capacity to cope with competition and market forces in the EU;the ability to take on and implement effectively the obligations of membership, including adherence to the aims of political, economic and monetary union." Clock "monetary union". That means joining the Euro.

Capeesh, you are incorrect. https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/conditions-membership_en