Red alert, day 23. Lockdown, day 13. Suffolk has 191 confirmed cases this morning and Tower Hamlets has 288 confirmed cases (can that be right? It’s only one more than yesterday). The UK has 42,479 confirmed cases, and as of yesterday 4313 patients have died, or 4320 depending on the source. Although these figures are not complete or reliable, they probably track the real figures in some way.
Even these figures are not reliably archived; the daily Public Health England release, which should be the authority, cannot be accessed once they change it to the next day’s. This is part of the business capital Bloomberg offers its clients: a database of publicly released information that should really be publicly archived in an accessible way. Journalists and others should not have to FOI basic data.
Healthcare workers in both the US and UK are without proper PPE and getting sick. A friend worked as an Ebola nurse and nursing professor in Africa and she wore a bunny suit whose seals had to be checked by a second worker. This is what is needed for working with sick COVID-19 patients. The first two nurses in the UK have died. The Nightingale Hospital at the Excel Centre is open or just about, and its owners seem to have consented to waive rent for it.
Here in the UK, the central government did not take every opportunity to get PPE and ventilation equipment and prepare; in the US, they got equipment, made the states fight for it, traded it abroad.
Keir Starmer was finally elected the new Labour leader after a months-long stress test. Unlike Jeremy Corbyn, he is not a person whose personality makes other people quit the party. He is making authoritative yet conciliatory noises about needing to work with the government to address the crisis.
The Financial Times published a radical editorial endorsing wealth redistribution:
The New York Times published a story about Finland and its great Cold War prepping that is saving it now. (It’s not “in the DNA,” it’s in the law.) Helsingin Sanomat published a column saying introverts are enjoying the lockdown. Indeed, the government may have thought they didn’t have to tell people about social distancing because it’s a way of life. Finns may have locked down well enough to turn the tide, according to health department THL, but other stories in the paper warn not to come out too fast. The country has 209 people in hospital. 28 people in Finland have died vs. 401 in (larger) Sweden.
This was the calm between two bursts of work and while I felt busyish all day, I completed nothing of note.