love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

Italy has reported 919 new deaths from coronavirus, the highest number of fatalities any country has reported in the space of 24 hours since the outbreak began late last year.

and the national health institute are saying this is not even the anticipated peak yet. Huge surge in Spain as well - 769 deaths.

Deaths are up in Italy but new infections are down again. We won’t know for a bit but people take a long time to get through this. If new infections continue to fall, the deaths will follow too but the lag is because of how the disease is. The people who died could have been infected up to three weeks ago.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUJdwDoWkAA0GO5?format=jpg&name=900x900

never mind the grim inevitability of the locked in Rona tsunami of death, has Jess managed to get her pizza yet?

Thank you, I was just looking for a screenshot of that! Ridiculous person.

I think even most braindead tory of celebz would be wary about flexing their bluetick status @ food delivery companies in an era when pensioners and the disabled can't get a food delivery within the calendar month rn.

she's not braindead, she's #real

I mean lads. Fucking Pizza Hut.

Sorry to hear this. Please reach out to our friends @PizzaHutUK for further assistance. Thanks for your understanding.

— Pizza Hut (@pizzahut) March 27, 2020

she's speaking truth to bad pizzas

i have never met anybody in real life who's ordered a Pizza Hut delivery when any alternative takeaway, no matter how bad, was available

I bet there is no shortage of top quality takeaways in her constituency as well

you've got that right, bab

will be no salve at all that history will have proved JC right once again when this is over. a politician who had been banging on about the inherent fragility of people's situations and the risks inherent to how our economy has changed in the past decade. someone who was banging on about the deep-seated insecurity and precarity that characterises many people's lives, particularly with the rise in the gig economy and self-employment. aye good one, cassandra, look at the employment figures

Complaining about lateness in delivery in takeaways at this stage is absolutely rotten. Drivers are literally putting their lives at risk, dealing with highly inflated demand and more often than not they're undocumented and as such unprotected in this crisis. Fucking wait for your shitty pizza.

^

She’s an absolute master of bad looks. Impressive in its way

a bit of a character

Also, in the nu-lockdown era: what's the fucking rush?

Very critical that Phillips gets her early dinner, do you not know how important she is

Wahhh, where's my hasenpfeffer?!?

I'm not saying they would ever stoop to such lows, but this seems like a bad time to provoke the fine employees of pizza hut UK into flobbing on your thincrust

Looks like JP deleted the tweet?

Bad look indeed.

it'll make a great episode for her sitcom

NHS working with Peter Thiel's Palantir company to mine data in response to the current crisis.

If JP were a pizza she would definitely be a nothing with left beef

NHS working with Peter Thiel's Palantir company to mine data in response to the current crisis.

Meanwhile it appears a government spokesperson confirmed they knew about the EU ventilator email on live TV *before* the government claimed it had somehow been lost.

We're literally all gonna die because of the government's obsession with handling the politics of Brexit in a pandemic. And while things like that medicines report in the Guardian from a couple of weeks elicited an eye roll and a fuck off at the time - this sort of stuff is a concrete example of why it really matters, beyond blue face paint FBPE hobbyhorsing.

A lot of the fiasco surrounding the ventilators will be totally due to the likes of Bodger and his covid-positive cronies seizing the controls of the procurement process like they're fucking Errol Flynn, and phoning round their business mates to cut a deal instead of just letting the people that do it as their actual job just get on with it

Yes that's another infuriating aspect to this.

Also for all the headline talk about ventilators, there are doctors and nurses with a shortage of basic protective wear.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/28/chaos-and-panic-lancet-editor-says-nhs-was-left-unprepared-for-covid-19

Today we donated our entire stock of disposable scrubs to an NHS hospital. It was just a few sets, because we don't carry large stocks, but they were desperate, so we sent them free of charge.
We don't usually do politics on Twitter, but here's a short thread. [1/5] pic.twitter.com/Z4ygmGr99M

— MedFetUK (@MedFet_UK) March 27, 2020

they should have been working on the PPE shortages weeks ago, total lack of planning here from the govt and NHS Trust bosses by the sound of it.

People on wards are literally wearing bin bags right now so that fetishwear story isn't just lols.

The scale of the enquiry when this is all over will need to be gigantic and the government should have nothing to do with it.

That clapping tho

I imagine Labour might think the clapping can be weaponized at a future date. I think they're wrong, for reasons people have pointed out upthread. I understand that lots of people are going thru a lot of tough emotions so to a large extent I'm trying to rein in my personal distaste for twee keep calm and carry on bullshit in all its forms, even tho really I think that's always been part of the problem, alongside non-directed "kindness" and the general bourgie public weltenschaung.

No investigation needed. Anyone can see that we’ll need 5-10 years of austerity to pay for this massive one-off event. It’s not nice but we’ve all got to pull together on this one.

I have a horrible feeling you're right.

look we’re sorry that covid-19 disproportionately killed tens of thousands of sick, elderly and vulnerable people but out only option now to restart the economy is to introduce policies which will kill tens of thousands of sick, elderly and vulnerable people

I was just thinking that what this country needed was another dose of austerity. We've all had it too easy for too long.

There will need to be an enormous period of economic reconstruction and a flood of cheap cash though. The rest of the 2020s might be more like the 1920s than any of us thought :/

Pushing through 2010s style austerity might be easier said than done when a) most of the country is on government income support of one form or another and b) everything that can be cut has already been cut to the bone.

my local mutual aid whatsapp group experienced a politics-driven meltdown and a tempban today, expecting more or this not less (he was a tory and overtly being a dick, also possibly channer-trolling not real)

Part of the PPE problem would be a supply shortage from China due to constraints on manufacturing followed by a huge global spike in demand, and unlike ventilators, literally everyone is trying to buy the things. But aprons and gloves and goggles are a barely adequate measure anyway, they should have had a strategic reserve of visors and suits and the like, but apparently Jeremy Hunt put the kibosh on that a couple years back. Should be able to scale up production of that stuff fairly rapidly though cos its pretty low tech

The secretary of state for Scotland, Alister Jack, is self-isolating after developing coronavirus symptoms. He is the third cabinet member, after Boris Johnson and the health secretary, Matt Hancock, tested positive for Covid-19 yesterday, to self-isolate after experiencing symptoms. In the past 24 hours, Jack said he had developed a cough and mild temperature so was self-isolating and working from home. He has yet to be tested.

Should be able to scale up production of that stuff fairly rapidly though cos its pretty low tech

In Taiwan the govt had a PPE count, realised there would be drastic shortages and ramped up PPE manufacturing and put a block on exports. It isnt fucking rocket science. I know our manurfacting base is quite pathetic after decades of Thatcherism, but fucking hell they could have tried something at least.

Herd Immunity would have meant superhero NHS staff able to use karate on viruses.

1,019 dead from coronavirus in the uk

260 in the last 24 hours :(

A nation of grasses and curtain-twitchers.

”We are getting calls from people who say 'I think my neighbour is going out on a second run - I want you to come and arrest them'.

"We have had dozens and dozens of these calls."

And that's well before we've reached the point where the system is totally swamped, local exceptions aside xp