Dido says that no-one prediced the rise in requests for testing. Really?

Honestly Lucca you will never get a more clear and trustworthy explanation of the statistics than you can get on "More or Less"

Dido, Queen of Carthage
Dido is described as a clever and enterprising woman who flees her ruthless and autocratic brother, Pygmalion, after discovering that he was responsible for her husband's death. Through her wisdom and leadership, the city of Carthage is founded and made prosperous.

Perhaps this one should revert to her real name.

varian

For more accurate statistics on covid testing in the UK, listen to the first item on Wednesday's edition of "More or Less"

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08rlmn8

Not being funny but I got lost, too complicated for me. Can anyone explain ?

Dido Queen of Carnage. Absolutely.

westendgirl

Sorry ,WW2, but I saw the same news in the Sunday Times.
How can you appoint someone who may have experience, but who has not been successful in that sphere.

The only experience she appears to have is of failing.

Sorry ,WW2, but I saw the same news in the Sunday Times.
How can you appoint someone who may have experience, but who has not been successful in that sphere.

For more accurate statistics on covid testing in the UK, listen to the first item on Wednesday's edition of "More or Less"

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p08rlmn8

Following the EU referendum, a group of MPs investigating fake news ordered Mr Cummings to appear before them for questioning about the Vote Leave campaign.

He did not respond the order of the House, and was accused of showing a “total disregard” for the authority of Parliament.

A report concluded Mr Cummings committed contempt of Parliament “both by his initial refusal to obey the Committee’s order to attend it and by his subsequent refusal to obey the House’s order”.

inews.co.uk/news/dominic-cummings-controversies-lockdown-genetics-contempt-of-parliament-brexit-430679

Dido Harding showed herself to be thoroughly inept and incompetent in her appearance before the Parliamentary Committee, but at least she deigned to appear, unlike Cummings who remains in Contempt of Parliament, yet seems untouchable.

Seems we are top of the tree for testing

Urmstongran The reason that the person in your example was able to get a test was no thanks to the Government, but because someone passed on some local information. Our local Facebook group gives anecdotal information about which testing centres are operating well.
It is the Government testing system which is operating badly.

The skies are the limit for the Baroness. Seems that it's a supreme example of its not what you know but who. It would almost be acceptable if the results were excellent, but it's one failure after another. I read this morning that a labour peer is questioning whether her rocket fuelled promotion is against the constitution.

Who knew that children go to school in September?

Indeed Furret, it cames as a tremendous shock to everyone. Apparently.

Far from firing her, ministers have promoted Harding to head their new National Institute for Health Protection. She didn’t apply for the post, she admitted to parliament.

Is that legal? Shouldn't the post be advertised?

Oh, I forgot, silly me! It doesn't matter if it's legal or not, does it.

Ah well there's any Health Protection down the drain then!

Who knew that children go to school in September?

Who guessed that hundreds of thousands of students head to universities where they – and easily shocked readers should look away – strive with every fibre of their being to mingle with each other as vigorously as they can?

What clairvoyant might have predicted that, when the government offered the public cut-price restaurant meals at the taxpayers’ expense, the public would gobble them up? Or that, when the prime minister urged workers to go back to their offices and save Pret a Manger, a few brave souls would have returned to their desks and risked having “dulce et decorum est pro Pretia mori” carved on their gravestones?

You may have expected trouble, but Baroness Dido Harding was flabbergasted. The complaint from MPs that the rise in Covid cases was “entirely predictable” baffled the head of the NHS test-and-trace programme. Nobody “was expecting to see the really sizeable increase in demand that we’ve seen over the course of the last few weeks,” she said.

Harding could not see a foreseeable crisis because she has no qualifications for running a public health service in a national emergency. She’s in post because she is a Tory peer and supporter of the governing regime. Far from firing her, ministers have promoted Harding to head their new National Institute for Health Protection. She didn’t apply for the post, she admitted to parliament.

Nick Cohen

Curlygirl

I do hope this isn’t true but have just read on Mail Online that the head of the NHS in England is ready to step down and could be replaced by Dido Harding. Please tell me this isn’t true.

A spoof I expect.

I do hope this isn’t true but have just read on Mail Online that the head of the NHS in England is ready to step down and could be replaced by Dido Harding. Please tell me this isn’t true.

A friend in Manchester has been tested this week and has Covid. She is 60y old and works part time.

She tried to get a test on line as she had a cough, was super tired and had lost her sense of smell & taste. No use with the on line application.

Someone told her of a walk in testing centre in Trafford Park so she drove over. 10 minute drive. Had the test (no queue) and got the result the next day.

I find that heartening. It’s not all chaos.

Only this week Dominic Cummings was pictured slouching through the Downing Street gates carrying some archive letter written by US general Bernard Shriever, pushing for continued investment in ballistic weapons technology.

...and if anyone thinks this was just a happenstance with no significance, someoe like Cumming is not seen displaying a letter like this without carefully thinking it through first. it had a purpose and its purpose carried a message for, probably, the Americans. Signalling a positive interest in a missile defence shield as if by accident and leaving them entirely free to deny any interest in it, if it is expedient for them so to do.

Spad as a verb - that is good! Like it

Great article. Nail firmly on head.

Extract from Marina Hyde’s article

Still, here she comes again – Dido Queen of Carnage, on hand to gloss the havoc. As she put it: “I don’t think anybody was expecting to see the really sizeable increase in demand that we’ve seen over the course of the last few weeks.” But Dido: they literally were.

At least Harding is visible. Huge amounts of the malfunctioning system are now being run – badly – by unaccountable figures. Take firms like Deloitte, which ran logistics at the testing site at what we might call Chessington World of Misadventures. Hospitals felt forced to ask to take it over after the results of NHS staff were serially lost or misdirected. The pile of 2020 sentences I never expected to type is now Earth’s tallest structure, but let’s add another one: “NHS commandeers Vampire Ride from accountancy firm charged with controlling spread of deadly pandemic.” (Seriously, stick a fork in me. I’m done.)

While Harding was defending the barely functional testing system, Jacob Rees-Mogg was telling the Commons that “instead of this endless carping saying it’s difficult to get [tests], we should be celebrating this phenomenal success of the British nation”. To which the only possible reply is four-lettered.

His own ma and pa clearly hopelessly overindulged Jacob Rees-Mogg, but millions of other parents just will not feel minded to take it from this rejected Charlie and the Chocolate Factory character. If there were any justice, Jacob would have been stretched into a mile-long liquorice lace by vigilante Oompa-Loompas as they sang one of their trademark cautionary songs.

Instead, he is somehow leader of the House of Commons. There, he speaks of what ordinary people “should” be doing – with the air of a man who knows that if any of the Mogg progeny are sent home from school with a possible Covid symptom, it’s not going to be him taking time off work to homeschool them and wait for a test spot to open up in Manchester a week on Friday.

There is zero uncertainty about childcare and loss of earnings in the Rees-Mogg household, where even the adults still have nannies. (At the age of 51, Jacob retains the live-in childcare professional who was – formerly? – responsible for wiping his backside.)

Yet again, the overriding impression is of a government run by men for whom the domestic sphere is a mystery they have no wish to get to the bottom of. One of them driving hundreds of miles to Durham – just in case he got ill and still had to do his own childcare – sounds, to the other guys, like a totally reasonable thing to have done. Meanwhile the big boss fails to be meaningfully involved in the lives of between 17% and 29% of his children (awaiting full data). If you can be persuaded it’s normal to drive a 60-mile round trip with a child in the car to test your eyesight, then naturally you believe parents should think it fine to stick a five-year-old in their own vehicle and travel 400 miles to obtain what’s necessary to get the child back to school and them back to work.

Either way, of course a government run by weirdo elitists didn’t reflexively foresee that September – back to school, back to offices – was going to mean a huge surge in testing demand. This is the trouble when “hardworking families” is merely a demographic you wish to appeal to, as opposed to who you are. Real-life “hardworking families” could have told you in a heartbeat that September was the main event. THEY could have predicted it. Because unless someone else does it all for you, huge amounts of parenting are about thinking ahead, planning, creating yet another routine that keeps the whole precarious show on the road – the endless foresight of it all.

Only this week Dominic Cummings was pictured slouching through the Downing Street gates carrying some archive letter written by US general Bernard Shriever, pushing for continued investment in ballistic weapons technology. Cummings should hang around the school gates instead, where any amount of mothers who’ve seen all this shit before and didn’t have time for it back then would be able to enlighten him in the simplest possible terms. Namely: Hey squidbrain, I’ve got some “data” for you! Mind if I “special advise” you with it, only I don’t have a window to put it in a 20,000-word blog? OK, here goes: I don’t WANT you to build me a fricking missile defence shield, I don’t CARE about the Manhattan Project, I think all your reading recommendations REEK of the business section of the airport bookshop, and I’m NOT going to be accused of “carping” by guys who’d have a nervo if they had to change a nappy.

You know what I want? A SWAB WITHIN A THIRTY-MILE RADIUS, YESTERDAY. Now spad THAT, genius.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/18/matt-hancock-test-and-trace-dido-harding

Furret:

'What matters, the only thing that matters, is that less people die.'

Yes, of course, that's what matters to us. The government, though? Will they be devastated at the loss of pensioners, the disabled and poorly? Think on.

varian

But is it Boris who makes these appointments?

Cummings spent three years in Russia and all of his subsequent actions seem to be tailored to advance Putin's agenda of weakening the West, firstly by taking the UK out of the EU, then by destroying the UK by promoting incompetent politicians and their brexit friends, no matter how unqualified to positions which they are obviously unable to fulfill.

What hold does this man have on Boris Johnson?

varian: I just can’t understand why there are no questions asked about Cummings time in Russia.

So he should, he buried most of them ?