italian dave

Moronic by Williams. Second time this season. Hope he never plays for us again.

Their traditional heartland being where?!

I'm certainly not basing this on anything I 'know', but Id always assumed that was the problem with UWE, and that either Wael was either not aware of it when he bought it, or maybe as you suggest didn't think it a problem but his brother did. I think it was/will be a big problem personally. Look at the massive difference expanding hospitality, food outlets etc has made to City - and we had some to start with! What? You mean he really is the 6th richest person in football??

Or what they could have had at UWE. As you say, dependent on the lease terms (I think that was the problem at UWE) but they can't know now what they'll likely be.

It might speed up getting out of the Dolman.

Can anyone help? Looking for an article or suchlike about the future of the game over the next 4-5 years. Not just whether we'll get this season finished. It's for a friend in Italy who's a teacher and has a student doing his final exam about it. I'll signpost to the article above by the Huddersfield chairman, but wondered if anyone has come across anything else? Thanks

I assume that means vote on the mechanism for deciding the final positions, not vote on who finishes where. Because if it were the latter then Rovers, being the much loved club that they apparently are, recognised by other clubs throughout the football world, would doubtless get voted into the top two. Seriously, it depends a bit, surely, on what happens in the Chamionship. If there's no relegation or promotion then surely the final positions are nothing more than academic.

Mmmm...ironic, maybe, but I think we’re just slightly in a different place now than we were when Flybe got their handout.

And an even worse example just now on Sky News Mr Wetherspoon, Tim Martin, defending keeping his pubs open , claiming no-one has caught the virus in one of his pubs, intends to keep them open throughout, what a complete and utter moron. And, on the ‘bringing politics into it’ debate, I’ve been in two minds, but when you hear that Boris has refused to comment, despite the fact that it’s clearly encouraging people to ignore government advise, and we all know why he won’t criticise Mr Wetherspoon, well I’m beginning to feel he’s the one bringing politics into it.

The satellite images of northern Italy are astonishing compared to a month ago. And in the canals in Venice they have fish, swans and even dolphins.

Just watched channel 4 news interview a woman in a crowded London street proudly saying she won't follow social distancing advice because "it means we're just giving in" to it. Unbelievable.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of our government, I suppose at least one consolation is that we don't have Trump in charge. If ever there is a man worse able to manage the situation, and if ever there is a worse strategy for dealing with it, I can't imagine. Interesting perspective from the US here of the contrast with Merkel. Now I don't always agree with her policies, but she is a leader - something in very short supply at the moment. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/angela-merkel-nails-coronavirus-speech-unlike-trump.html

Hard to believe that this time last week we thought we were going to Blackburn on Saturday.

Government briefing this morning stressing that there is "zero prospect" of a London lockdown. Does anyone else get a feeling that means it's coming, but they just want to avoid what happened in Italy when word got out and everyone fled from Milan to different parts of the country.

Not sure about the first sentence. Different countries are approaching it in so many different ways I don't really know how any estimate would be made. Some (like us so far) only test when someone gets to hospital. Others when people have symptoms. Others when they have the testing kits. And what the trial in Italy showed, when they tested a whole population, was that more than half the people who have the virus show no symptoms. So, certainly feels like understanding who's had the virus will help with the numbers. But what would be even better would be testing not who's had it, but who's got it. That seems to be how S Korea have managed it with relative success, and the town in Italy - despite being close to the epicentre there - managed to reduce new cases to zero.

Doesn't help when the Prime Minister's own father blithely announces on TV that he's still going to go to the pub.

They are sending medical equipment and doctors to Italy. Maybe actions speak louder than words.

In Italy the supermarkets are still open, but access is limited, you have to keep a distance from other shoppers, and trolleys, tills etc are cleaned after every use.

Absolutely. And that article from Italy in my post above suggests that NHS surgeon is spot on. And by the same token, isolating only people with symptoms means that more than half the people who have the virus are still wandering around the place unaware they have it.

I agree, hence my suggestion elsewhere that we won't get a 20-21 season. Apart for a vaccine, the other thing that may affect this is the understanding we increasingly get of the virus. And so far, much of that points to the importance of testing, something the WHO has been banging on about, S Korea has been very good at and we, and the US, pretty poor. Although little pockets seem to have re-occured in S Korea since they got the numbers down, they have been very quick to identify and contain them. There's an interesting article in the Italian press about a small town call Vo', in the North, where they have been testing the entire population. One thing that's highlighted is that 50% or more of people who catch the virus are asymptomatic. That means they take fewer precautions, and may even be doctors or other health workers. And children particularly - so it's not necessarily that they don't catch the virus, just that they don't show any symptoms. So, by identifying and isolating these people they've been able to reduce the rate of spread significantly. https://www.repubblica.it/salute/medicina-e-ricerca/2020/03/16/news/coronavirus_studio_il_50-75_dei_casi_a_vo_sono_asintomatici_e_molto_contagiosi-251474302/ So, what we could get, for example, would be regular testing for whole populations - massively expensive but compared to what the Chancellor announced yesterday...?

With news of the Euros being postponed by a year, and all the talk this morning of how long this will last, I can't help thinking that this season re-start again next March, and we'll just not have a 20-21 season Bit annoying, as I've just bought my season ticket!

I'm not for a minute claiming to be an expert on this, but as I understand it health spending in the U.K. has increased over the past decade, as it has over the past 70 years , whether you measure that before or after inflation. There have been a few short periods, 2010/11 ish being the last, where that didn't happen, but overall upwards. However, it's gone up by less in the past decade than it had before that. The problem is that tells only a small % of the story. Over the same time we've grown older, we live longer, we get more illnesses in old age etc etc. When the welfare state was introduced after the war I believe that the average person lived for three years after their state pension age. That's an issue for pensions, but it's also a hell of a lot of hip replacements not to mention longer term illness. In addition, we've got far far better at treating people, but at a cost. I know a little about cystic fibrosis, for example. 20 years ago if you had CF you'd probably die by the age of 20, and you'd have few drug options beyond anti-biotics. Nowadays, you might live twice that long (with all the hospitalisation that involves) and there are specialist drugs now coming on the market. One, Orkambi, was the subject of a recent campaign to get approval for its use by the NHS, and there are second and third generations now being trialled. They cost literally hundreds of thousands of pounds per patient each year. So, just keeping up with inflation, or even a little above it, is way way short of what's needed. Lastly, it depends what you spend on, as well. The government recently announced capital funding for new hospitals. That's all well and good, but if you keep revenue funding (day to day spending) at its current levels, as we are, then you won't have any nurses or doctors to work there. The US as a whole spends more on healthcare per capita than just about anywhere else, but has some of the worse outcomes because their system is completely disfunctional. We spent, in 2017 (latest data apparently) just under £3000 per person, which is around the OECD average, but less than the old EU15 average.

Good luck, hope you get a positive response. We are all going to need people like you in the weeks to come. Ludicrous position to be in though: someone, and at a lower level than the health minister, needs to just take the responsibility to make decisions that our outside the norm.

And so, presumably, only counting them in the numbers too?? And at the same time as the World Health Organisation are stressing test, test, test. I believe S Korea have tested something like 1/4 million people.

I think @MarcusX meant 40 years ago; just before we joined the EU, a time I can remember, we were known variously as the sick man of Europe, the poor man of Europe and the dirty man of Europe. Fairly sexist times, as you'll gather! But not far from the truth.