Lockdown end date 18 MONTHS away says health minister Nadine Dorris

Not full lockdown or a version as restrictive as what we have now, but there will be restrictions of some level for 12 to 18 months. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is.

Well Furlough cannot last longer than 3 months ,They have to do something ???

That is if they find a vaccine. Not a certainty by any means

Well said Nadine Dorries.

No surprise the media are now getting really uppity having been called out. You would think they are the ones running the country.

There have been numerous questions at the daily briefing which have been bordering on the ridiculous and were never going to be answered. No more than effectively mischief making. Those on the podium have just pandered to the journalists. A mistake. Quite rightly Sturgeon doesn't waste time on massaging egos with follow up questions and neither should anyone else. 

This is about what should be a very clear, simple message, with no distractions. The big question is why they need to keep repeating it.

It's impossible. The country couldn't survive.
Each day costs eye watering amounts of cash

Agree with that.  Nadine isn't the sharpest tool in the box as she manages to contradict herself.  She also doesn't think journalists should ask the most important question and hold the government to account.  Wasn't impressed with her in IMAC, and think she should stick to writing books.

They have set up plans to relax restrictions in Germany and Austria already, but then they are countries that have clearly handled the situation much better than the UK.  Nadine's post suggests the govt doesn't have a plan.  That's clearly bollox as they obviously have plans, but her tweet suggests a passive reactive approach.  Hopefully that is just her and not symptomatic of a general malaise in government.

Once the schools go back (after half term is my guess) people will relax and that could be dangerous. Huge call for the Govt and they are damned either way.

Well that's the Nurnberg rally cancelled but at least they'll get Oktoberfest.

Why did she post if it she didn't want a reaction ?

A lot will depend of the number of deaths

Once the Virus has peaked and starts to gradually diminish, that will effect how we react

I see we have now passed 13,000 deaths today

Good post JC

You are right, some people on here do have all the answers, just to the wrong bleeding questions though

You are very opinionated for someone who believes that opinions shouldn't be expressed.

The problem here isn't so much the opinionated posters. It's the idiotically arrogant views of the European politicians who believe they're the only ones who can have the answers. Why don't they take the time to look at what many of the (supposedly less well developed) Asian countries have done? Especially since many of the Asian countries have been dealing with SARS et al, and know a little about how to tackle these things.  South Korea set a clear model a few weeks ago, and continue to lead the way today.

70-75% of those who display symptoms have a raging fever. Get everybody (businesses and individuals) to temperature test, and set up makeshift antigen testing stations across all cities so that everybody who has a high temperature can be tested for the virus. (As of the middle of March, South Korea had only tested 270K people out of a population of 51 Million - that was an impressive achievement for then, but many European countries will be able to knock out 50K tests a day by the end of April, so testing itself shouldn't be a problem as long as you're targeting those with high temperatures. There's no need to test an entire population, as the Americans are talking about.)

Once you've got somebody testing positive, you get them to write down a list of all of the people they've been in close contact for a prolonged period for the last seven days. (That'll generally be the people they live with, a few people they work alongside, and one or two close friends.) Contact those people and tell them to get themselves tested, and try and get them to give you a further list of contacts etc. It's a lot of spadework, but it's not particularly difficult in itself. We could take on thousands of new staff temporarily and have them trained up in a few days. The key is to find out the source of the virus. In South Korea, around 80% of the cases came from just a handful of people. Work your way back until you find the source - or you run out of people who are testing positive - and you can then work back out again. In that way you can identify large groups of infected people and simply lift them out of the system. Let the rest of the people go about their normal business.

Contact tracing is the key. All European countries need to be doing it, as it's the way you work out who is infected, and isolate them so that they don't have the chance to infect anyone else. Apps might possibly help with the spadework, but basically it needs lots of people ready to make lots of phone calls. Many of the Asian countries are having great results with this. Australia also did it, and possibly didn't need to bother with their shutdown. (Many are crediting Australia's good results to their partial shutdown, but if you look at the figures, they had likely already controlled it with early contact tracing before the shutdown started to have any significant effect.  At least they seem to understand the need to have a proper system in place, and are working on having a much bigger-scale contact tracing system in place before opening up fully again. That's more than we can say for the clueless European countries.)

We could have temperature testing, mass antigen testing (50K a day would probably be fine, and 100K better still), and a national contact tracing system in place by the second week of May, and we could then send everybody back to work and keep a lid on the infections. Or we could just f**k around with economically destructive shutdowns and partial shutdowns for the next twelve to eighteen months, and spend the next fifty years writing history books about why we've been relegated to being a third or fourth-rate country.

70-75% of those who display symptoms have a raging fever.

I don't know the exact figure but that's clearly incorrect.  I'd suggest from The Diamond Princess figures, that around 20-40% have a temperature above 37.5%