The NHS is looking for up to 250k volunteers
england.nhs.uk
england.nhs.uk
I'd be much more likely to accept that this was causative if not for the existence of San Francisco and other one-party cities that nonetheless exemplify incompetent governance.
You ever been to a DMV? Or seen someone treated at the VA? Or heard how patents are issued at the Patent Office?
The government is good at some things. It's really, really bad at others, and has zero accountability most of the time.
Asian countries seemed to have reacted better in this case - undoubtedly a major chunk of that was due to prior outbreaks in that region, but is that the only variable that contributed to the outcome?
Edit to add: okay, so a sibling comment claims the reason is a Confucian, culture. But that’s narrow, everything is always multi-factorial. It’s good to see and discuss one aspect, but not at the expense of other considerations.
I don't believe I said "anyone here has claimed there is only one variable that explains any countries better or worse ability with regard to this pandemic."
I propose that something very interesting is going on here, at the object level. I also propose, more speculatively and provocatively, that something very interesting is also happening at the meta-level: a reluctance to discuss the phenomenon.
I just didn't really see where you were coming as a reply to the original comment, where you'd written "prior outbreaks ... only variable" and the parent comment was talking about "civil society (and) social capital".
If it was about the "prior outbreaks" part, that commented was making a reference to the ~common belief that the superior outcome for Asian countries was solely the result of their past experiences with SARS, etc. In retrospect, I should have made that reference explicitly, apologies for that.
It’s way past time the government stopped messing around and just hired all the spare labour - which can then be directed to assist the NHS or directed to stay at home as required.
When there are so many people without work that want it we need to stop QE’ing Gilts and start QE’ing workers hours instead.
All this could be done with an off the shelf PAYE system and a few scripts to generate the BACS file to hand over to the BoE.
It fixes the layoffs, redundancies and the lack of work for the self employed and it will automatically back off when things recover.
Pay people and they spend it - keeping the economic circulation ticking over.
I urge you to not assume your position is the standard and to see beyond your nose.
There's a very obvious and very real additional factor at play here.
* https://services.parliament.uk/Bills/2019-21/coronavirus/doc...
But those complications can be set aside for the moment, and anyone caught abusing the normal regulations can be dealt with severely later.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...
By contrast, paying wages to otherwise idle workers isn't going to make much of a dent in the CPI. If it did, there would be a clear correlation between unemployment rate and consumer prices.
Spending is automatically recovered by taxation of the flow. If the central bank spends on wages, the Treasury will end up running a surplus.
Admittedly not everyone can afford to volunteer
Volunteering can be good for your mental health, see https://duckduckgo.com/?q=volunteering+improves+mental+healt...
Volunteers have enough wealth to volunteer (or, as stated, can get hooked up with better opportunities, but gotta jump over that first barrier).
Lots of things you would need to (obviously) control for.
Dunno if I’ll ever see a double-blinded randomized trial on volunteering though.
The only people who are arguing "more research is needed" are social science professors and their PhD candidates.
Yeah, sure, if your mental health is so poor you can't leave the house, it goes without saying those who can get out of the house do, be default, have better mental health. That doesn't mean those people aren't deriving any additional benefit.
You don't have to be wealthy to volunteer, you can be homeless and living on government allowances and still volunteer.
> Dunno if I’ll ever see a double-blinded randomized trial on volunteering though.
Social scientists generally don't do these kinds of studies. A more typical research question might be something like "what forms of volunteering do italian grandpas take part in, and what are the perceived benefits do these efforts for themselves and the communities they serve?" This would be addressed through open-ended semi-structured interviews through various sampling methods, but probably a snowball sampling strategy. The research goes in the directions that the subjects lead it in, with effort being made to tie up loose ends as part of a theory-building process. Basically a structured and evidence-based attempt to come up with a coherent explanation.
There isn’t actually much to spend it on right now, other than rent, groceries, and online entertainment. Everything else is closed and my bank balance is actually looking much more healthy than it normally would this far into the month!
Some people, like you, have a bank balance getting healthier.
But others have the opposite. Those people could really do with being paid somehow while they are supporting the NHS.
Ah yes, forgot calling out pedantry hits too close to home with one of the world's most pedantic communities.
* https://services.parliament.uk/Bills/2019-21/coronavirus/doc...
Emergency volunteers are sections 8 and 9, and a bunch of stuff in the schedules.
They can't go out, can't spend it on anything but essentials and some percentage of those essentials are difficult to get anyway.
Amazon.
The government has not declared a rent holiday ..
Essentials, rent, utilities, insurance, vehicle costs, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, entertainment, gambling, software, online gaming, anything that can be picked up or delivered from industries that are still operating. Maybe they'll save some of it and spend it latter, or invest it now or later.
It's a collection of hundreds of legally separate organisations. A doctor goes to work for eg Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, or for Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, they don't go to work for "The NHS".
In 2017 there were:
207 clinical commissioning groups,
135 acute non-specialist trusts (including 84 foundation trusts),
17 acute specialist trusts (including 16 foundation trusts),
54 mental health trusts (including 42 foundation trusts),
35 community providers (11 NHS trusts, 6 foundation trusts,
17 social enterprises and 1 limited company),
10 ambulance trusts (including 5 foundation trusts), and
7,454 GP practices.
The largest is probably Barts Health NHS Trust, which employs about 15,000 people. The smallest is probably Weston Area Health NHS Trust which I think employs about 1,700 people.
These organisations are legally separate. They have their own board of directors. They employ their own staff.
To change this we'd have to roll-back the Lansley Reforms, and that's too hard to do even when we're not going through pandemic.
And it is not really NHS' fault that people tend not to know their neighbors anymore and thus need an app that matches their willingness to help with a recipient...
Still worried about a slippery slope - free at the point of need. No relying on extra support. If we need it pay people to do the job.
I suspect a part of the reason for the call is to communicate that we are not in normal times and the idea of paying someone to make your problems go away doesn't work. Help or get out of the way, your payment will be a slightly less broken country when this is past.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/20/8190384...
https://www.genengnews.com/news/covid-19-reinfection-not-a-c...
A statement that includes explicit acknowledgement of uncertainty should not be downvoted (unless there is another reason contained within), full stop. If this was /r/politics, fine, but it isn't.
This is causing harm to society that we have very little means of seeing (at least not without an investment of significant effort and time, something most people tend to avoid whenever possible).
I have deliberately not included acknowledgement of uncertainty, for two reasons.
For instance, say, "I fully acknowledge that this is just bunk told in jest to small children, but perhaps the Moon could really be made of Roquefort cheese." is not a HN-worthy comment.
That is undoubtedly true. It may even be consistent with official site guidelines (which I don't think make any claim to be perfect - "perfect is the opposite of good" as they say).
Might this also be true: "In HN, comments are sometimes downvoted, irrespective of whether the comment is insubstantial, off-topic, or incorrect. The reasons behind this are incredibly complex."
We simply do not know what this virus will do.
The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 came in waves, and they were different.
Worst case scenario (of people acting on my previous comment), people believe they can be reinfected and would practice further physical distancing. That does not seem malicious, but hey, I might be wrong.
Think about it this way, if your mother was concerned and you said, "Don't quote me on this, but as far as I know, you can be infected twice", you can bet your ass she would believe you.
I’m fairly sure I had it, but can’t be 100% certain until the test for antibodies is available.
https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/24/uk-buys-3500000-antibody-test...
The headfake could be that this leads to an improvement to the health and well-being of the 250k volunteers some of whom might otherwise suffer from feelings of loneliness and helplessness
As someone who has grown up benefitting from the NHS, I will sign up to volunteer, and am glad to do so. I wouldn't be surprised to see ample response from the rest of the nation.
Interestingly, in the past I've also experienced private health-care in the US, and yet wouldn't consider volunteering in the same situation on that side of the pond (and, of course, they likely wouldn't ever ask).
the inherent problem of today's society is exactly because it rewards people who are "selfish" and value-chasing far more then having a far more communical mindset.
In terms of value extraction from society, those who play selfish win, and they win at the expense of others.
I would even like to add that they might even be rewarded for this behaviour at large in our current economic system. Because the system is very bad at including costs of external factors. These external factors right now are being paid for by society at large. A prime example of this would be enviromental costs and bailouts with too little strings attached.
It is too easy to say the a mass of people should just work for free to cope for the mistakes of their government. Now of course some people will do it and I admire them, some of them will even do it while in personal financial trouble and I admire them even more.
But they absolutely should be paid in the end. Because the value they will provide to the society is just enormous, and "us" (for those who do not help with the crisis) not paying them would not really be the fairest situation...
Presumably we aren’t talking about volunteering the time of other people, but ourselves. If we can all afford to do it, isn’t it something to be encouraged, especially since it will charitably benefit those who cannot afford to do it?
Remember, many people are one month away from the Sheriff showing up at our door, and evicting us at gunpoint.
It's like the companies asking for a bailout -fine if you were running a good business and got impacted by a once in a lifetime event, maybe we should look at it. But if the reasons you've got no cash reserves to weather the storm is because you spent it all on share buybacks then maybe the risk lies with the shareholders since they reaped the rewards.
It's just another step in the cycle - cut services, cut taxes and then act shocked when the services aren't good enough to cope, and then point in every direction you can except for actually providinig the services that the government is responsible for.
This implies that paid labour is basically free for governments at the moment. They can either pay people jobless claims, or hire people for the new work that needs doing.
Volunteers are also a great idea! But I want to emphasize that governments shouldn't shy away from projects now if the labour costs money. Because they're currently about to pay people to not labour. So any outlay in salary is a savings on unemployment claims.
Because when those volunteers go to get something they want, such as buying a home or paying rent, it won't be given to them free. It might be possible for some sense of social capital to exist to feel the gap, but that seems to be mostly gone these days as it has be optimized and hacked until it is no longer recognizable.
Perhaps it's bleak, but it is an expectation that generally works even without massive brainwashing. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
> Interestingly, in the past I've also experienced private health-care in the US, and yet wouldn't consider volunteering...
So your willingness to help is premised on upholding some collectivist institution, not on helping save lives in times of a crisis. Interesting indeed.
Interestingly, my local hospital emailed today and said that "Emergency Department attendance figures have fallen by 130 cases per day, or around 40% as a result of this crisis"
When I was finally seen by a doctor, he "mentioned" that if I'd been waiting much longer I might have lost at least some use of my hand.
He also said that, at least in my neck of the woods, it's not unusual to wait up to 8 hours on a Friday/Saturday evening.
The NHS has a waiting time target in emergency departments where 95% of patients are seen, transferred or discharged in under 4 hours.
For some time that target has not been met. In many places it was down to just 85% of patients being seen, transferred or discharged within 4 hours.
A while ago we were comfortable with that because we know a bunch of people who shouldn't be at A&E turn up there, and it's safe for them to wait.
But more recently we've seen that people who should be waiting, people at risk of harm, have had to wait longer.
If you like spreadsheets there are loads here, giving details of A&E attendance across England and with details of 4 hour waits. https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas...
The UK health service is one of the few things I’m actually still proud of about the UK.
American cities on the other hand, like most cities, do often lack community cohesion.
Counter-example: I thought the majority of fire and rescue people in the US were volunteers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_fire_department#Unit...
Will citizens heed the call? To be determined.
– delivering medicines from pharmacies;
– driving patients to appointments;
– bringing them home from hospital;
– or making regular phone calls to check on people isolating at home.
They don't need volunteers to merely function, but then we both know there was no honest intent behind your comment in the first place.
(https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-ba...)
The value of a submission like this is the specific new phenomenon it's about. Generic discussion, especially generic ideological discussion, is always the same and therefore off topic on HN. The NHS in general, or healthcare systems in general, are as generic a topic as it gets.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm sure you had no intention of starting a flamewar, yet you can see the incipient flamewar already in the few replies this comment received.