RiseAgainst

There's a story on BBC News this morning saying that a fifth of small-to-medium businesses in the UK won't survive four weeks of lockdown. From the conversations I'm having with small business owners, I can well believe that. I wonder whether a similar proportion of football clubs would be in similar jeopardy? Not necessarily Boro, but local clubs, amateur teams, the heavily indebted and the badly run. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52114414 Volkswagen is haemorrhaging two billion Euros a week, even with all its factories shut. Unavoidable costs pile up regardless of whether you've furloughed your staff and shut your premises, and I can't imagine small clubs would have any reserves to pay essential bills for more than a few weeks. It's frightening to think how different the football pyramid might look next season if the current level of lockdown is extended beyond a week on Monday.

Yes, I was meaning when this three-week period ends, or the Monday after, which is the day everyone would have gone back to work/school after Easter. Doubt anything will change before then, but that would be an opportune moment to lift the burden slightly while keeping riskier things like sporting events off the menu.

I know lots of people who (almost certainly) have/have had Coronavirus but haven't been tested, including myself, my wife, my wife's friend and her husband, two separate clients of my business, neighbours...the list goes on. None of us are currently included in the official statistics, which is hugely diminishing their accuracy and relevance. Once these long-awaited home testing tests finally start arriving en masse, statisticians will be able to make accurate calculations for the first time. On another note, if Boris, Prince Charles and other high-profile people make a swift recovery, it'll hopefully calm some of the panic among people who haven't caught the virus yet. It might even encourage the powers that be to start partially lifting the lockdown. Keep mass gatherings off the menu, no professional sports, no nightclubs or concerts, but maybe re-open some outdoor facilities like play parks and let people visit friends providing everyone stays indoors.

The virus isn't going to vanish if we all hide at home for a few weeks. As soon as they lift restrictions, it'll spike. And I can't see people coping with being stuck indoors for more than a matter of weeks. We'd all go mad, and run out of money. And the virus would still be circulating. Even the Chinese predict cases will soar as soon as they take off all the apartment block doors they've welded shut. Though I suspect they won't release official figures any more. My best friend is one of Scotland's most senior doctors. He says if we hadn't locked down, cases would have spiked, many thousands would have died and hospitals would have been completely over-run. It would have been horrific. But by the start of June, Coronavirus would have burned itself out. Instead of which, he expects a comparable number of people will die over a timeframe ten or twenty times longer, allied to the absolutely incalculable social, economic and psychological costs of the country being shut down indefinitely. Since it's going to be years before there's an effective global vaccination programme, there's no exit strategy to hiding away, and economic projections suggest countries will be bankrupt long before Covid-19 dies out. He also cites the example of how much isn't being done medically during this lockdown. People are developing other acute health conditions on a daily basis that aren't being investigated or treated because the surgeries are all closed and hospitals aren't doing normal work. That may take years to fully resolve if people haven't already died from a lack of treatment. The Covid-19 death rate isn't the only one worth looking at. Every day that passes under lockdown puts households further into debt, racks up billions more pounds in State debt which we'll be paying back for decades, and deprives children of a full school education (as opposed to whatever individual teachers can cobble together over Skype.) I can't even begin to quantify the mental health ramifications of all this. The only argument I can make for a lockdown is to give the NHS time to increase its ICU capacity and raise available staffing levels through recruitment and volunteering. Once they've done that to the best of their ability, it seems little short of madness to expect everyone to remain at home. I do understand asking vulnerable and elderly people to self-isolate, but all of us? Even when, in the overwhelming majority of cases in people under 70, you'll just have a few days of feeling unwell - if you even realise you've got it at all? Is staying at home truly the answer?

Good point - nobody seems to know how long the virus can live on specific surfaces, and even someone who's recovered from it could transmit new germs unwittingly. This whole thing has made me realise what manky gets some people are, like the woman a fortnight ago at soft play who kept coughing upwards all the time instead of into a hanky. I'd never really thought about how many germs may be lingering on every public surface we come into contact with. I've always been pedantic about washing my hands thoroughly whenever possible, but I could easily become totally paranoid about contagion and secondary infection if I sat down and thought about it for long enough...

I've spent the last few days battling Coronavirus! Obviously I can't be definitive about that til the home testing comes out, but I have five of the seven most common symptoms according to the WHO, and my wife has six - including the top three. It's the first time in my life a dry cough has then turned productive, the first time I've felt breathless other than while walking around in really hot climates, etc. On the upside, assuming I test positive next week or the week after for the antibodies, I can honestly say it's not a patch on flu. I've been able to work from home insofar as there's still work to do, only missed a few meals, and though I feel pretty crap, I'm still functioning. The lack of sleep from all the coughing is the worst part. I'm also attempting to register as an NHS volunteer, but healthcare is devolved to Scotland and the SNP cannot bear to copy a good idea the English came up with first, so there's no opportunity to do so yet. At least I shouldn't have to worry about catching Coronavirus if I'm running in and out of chemists and supermarkets for people. When I'm not trying to catch up on sleep, I am reading a lot more. Dominic Sandbrook has just published a brilliant book called Who Dares Wins, about Thatcher's first term in office. There's loads of football references (he's a massive Wolves fan), and lots of wry humour. Highly recommended if you're interested in the history of modern Britain.

Juninho walks into any all-time best team for me. Even today as a 47-year-old, he'd be better than any of our current midfielders.

I wasn't suggesting there'd be a war over social things. I was suggesting people's patience with (and respect for) the current national closure will dwindle the more it drags on and affects daily life and household income. And eventually, that will begin to manifest as resentment, then hostility, then increasingly brazen breaches of whatever is being imposed on us all. Yes, some people have yet to accept the gravity of the current situation, but I don't think we're all going to become more accepting of being confined to our homes as the weeks roll past, as you suggest. My dad is over 70 and my mum has bronchiectasis, so they will shortly be told to self-isolate for 12 weeks. As of today, they cannot get an online groceries delivery slot from any supermarket. They can survive on freezer meals for a while, but if weeks become months, they will start to become very angry about being unable to go to the shops and obtain food, rather than having to ask me to risk my own safety by going out for them. And they're a retired couple with no kids at home, no jobs to worry about, public sector pensions, a lovely home with a nice garden and a profound love of iPads. They're the antithesis of party animals, and they're certainly not impatient or self-centred people. My dad is a retired chemist, so he and my mum are acutely aware of the risks of Covid-19 to her health, but she's already discussing how long they'll be willing to accept being locked down, and it's not even happened yet. I suspect similar conversations will be happening behind closed doors up and down the land this week.

I'm not sure we're more bolshy than the Italians. Friends of mine spend a lot of time over there, and say Britain is a more compliant and respectful-of-authority society than the devil-may-care Italians. But I do think a lockdown will quickly set citizens against the state, and in the social media age, all it takes is a few single mothers being arrested/fined for trying to take their ADHD toddlers to a closed park, and social media will go up like a tinderbox. Unless death rates continue to spike, any lockdown will have to be pretty short-lived, because protectors will quickly come to be seen as oppressors. The collective national interest argument and self-policing might hold til after Easter, but I don't see it enduring beyond then. Let's hope the powers that be use these next four weeks wisely to get all the new ventilators running and bring the retired NHS workforce back into the fold.

We're more of a box-set household than a film family. Currently watching Living With Yourself, which is about a self-improvement clinic that clones people into better versions of themselves and disposes of the originals in the woods. Until one day they don't. Very black humour of the kind Americans rarely manage, like a modern Six Feet Under. Other good streaming dramas if you haven't seen them - The Americans (brilliant 80s Cold War cat-and-mouse), Chernobyl (for a bit of perspective), Happy Valley (it isn't happy) and Save Me (not going to comment on whether he does or not). I would say Line of Duty and Homeland too, but I reckon everyone's seen them already.

Away from debate about the numbers, I wonder if certain industries will fail to recover from this? I can see international tourism struggling (few airlines left, strict quarantine rules, public antipathy to long-distance travel post-Corona), and fast fashion might fall out of favour as people realise buying £10 tops isn't the be all and end all of modern society. However, I bet collective experiences like the cinema and theatre experience a rapid renaissance when they start re-opening. Ditto coffee shops and swimming pools. You don't know what you've got til it's temporarily closed.

After the hundreds of billions of pounds the UK Govt is pledging to try and support the economy, I think using words like "megalomaniac" to describe them is quite offensive. I'm not a fan of Boris at all, but in relatively little time, they have unveiled an astonishingly detailed and unprecedented package of support for British workers, and one which puts most other nations in the shade. It's tragic that we need such economic stimuli, and i still think we're shutting down too much too soon, but other people seem to think we haven't shut down enough quickly enough, so maybe the balance is about right. At least a lot more households should be able to keep the wolf from the door after today's announcements.

It's my wedding anniversary today, so me and the missus went to a restaurant in our home town in South Lanarkshire. We thought it'd be an impromptu chef's table, but it was surprisingly busy - and almost entirely with people in their 60s and 70s. There's clearly still demand among people wanting to eat out, so it's a shame two of the better chain restaurants are closing. Understandable, given the blanket closures being put in place across the public sector, but sad for the staff, and a shame for people who want to enjoy normal life while they still can. There are going to be some very bored and frustrated people in the coming months, and that's just in our house!

It will be interesting to see whether FFP is abolished now. It seems unreasonable to expect clubs with huge outgoings on player salaries and stadium maintenance but no income from matchday attendances to balance their books. It's possible broadcasters won't even make scheduled payments to the leagues if matches aren't taking place. Yet I bet every Boro player will be receiving their full salary, even if they're asked to stay at home rather than train or play any games.

Blu-Rays. Pah! I'm still watching DVDs over here. With hindsight, Disney+ is launching at the perfect time, with all this self-isolation going on. It's Disney's servers I fear for, as legions of bored children rewatch Cars for the 1,000,000,000,000th time.