RIP, WTF and other acronyms

When you write a daily blog, you shouldn’t ignore the big/strange things that happen. THE NEWS (with capital letters) will and should creep in. As much as I’d like to write about it being too hot for gingers and how the dog has found the coolest spot in the house, instead I’m going to write about THE NEWS.

Last night, I went to bed fuming. 

“It’s all so unfair!” I told the Long Suffering Husband.

“Oh, have you seen what the CPS have decided to do to tackle the fact that rapists get away with it?”

I hadn’t. 

He explained that the CPS had named their new strategy the Rape Implementation Plan, or RIP for short.

Suddenly, I wasn’t just fuming, I was incandescent. 

I didn’t even have time to mention that I’d looked at Matt Hancock’s Twitter feed (or WTF as I will call it in my head for ever more).

This morning, I woke up grumpy with these bits of news making me irritable.

“You shouldn’t read it, if it’s going to make you grumpy,” the LSH said.

That’s not really a solution because it’s still happened. Anyway, I didn’t read about RIP, he told me.

As usual, I’m confused about the government and how they are handling the pandemic. 

You might have seen it now, because news reporters are all over Twitter and they will have been working hard, all night to get to the bottom of WTF (Matt Hancock’s Twitter Feed).

What happened was that while Leicester were waiting for the promised announcement on whether their lockdown restrictions could be eased, believing they’d been forgotten, Matt Hancock tweeted. In a thread of 4 tweets at 9.30pm he announced that in the morning it would be illegal for people who live in the places mentioned in his photo to meet in other people’s houses or gardens.

How? 

How can government be done like this? It’s just so unfair. Not everyone has twitter. It’s confusing and there is a complete lack of transparency over why this is necessary.

How can something so normal, like going into your parent’s garden be made illegal for some parts of the countries overnight on Twitter?

You still have to go to work but you can’t drop your child off at your parent’s house or the baby sitter.

You can go to the pub and sit at an adjacent table to the person you planned to sit in your garden with but you can’t go with them.

If you live in Leicester can go to a restaurant with someone not in your household if you go to Hinckley or Market Harborough.

It’s illegal for me (from Essex) to go on holiday with someone I don’t live with if I have a cottage in Bingley but it’s fine for two households from Bingley to come to my Essex town for their holiday. 

The message seems to be, if you want a normal life (and who doesn’t?) then go. Move outside your area. Take those bugs and spread them around the country.

I wonder if there is also a little bit of unintentional racism happening too. A fear that all these Muslims will have Eid parties and not social distance. Will the same fear happen before Christmas?

I’m also confused about the data behind it. There have been more cases and the TIT (test isolate trace) system has found that people are confessing that they have seen people in their own homes and that’s how it appears to be spreading. However, these cases appear to be in the under 40s, mild or asymptomatic with no increase in hospital admissions and a decrease in deaths.

I’m quite concerned by the specificity problem of the tests. They are between 95% and 97.5% effective. So that in up to 5% of cases tested they could be finding a similar coronavirus. What if this rise in cases in the North is just a common cold? If you test more people, you’ll get more false positives and no one will believe the virus has gone away, even if it has.

Oh, I really am grumpy about the whole thing.

I think I might get back onto Twitter and look at WTF because it is amusing to see how autocorrect changes the name of the head of TIT : Dido Harding.