IOM Covid removing restrictions

[thommo2010]

40 minutes ago, Non-Believer said:

Our current situation must be the envy of much of the world. We have no known virus here. We have normality of life currently unknown in a lot of the rest of the world, to include socialising and sporting events. Our health services are unburdened by it, either workload or the economic side, frequently forgotten.

The only way the virus can make a reappearance (on current knowledge) is if it's imported by a carrier. The current travel restrictions reduce that massively. Our near neighbours are rife with it and are having lockdown measures regularly reinstated. This is also happening across the world where mutating, more severe cases are now being reported.

We don't know how lucky we are and shouldn't get complacent.

Where are these more severe cases being reported? From what I can see there are clusters of new infections but hospital admissions and death rates are well down in the uk. In scotland there has been 1 death from covid since may i think it was. 

[Southfork]

21 minutes ago, Cambon said:

I am sure they do, especially when government support ends. They will have to get off their asses and work. The job centre has hundreds of vacancies. But as long as people are being paid to do nothing, they will do nothing! 

You really do come across as quite a smug nasty clown.  Bet you work for the DHSC too showing such contempt for the unemployed like that. Yes they’re all lazy twats who are just taking the piss. There’s over 10,000,000 new lazy twats in the UK too just mooching around for freebies on furlough lazy bastards. It’s not like they were told not to go to work by the government or that the government bankrupted their employers by imposing a lockdown or anything. What complete knob jockey you are. 

Edited August 24, 2020 by Southfork

[Utah 01]

1 hour ago, Neil Down said:

Why would opening up the borders improve our current lifestyle. Everybody can and should be going about their normal business on the island.

You might not like the fact but slightly more than 50% of the population are not Manx born and are, with the current restrictions, effectively prisoners here with no family, uncle' sister' sister, sister's mother (and so it goes on) living in the next street but with family hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

There are others who have jobs and important business connections in the UK who need freedom of movement.

 

[Banker]

26 minutes ago, TheTeapot said:

I haven't said it is booming, I've just pointed out it is not as awful as you are making out. 

Also, in the matter of 'record unemployment' it might just be, but certainly not by much if so. And the explanation is so fucking obvious it shouldn't need one. Check the IOM in numbers document, page 10 to see for yourself, focusing on 2013/14 and stop doom mongering you utter cretin. 

Must have been pongo said it was booming along with markets.

i thought personal insults was banned on forum but anyone who has to stoop to them is obviously losing the argument 

[pongo]

11 minutes ago, Banker said:

Must have been pongo said it was booming along with markets. 

Nope. You're deliberately taking things out of context. As usual.

The markets are booming. But it's a subtle and nuanced picture.

In general, things are much better than they could be. Here too. That doesn't mean that everything is perfect.

Edited August 24, 2020 by pongo

[TheTeapot]

24 minutes ago, Utah 01 said:

 effectively prisoners here

 

 

HYPERBOWL

[pongo]

24 minutes ago, Utah 01 said:

There are others who have jobs and important business connections in the UK who need freedom of movement

Is there anything stopping people from travelling backwards and forwards to the UK? Provided that whilst here they work from home.

[Non-Believer]

52 minutes ago, thommo2010 said:

Where are these more severe cases being reported? From what I can see there are clusters of new infections but hospital admissions and death rates are well down in the uk. In scotland there has been 1 death from covid since may i think it was. 

Far East, Vietnam and cross infection back into animals (pigs IIRC) in SE Asia.

[thommo2010]

26 minutes ago, pongo said:

Is there anything stopping people from travelling backwards and forwards to the UK? Provided that whilst here they work from home.

Yeah those that cant do their work from home

[Roger Mexico]

1 hour ago, Banker said:

also when teapot et al say economy booming etc they have so far ignored the record unemployment figures which will get worse & strangely can’t give an explanation for this !!

It's usually difficult to explain something that isn't true.  I've actually put up links on here to the actual unemployment figures as recently as Saturday but here they are again as a mouse click seems beyond you, showing the years 2010-2020:

Apart from one month (April) they are at the sort of level they were several times in the past decade, including nearly all of 2012-13.  And they are falling (and the number of vacancies is rising).

[cheesypeas]

1 hour ago, Cambon said:

I am sure they do, especially when government support ends. They will have to get off their asses and work. The job centre has hundreds of vacancies. But as long as people are being paid to do nothing, they will do nothing! 

The economy here is doing very well. People are spending more on Island. Businesses are doing well. New businesses are opening up. Card Factory is recruiting. KFC will soon be recruiting. The VAT calculations will be interesting this year. I reckon we should probably end up with more money. 

Your comments on the uk markets are interesting. FTSE is down 20%, but GBP is holding its own against  EUR, and USD has weakened. FTSE was expected to drop this year on Brexit worries. So basically, it is doing ok. 

I wish our business was doing well ! We're 60% down on turnover as a direct result of the virus. Effectively we are treading water, but appreciate we are in a better position than some companies. You may find that those 100's of jobs could be the same jobs duplicated by different employment agencies. Certain sectors of the economy here are doing very well, but by no means all sectors. When the Govt stop financial assistance for employers, I think we will see a few more casualties yet. I also believe the promenade will dent VAT. The amount of Amazon and Asos parcels I see whizzing around leads me to believe most retail spend is being done online.

Edited August 24, 2020 by cheesypeas

[Roger Mexico]

2 minutes ago, cheesypeas said:

You may find that those 100's of jobs could be the same jobs duplicated by different employment agencies. 

Oh quite probably, but the direction of change is the important thing.  They may be doubling 100 vacancies to 200, but the headline goes from 200 to 400 then the underlying figures may have gone from 100 to 200 (simplifying wildly). Looking at the adjusted (see note) figures for recent months:

April: 117

May: 176

June: 305[1]

July: 443

the underlying trend looks encouraging.  It may be that there are people coming onto Job Seekers Allowance as MERA is adjusted this month (and abolished next month) and the Salary Support Scheme is dropped next month, but that may not be as much people as some think.  The SSS is currently restricted to only the Travel and Tourism sector for example.

There's an additional factor that may be increasing the JSA figures above normal at the moment.  The latest figure include 143 people claiming as "Leaving From Or Arriving On Island" (compared to 20 a year ago).  Obviously if you are self-isolating or having to leave the Island next week, you can't really start a new job.  So the figures may a 100 or so higher than they normally would be just from that.

 

[1]  There is clearly a mistake in the sector vacancies for Information Communications Technology in June, which went from 0 in May to 105 in June down  to 6 in July.  I suppose it's possible that 100-odd jobs were created and magically filled straight away, despite there being only 2 people on JSA in the sector.  But it's more likely a typo.  Which was still added up and put out as an official statistic, which shows you how much actual use people in government look at and make of the figures they produce.   I have therefore knocked 100 off the total.

[Banker]

1 hour ago, TheTeapot said:

HYPERBOWL

What’s that, the teapot equivalent of super bowl?

[thesultanofsheight]

1 hour ago, cheesypeas said:

I wish our business was doing well ! We're 60% down on turnover as a direct result of the virus. Effectively we are treading water, but appreciate we are in a better position than some companies. You may find that those 100's of jobs could be the same jobs duplicated by different employment agencies. Certain sectors of the economy here are doing very well, but by no means all sectors. When the Govt stop financial assistance for employers, I think we will see a few more casualties yet. I also believe the promenade will dent VAT. The amount of Amazon and Asos parcels I see whizzing around leads me to believe most retail spend is being done online.

It’s a bit of a lottery from what I can see. Some are doing really well, some are flat, and a good chunk are still suffering and will inevitably fail when the government support money is pulled. I think people are really trying to polarize a lot of the above debate and to bring any questioning of what’s going on (or criticism of what’s being done with the border) into direct criticism of government when it isn’t. We’ve done very well so far compared to the hopeless UK but we should certainly be questioning the approach being taken as it’s very clear from a lot of what’s been said above that the borders aren’t closed despite a big chunk of the population believing that to be the case. I see there’s now been a big knee jerk reaction from cabinet office last week and now they’re claiming everyone coming here will be checked even if it’s just a phone call so hopefully now they’re better resourced to be more proactive it’s not a quantum leap from that for some form of 7 day quarantine with testing which has to happen to get activity up to the next level. But not making decisions through fear of public backlash, not being properly resourced to handle things, and slack monitoring of things done is what we seem to default to. We are being conned into believing / accepting that “the borders are closed” is the solution to absolutely everything which it most certainly is not. But it requires the least resourcing and of course they still don’t want to spook the irrational panickers by introducing “new” things they’ll just panic about! 

I was looking at the Treasury predicted best and worse case scenarios for revenue loss yesterday and it’s entirely conceivable that one of the worse case outcomes, which is a shortfall of nearly £200,000,000 in income tax VAT and other taxes, is entirely possible if people don’t get back to work and back spending and supporting local businesses and, of course, Manx businesses successfully writing new business off Island. On the basis that Cannan has approval to borrow up to £250,000,0000 it’s not going to touch the sides if we’re looking at a £200,000,000 problem for government alone. That leaves little or no money to support any other business sectors or extending salary support schemes and other packages. So things are far from back to normal as claimed. However what certain parts of our public sector have been very good at doing over the years is sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting la, la, la and thinking that there is an endless pot of money to paper over all the cracks. There isn’t. It’s time for proper progressive (and technological) solutions to open things back up again being implemented not continuing the belief/culture that the Island is in shut down and turning a load of scared residents into some form of Stasi network who don’t want to go back to work full time because you think that’s the easiest and cheapest solution when the scenarios forecast by our own Treasury show that it isn’t as the impact of that for much longer is absolutely huge. Things need to start snowballing back to normality before the worst case scenario becomes a possibility.

Edited to add budget forecasts on shortfall scenarios. Worst case is £191M. 
 

Edited August 24, 2020 by thesultanofsheight

[Neil Down]

3 hours ago, Utah 01 said:

You might not like the fact but slightly more than 50% of the population are not Manx born and are, with the current restrictions, effectively prisoners here with no family, uncle' sister' sister, sister's mother (and so it goes on) living in the next street but with family hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

There are others who have jobs and important business connections in the UK who need freedom of movement.

 

Nothing stopping them visiting. just factor in a quarantine period when they get back. How difficult is it to understand