Juddian:
Here’s my take on the next couple of months.
The way things are accelerating the naysayers here are going to be proved very very wrong, London is the epicentre as one might expect from the hole so expect the M25 mostly to be the border, no one in no one out except for key industries and deliveries, eg foodstuffs medical equipment and coffins mainly.
They’ll have to lock London down to keep a hold on things, i suspect those with second homes in the country have already moved out and those with caravans will get out too.
The police, who you might notice are missing are probably being brought up to speed to handle this blockade, the army may be used as back up for them but will be there mainly to deal with the inevitable looters who will come out when it gets a bit warmer to do their thing, no way is the present govt going to allow them a free run like they did a few years ago when the old bill stood back as instructed and let them run riot, be interesting to see just how tough they are with their knives and machetes when they’re no longer bullying and plundering the weak and defenceless but find a line of properly armed current and re-enlisted squaddies in their way with rules to do whatever necessary to maintain order.
Long term this country will never be the same again.
I honestly don’t know what to make of it all. Being the cynical old [zb] that I am, also very anti-establishment, anti-authority, it tends to taint my view somewhat. My thoughts:
I follow the financial markets closely and have been watching them implode at an increasing rate since around autumn last year when the US REPO market had a major wobble. CTRL-P was fired up to max by the Fed to inject liquidity into the banks’ reserve accounts in exchange for taking their trash mortgage-backed securities and corporate bonds “collateral” off their balance sheets and it’s just spiralled out of control from there to the point where the Fed is now doing $1 trillion per day in REPO operations to keep the banks afloat. It’s absurd. The reason I mention this seemingly irrelevant nugget is because the first appearance of CV19 just so happened to coincide with the banks starting to have major liquidity issues, and the situation for both has been getting worse at an alarming rate ever since. How convenient would it be for the governments and central banks to have some major crisis to blame for their [zb]wittery and failed debt-based fiat monetary system than… I dunno… ? A virus pandemic, perhaps? 
The DJIA (Dow Jones Index) crashing by 10,000 points (!) in the space of a month - one of the biggest crashes in history - and the stock market “crash” in general, the coronavirus provides the PERFECT excuse! The truth of the matter is that this would be happening if the coronavirus didn’t even exist, albeit at a slightly slower rate. They realised back in autumn that the banking system was on the verge of collapsing which would take everything else down with it, but strangely it’s barely getting a mention in the media because must keep the coronavirus fearmongering theatre running at max! /s
So the coronavirus is a hoax then? No, absolutely not. We’ve all seen the videos from China and Italy. It’s very real and people are dying. But are we being fooled? Let’s run some numbers: Influenza sees between 3 to 5 million severe cases globally every year, with a death rate of between 290,000 to 650,000 according to official WHO figures. In 3 months of CV19 there have been just over 12,000 deaths. Call it 15k for round numbers, so under 100k per year, well short of the lower figure for influenza! And what do we do each year when the 'flu virus shows up? Nothing! Not a peep! Yet here we are with a large part of the developed world on Martial Law lockdown, not allowed to leave the boundaries of our property without imprisonment (Jordan) or arrest (Italy). Does this seem like a proportionate response when compared with 'flu ?
But r420! You are missing the fact that the R0 contagion rate for coronavirus is higher than 'flu! No, I’m aware of it. But HIV, SARS, H1N1 swine flu, mumps and measles all have an even higher infection rate but we never saw any lockdowns. People died, sure, but the world did not end and we did not wreck the world economy by effectively forcing airlines, entertainment, tourism and restaurant industries out of business along with tens of thousands of others, putting millions of people out of work, all because of some obsession to extend the life of ailing OAPs by another couple of years. 
Yes it’s very sad that people die, but it’s a fact of life, it’s going to come to us all. It’s easy to say “r420 you heartless [zb], you wouldn’t be saying that if those OAPs were your mother or father that they were leaving to die!” - true, but at what cost? The economic fall-out from this worldwide lockdown is going to be biblical. Your children, their children, their grand-children are going to be paying for it through obscene taxes for decades, centuries to come. Is that what you want? Is that what they want? Sometimes hard choices have to be made. 
It’s no secret that the developed world has a pension funding crisis which is getting worse by the day. All those crusties living longer and longer each year, causing a huge strain on the government’s funds. What to do? If only there was a way to quickly bump them off to solve the problem…you know …like a virus or something…!
Going even deeper down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole there is this article from ZeroHedge (!) which is certainly ‘out there’, but thought-provoking nonetheless, particularly the bit about Gates Foundation desire to reduce the global population and just so happen to be one of the World Health Organisations’ biggest benefactors and with whom has a partnership on vaccinations : zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ … government . Excerpt from the article:
Article:
In an astonishing coincidence, the Gates Foundation hosted an event just last October with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum called Event 201, a pandemic simulation which gathered elite figures in government, business and health expertise to plan for the possibility of a worldwide outbreak.
Look at the timeline. How very coincidental that the coronavirus is believed to have first appeared in November… Tinfoil hat nonsense or could be closer to the truth than we want to believe? I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
So what the hell do we do? Do we look at the 'flu figures vs the CV19 figures, say “meh, storm in a teacup, won’t affect me” and carry on as normal, ignoring government advice to stay at home and avoid contact? Well, looking at the stuffed pubs over the past few days and all the people out and about in the countryside with their kids etc, it seems that very few are taking it seriously and don’t care/realise that if the infections go up it will ■■■■■■■ the NHS and a LOT of people are going to die.
I am torn. My (selfish) gut instinct is to carry on as normal whilst taking sensible precautions (hygiene), but not to the point of cooping myself up in my house like a hermit. You’re going to end up being in each other’s ‘social distancing’ space whenever you go out to get food supplies from the supermarket no matter how hard you try to avoid it. I went to the bank on Saturday and they have a new policy of only allowing 2 people in at a time and they must stand apart. The trouble was, that forced the queue outside onto the pavement where about 15 people were all huddled together in each other’s space , so what’s the point? Same thing outside the supermarkets just before they open. The horse has already bolted, it’s damage limitation now.
But then I see the video posted from the US showing the guy literally choking to death on the fluid in his lungs and it quickly made me realise that maybe we should all be doing our bit to distance ourselves from each other and have some social responsibility. Do we really want to risk suffering that ourselves, or passing it on to some other poor soul if we’re asymptomatic carriers? I fear that in the coming days the choice will be taken out of our hands and Martial Law will come, as per Italy, France, Spain and much of the USA. Martial Law in the UK would give a large part of the ‘entitled’ population a very rude awakening and it could turn ugly really quick with rioting if it were to last more than a couple of weeks. There is already talk of this lasting beyond a year!
I’ll leave you with one last thought (a comment posted on another site) :
message:
Remember on 911 when W. Bush was hauled off into that bunker and all reports were saying he looked stunned and bewildered? No, I’m not saying that to be political. I’d be stunned and bewildered too if I’m the President and I have no say in where I’m going because there are “invisible” terrorists out there and I’m surrounded by people whose SWORN DUTY is to keep me safe, regardless of what I think.
That said, I’m stunned and bewildered that so many are panicking when the current President is surrounded by potentially infectious vectors and the same Secret Service and intelligence officers do NOTHING.
Is there no greater clear and present danger than an invisible enemy?!?
So many people here say, WATCH WHAT THEY DO, rather than what they SAY. I agree…and the President of the USA is still out in the open while the Secret Service has the best INTEL in the world to assess threats yet they do NOTHING.
This is not a political message…I’m just applying what so many have been saying to the current situation. If the President isn’t in a lockdown/bunker situation, why should the rest of the free world follow suit?
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” - Benjamin Franklin
this needs looking into.
Mentioned it once before but one wonders if the dragons memory is still fresh from the Rothies East-India- company’s raid on it’s shores to plunder the trillions of bucks made selling silk and spices to the Roman Empire,and turning them onto the joys of mass opium addiction during the Boxer-Rebellions?