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80% pay

Former Community Member
Former Community Member
This does raise a few points! I can see both sides having spent 13 years as an employee interspersed with being self-employed out of my total of 46 years working.

My understanding is:

I'd say most business use an accountant to minimise their tax bill by claiming for office items including the new phone monthly rental, new lap top etc yet alone other things as transport costs including the new van, all of which are not available to the employed.

I suspect also that quite a few jobs that are paid in cash, are not always declared in full.

Purchase of tools and equipment also tends to be a call made on reducing taxable income when there is a profit to be reduced.

The consequence I see is that the tax paid averaged over the last three years will be lower and subsequently, any "Government" pay given out in June will be considerably less than the living standards some have got used to............... One "perk" is that they can still continue earning whereas to qualify for the employee 80%, they must be furloughed. 

Secondly, those small or sole traders fronted with a Ltd company are employees, so does the Ltd company have to pay themselves as per the 80% scheme in place for employees? The directors of those companies are not self employed, they also take dividends to reduce tax, so have they excluded themselves from yesterday's announcement? Yet alone to be furloughed, they must not do any work at all for their employer, ie their own business?


Regards


BOD
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    wallywombat:

    Further, the point of testing (at least if done on a large scale like South Korea, rather than the half-arsed UK approach so far) is that it allows you to relax self-isolation in a controlled fashion, and quickly jump on any hotspots that reemerge. You test people  who haven't developed symptoms yet, rather than waiting for them to show symptoms, by which time they would have been shedding virii for a week.




    Good sensible theory methinks. Will it work? Who knows. Let`s hope we find out that it does work but brace ourselves that it might not.


    Don`t forget, normal seaonal flu is doing the rounds as usual too. Normal flu is a killer. I once got flu and I never want to get it again, I felt like I was dying, I can understand how flu can kill people, I was a lot younger and fitter when I got it, it was terrible back then. Nowadays it could kill me. I`d had mild colds. bad colds and some hum dingers of co lds that 2 or 3 times I thought were flu but once I got flu I realised I`d never had it before.

    I believe Bird Flu turned out to be not as bad as they thouht it might be.


    Some will die of Corona (or Flu).

    Some will recover pretty well.

    Some will struggle without magnificent NHS intervention - they are the ones we are trying to save, let`s hope it works.

    Hit the peak, flatten it, squash it, spread it out. If everyone that is going to get it still gets it but we have a chance to make a big difference (we hope). If the NHS is overwhelmed then other serious interventions suffer too and more folk will sucumb to them serious illnesses and accidents.


    Good luck everybody

     

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    The point of self-isolation is to delay and flatten the curve - accept that most people will still get infected, but the numbers turning up at hospital per day won't be (too) overwhelmingly large. Also, delaying buys time to to manufacture more PPE, ventilators, construct temporary hospitals, train staff etc. Finally, the idea is that vulnerable people will be kept self-isolated for months. By the time they're "let out", most of the "healthy" population will have been been infected, recovered, and will now be providing herd immunity.



    Agreed. But the thing that worries me is how long do you have to stretch things out to achieve that? I tried some very (very) rough calculations - presuming things like 2.5% of victims will need intensive care, a massive increase in ICU capacity (including the new Nightingale and a few equivalents elsewhere - and presuming they can find all the extra ICU staff) and hopelessly hopeful assumptions like you can regulate things so every ICU unit is kept exactly at capacity - and for the UK sized population concluded that the process would take around 18 months - which seems like a lot more than the 3-weeks to 3-months that's often talked about - and an awful long time for most of the economy to be kept shutdown.


       - Andy.


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    AJJewsbury:




    The point of self-isolation is to delay and flatten the curve - accept that most people will still get infected, but the numbers turning up at hospital per day won't be (too) overwhelmingly large. Also, delaying buys time to to manufacture more PPE, ventilators, construct temporary hospitals, train staff etc. Finally, the idea is that vulnerable people will be kept self-isolated for months. By the time they're "let out", most of the "healthy" population will have been been infected, recovered, and will now be providing herd immunity.



    Agreed. But the thing that worries me is how long do you have to stretch things out to achieve that? I tried some very (very) rough calculations - presuming things like 2.5% of victims will need intensive care, a massive increase in ICU capacity (including the new Nightingale and a few equivalents elsewhere - and presuming they can find all the extra ICU staff) and hopelessly hopeful assumptions like you can regulate things so every ICU unit is kept exactly at capacity - and for the UK sized population concluded that the process would take around 18 months - which seems like a lot more than the 3-weeks to 3-months that's often talked about - and an awful long time for most of the economy to be kept shutdown.


    I do wish that all this talk about ventilators would stop. Full ventilation requires an ITU bed and they require personnel, who cannot be trained in just a few days.


    And then, what is the prognosis for a patient who is on ventilation? The figure for recovery (of hospital patients) published in worldometers.info is 4% of "closed" cases in UK. Those stats seem to show that 99% of cases have been "mild" as opposed to "serious or critical". So it appears that 135 lives at most have been saved so far in hospitals.


    It seems abundantly clear that the economy cannot continue as it is at the moment, and the Government cannot continue to pay 80% wages and bale out companies for any extended period. I simply ask whether all the economic turmoil is justified by a small number of lives saved? That's a political decision and each of us will have a different view on the matter.

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    Well if it  goes on for 3 weeks or 3 months that`s a lotta money lost and firms closed down and recouping taxes etc is not good. But to work, if it indeed can, it will need far longer. We will never be the same. No matter how many (or how few)   you actually save then for those and their close ones it`s bad if they don`t make it. I`m not ready to go yet so I hope I don`t but I do realise I might do
  • Former Community Member
    0 Former Community Member

    Chris Pearson:



    I do wish that all this talk about ventilators would stop. Full ventilation requires an ITU bed and they require personnel, who cannot be trained in just a few days.


     




     

    Exactly - a ventilated patient is normally highly sedated and intubated- ie they cannot breath for themselves and need full mechanical assistance to do so and need to be within an ITU environment principally as lots of other bits will be failing as well


    What is probably more useful is an assisted breathing capability which is what the Nightingales are providing - ie breathing air and 02 at a bedhead supplied to a conscious patient to assist their breathing and 02 uptake whilst lungs are compromised due to being full of gunk (technical term)


    My estimate was 300,000 cases by Easter, 30,000 of which will be pretty ill and 3,000 will have pegged it - we seem a bit beyond that at the moment


    Personally, I think any government is going to have to release the stranglehold by June to allow some businesses to survive and use the summer to plan for the second wave of this which will still be ongoing this time next year - but hopefully we then have people still able to function as immunities etc kick in


    We'll be paying the bill for a generation at least


    Regards


    OMS
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    I do wish that all this talk about ventilators would stop. Full ventilation requires an ITU bed and they require personnel, who cannot be trained in just a few days.



    Fair point - I was perhaps over-simplifying by combining more general 'assistance in hospital' with full ventilation/ICU. I think the general comparison of population size, percentage of cases requiring hospital care, with number of beds and average length of stay still has some merit though.


       - Andy.
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    Chris Pearson:

    And then, what is the prognosis for a patient who is on ventilation? The figure for recovery (of hospital patients) published in worldometers.info is 4% of "closed" cases in UK. Those stats seem to show that 99% of cases have been "mild" as opposed to "serious or critical". So it appears that 135 lives at most have been saved so far in hospitals.




    I must correct the above data. It seems that worldometers.info has not kept up to date.


    Proper audit data are here.


    The headline stats are 50% mortality rate of patients who have been discharged from ITU with only 33% survival if full ventilation has been required. 2621 admissions to ITU by Friday 3 April. So if the chances of survival don't change, that's 1300 lives saved in ITU. Of course there will have been thousands more for whom admission to ITU may have been avoided. ?

     

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