Portugal has the highest vaccination rate, Sweden has spent less time under draconian restrictions than the UK. The UK's COVID death toll isn't great. I'd have our response to the virus as overall average to good, I don't think we can lay a claim to be "the best" though.
Definitely middling, absolute cock ups in some areas (e.g., nursing homes), but good elsewhere.
As I noted if there is any justice in the world then Jodie Comer's performance in Help should be enough on its own to bring the government down.
Apparently the quote is based on dividing current hospital levels by the lowest number since the pandemic began. Which as a basis for the quote and the subsequent reporting is in flat out lie territory.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Can I go for a middle ground between 'way down the list in order of importance' and 'really very important'? It's quite important, along with other measures. It's definitely not the only thing of importance - we clearly wouldn't lock down the whole country to prevent 'just one death', so for all of us its a balancing act between health outcomes and impacts. But it's one of the best measures for comparing between countries, as rates of testing etc vary so wildly. Excess deaths is a much better measure than headline deaths from covid, for reasons well rehearsed. Even here though, there will be aspects beyond the ability of different governments to influence in the timescale of a pandemic, like demographic structure, general levels of health, etc, as well as issues like climate and geography which we still don't fully understand the impact of.
By excess deaths, the UK has so far done quite poorly, though many others have done much worse still. Nor has the UK done that well on limiting the impacts on its citizens lives - these things are difficult to compare, because there are so many aspects to restrictions which have been put in place, but we in the UK have been hit pretty hard by restrictions on our lives. However, this isn't over yet - the UK would appear to be, if not out of the woods yet, to have the edge of the woods in sight both in respect of health impacts and restrictions on people's lives. Many other countries, particularly our neighbours in Europe, still have restrictions where we do not (which is both a negative in absolute terms but will have an economic impact too) - so the balance of 'who has done best on restrictions' is tilting back again towards the UK (as I said earlier, who has done 'best' on this measure will rarely be possible to say for sure). Worryingly, it looks like excess deaths are heading upwards on mainland Europe too again, relative to ours.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
Some examples might be useful. It might be they are enjoying schadenfreude, rather than taking delight in the suffering of others.
Ms. Heathener, but it implies that the Labour Party will advocate rejoining.
And while that will enthuse some (almost all of whom would vote Labour anyway) it would antagonize more people, both those who wanted us out, and those who are lukewarm either way but do not want to return to a referendum and, potentially, even more negotiating.
They won't, Starmer would largely campaign on closer alignment to the SM and CU in terms of regulations and to appease the SNP and LDs who he would need to become PM. However he would also likely campaign to keep the current points system with maybe a bit more leeway in shortage areas, to win over the Redwall
I think you mean the Red Wall.
Winning over Redwall would require a very different set of priorities. Mostly about being kind of small rodents.
"The poll was largely conducted before the Owen Paterson sleaze scandal exploded at Westminster."
More troubles to come for the Tories.
The optics of his and Rees-Mogg's absence are terrible again today, just like the "storm in a teacup" yesterday. I'm starting to wonder if Johnson is actually incapable of the kind sober and sombre, "responsibility" course-correction and mood music which would be the default response in this situation for many politicians.
It's almost as if his whole premiership has been predicated on the idea that his brand of trolling, nudge-winking arrogance would always win the day and sail through, and now in these new circumstances he doesn't know quite what to do, or have an alternative gear to choose from.
If so, he could be out and gone much more quickly than some expect.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
This was a vitally important issue that required an immediate response from the government, but is also a storm in a teacup that no one important needs to bother themselves with?
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
I've put the bit that shows you don't understand what was done and why in bold. You can't "catch up" when the whole point of what we did — ordering everything, early approval, and stretched dose intervals — was to deliver vaccine to as many people as possible as early as possible.
Apparently the quote is based on dividing current hospital levels by the lowest number since the pandemic began. Which as a basis for the quote and the subsequent reporting is in flat out lie territory.
The problem is a divergence between narrative and fact. In which case the narrative takes precedence over facts.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
Again that isn't a valid measurement. If the lockdown hadn't occurred up to the point that the vaccinations arrive, covid was going to swamp our health service.
And that would have resulted in a lot of people aged 50+ dying because it's possible no medical treatment would have been available.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
I've put the bit that shows you don't understand what was done and why in bold. You can't "catch up" when the whole point of what we did — ordering everything, early approval, and stretched dose intervals — was to deliver vaccine to as many people as possible as early as possible.
Yes, it's either a silly or disingenuous point. Otherwise, to take the extreme example, getting 1% higher than us done, but in 5 years, would be 'surpassing'.
It's great that places have now got even more done, and we should aim to be top in that respect and push even more, but the problem at hand was no one was vaccinated, and our response managed to get a massive number done early. Which given where we were wave wise, is a damn good thing. That isn't changed by others getting .1% more done or whatever.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
I don't think anyone said "only deaths count". Indeed, I only raised the fact that it's bizarre to ignore deaths completely.
If you want an honest accounting of the success or failure of any government's Covid response, you need to at least include deaths in some shape or form. I think you have to be pretty blinkered to exclude it.
To defend H here since I'm feeling robust and contrarian today. I think it's possible to be a lifelong Tory, come what may, without loss of integrity. Eg if your politics is driven by an aversion to the left you'll always support the only party of the right with a chance of government, ie the Cons. This is me too but in the opposite way. I've supported every iteration of Labour since I first got interested in politics as a teenager. Why? Because they're the only party of the left with a chance of government. I'm Labour like a football team in this sense. Callaghan, yes. Foot, yes. Kinnock, yes. Blair, yes. Brown, yes. Miliband, yes. Corbyn, yes. And now Starmer - Yes. My enthusiasm waxes and wanes, and I only joined in 2017, but my vote can be counted on. The one and only thing that could stop me voting Labour would be if we went for a populist charlatan as leader.
Yes. It would be absurd and possibly counter-productive at the ballot box for Labour to go for a populist charlatan as leader.
Thankfully they never have. Ditto the Cons until this one. On which topic, charlatans, perhaps it would be useful for people to see my relative Integrity rankings for the PMs in my adult lifetime. Where Integrity = How honest and driven by sense of service to the nation. It goes -
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Well, Philip, you have said some really dumb things in th emany many hours you spend on here pointlessly defending the pointless, but this one tops the lot in terms of ignorance:
"HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe."
If any other country handled the pandemic better then please name any other country in Europe that was able to drop all legal restrictions before the UK?
If they'd done better, they'd have been able to do so. Who was it?
Well, that's just begging the question. Why is dropping all legal restrictions the hallmark of success? Deaths per population seems like a much more obvious number! Or one could look at economic output, or costs of government intervention... lots of different metrics are apparent.
It also seems silly to conflate different sorts of restrictions. Total lockdown is very different from, say, making people where masks on public transport. If a country still has a public transport mask mandate, I'm not going to view them as a failure if they have far fewer cases.
By the way, you remember the War on Drugs? Portugal dropped most legal restrictions on drugs. Does that mean Portugal had the best handling of the War on Drugs?
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
Again that isn't a valid measurement. If the lockdown hadn't occurred up to the point that the vaccinations arrive, covid was going to swamp our health service.
And that would have resulted in a lot of people aged 50+ dying because it's possible no medical treatment would have been available.
We just don't know that. It seems that there would have been an almighty strain but we don't know about swamped. Going into an extremely mild spring and summer rather than the dead of winter and, as OGH Junior reminds us constantly, people would have modified their behaviour.
So we don't know what it would have done to the health service. Ask the Graun and every winter our health service is swamped.
Meanwhile the corollary of lockdown - the NHS closing for non-Covid conditions - is going to result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths from treatment not provided.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
Absolutely agreed.
Restrictions to get us through to vaccinations were arguably justifiable, but only just, for me.
Restrictions post-vaccines are absolutely ridiculous.
The tens of millions of lost years of life due to restrictions need considering far more than has been done so far.
To defend H here since I'm feeling robust and contrarian today. I think it's possible to be a lifelong Tory, come what may, without loss of integrity. Eg if your politics is driven by an aversion to the left you'll always support the only party of the right with a chance of government, ie the Cons. This is me too but in the opposite way. I've supported every iteration of Labour since I first got interested in politics as a teenager. Why? Because they're the only party of the left with a chance of government. I'm Labour like a football team in this sense. Callaghan, yes. Foot, yes. Kinnock, yes. Blair, yes. Brown, yes. Miliband, yes. Corbyn, yes. And now Starmer - Yes. My enthusiasm waxes and wanes, and I only joined in 2017, but my vote can be counted on. The one and only thing that could stop me voting Labour would be if we went for a populist charlatan as leader.
Yes. It would be absurd and possibly counter-productive at the ballot box for Labour to go for a populist charlatan as leader.
Thankfully they never have. Ditto the Cons until this one. On which topic, charlatans, perhaps it would be useful for people to see my relative Integrity rankings for the PMs in my adult lifetime. Where Integrity = How honest and driven by sense of service to the nation. It goes -
"Flustered Boris Johnson today claimed there is 'nothing more to say' about the Owen Paterson case and refused to apologise as he was monstered for ducking a Commons showdown."
Wow ; I don't think he'll last long, if he continues like this.
Maybe he just has no other gear other than arrogance.
Yes, it's either a silly or disingenuous point. Otherwise, to take the extreme example, getting 1% higher than us done, but in 5 years, would be 'surpassing'.
It's great that places have now got even more done, and we should aim to be top in that respect and push even more, but the problem at hand was no one was vaccinated, and our response managed to get a massive number done early. Which given where we were wave wise, is a damn good thing. That isn't changed by others getting .1% more done or whatever.
Actually I don't think he was being silly or disingenous, he's simply one of the vast majority of people who don't understand what we were doing. It's the difference between speed (how soon you can vaccinate people) and capacity (how many people can you vaccinate). We were focussed on the former. You can't beat what we were trying to do without a time machine.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Dying greatly restricts your ability to live, on a permanent basis. I'm surprised you were unaware of this.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Well, Philip, you have said some really dumb things in th emany many hours you spend on here pointlessly defending the pointless, but this one tops the lot in terms of ignorance:
"HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe."
If any other country handled the pandemic better then please name any other country in Europe that was able to drop all legal restrictions before the UK?
If they'd done better, they'd have been able to do so. Who was it?
Well, that's just begging the question. Why is dropping all legal restrictions the hallmark of success? Deaths per population seems like a much more obvious number! Or one could look at economic output, or costs of government intervention... lots of different metrics are apparent.
It also seems silly to conflate different sorts of restrictions. Total lockdown is very different from, say, making people where masks on public transport. If a country still has a public transport mask mandate, I'm not going to view them as a failure if they have far fewer cases.
By the way, you remember the War on Drugs? Portugal dropped most legal restrictions on drugs. Does that mean Portugal had the best handling of the War on Drugs?
Years lost due to excess deaths, and years lost due to restrictions, which is higher?
Every month of restrictions is equivalent to 5.5 million lost years of life. So there'd need to be a shit-tonne more deaths than there have been to justify any restrictions at all.
Yes dropping restrictions is the only thing that matters post-vaccines.
Portugal has the highest vaccination rate, Sweden has spent less time under draconian restrictions than the UK. The UK's COVID death toll isn't great. I'd have our response to the virus as overall average to good, I don't think we can lay a claim to be "the best" though.
Definitely middling, absolute cock ups in some areas (e.g., nursing homes), but good elsewhere.
here's my "well, quite" post of the day.
come back in March 2022 (if not 2023) rather than following daily figures.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
There was a recent Health Foundation report that estimated the average number of years of life lost from a COVID death was 10.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Dying greatly restricts your ability to live, on a permanent basis. I'm surprised you were unaware of this.
Everyone dies. I'm surprised you were unaware of that.
How many years lost attributable to deaths have there been?
How many years lost attributable to restrictions have there been?
67m people restricted for even just a week is 1.2 million lost years of life.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
Again that isn't a valid measurement. If the lockdown hadn't occurred up to the point that the vaccinations arrive, covid was going to swamp our health service.
And that would have resulted in a lot of people aged 50+ dying because it's possible no medical treatment would have been available.
We just don't know that. It seems that there would have been an almighty strain but we don't know about swamped. Going into an extremely mild spring and summer rather than the dead of winter and, as OGH Junior reminds us constantly, people would have modified their behaviour.
So we don't know what it would have done to the health service. Ask the Graun and every winter our health service is swamped.
Meanwhile the corollary of lockdown - the NHS closing for non-Covid conditions - is going to result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths from treatment not provided.
And the constant rallying call for restrictions every sodding Winter for years to come.
Can we be sure a (hypothetical future) Labour govt would resist the Unions/NHS bods on it?
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
There was a recent Health Foundation report that estimated the average number of years of life lost from a COVID death was 10.
So at excess deaths of ~120k then that's ~1.2 million lost years of life.
That's the equivalent of a single week of restrictions. Just one week, matches every single death through the entire pandemic to date.
It’s not particularly enjoyable to watch PB turn into a slagging match where posters round on each other.
A good swedge is a pb.com highlight. Particularly if it's a tory blue-on-blue.
I would love to see one of them turn into an IRL punch up.
Yep, there's been quite a lot of blue-on-blue discord on here recently. Put Big G, HYUFD and PT in the same room and it would be mayhem.
By contrast, the red-on-red action has been pretty tame - just BJO switching sides. As for the yellows, well, they just don't bother arguing with one another.
I think this is a metaphor for wider issues of party unity.
Remember BigG and PT both voted for Blair though unlike me, if Labour got into government again and the Conservatives went into opposition I could see at least BigG shifting back to Labour or the LDs again
Thank you for proving my point!
Remember I spent 13 years campaigning and voting for the Conservatives in opposition, eventually the cycle will turn again but I will still be voting for and backing the blues.
Just out of interest how old are you @HYUFD ? That comment puts you over 40 if you could vote in 97. I don't know why but I imagined you as late 20s or early 30s. My guess wasn't actually based on anything really.
I am just under 40, I could not vote in 1997 but I did canvass with a friend's mother who was a local Tory member.
I attended my first campaign rally in 1992 for Major in rural Gravesham when he was on his soapbox and have been involved campaigning for the Conservatives in some capacity in every general election since
Life begins at 40. Ask yourself what your values and principles are, then look at the party you are attached to like a limpet and realise you parted ways morally a long time before.
If you are a Majorite Tory why are you condoning Borisite blue Labour policies that you have opposed all this time? What is the point in you keeping Labour out only to do what Labour do? If you are a Majorite Tory why condone outrageous corruption?
That moment of absolute clarity when you realise the party is beneath you and you walk away is golden. I hope you enjoy it - and the personal cleansing of your own morality - as much as I did.
I am not a Majorite Tory, I am just a Tory.
I have campaigned for Major, Hague, IDS, Howard, Cameron, May and Boris (and briefly met Thatcher once at a reception)
And the rest? You'll back your party regardless of what it does or how it clashes with your own principles because it's your party?
Like a football team in other words.
To defend H here since I'm feeling robust and contrarian today. I think it's possible to be a lifelong Tory, come what may, without loss of integrity. Eg if your politics is driven by an aversion to the left you'll always support the only party of the right with a chance of government, ie the Cons. This is me too but in the opposite way. I've supported every iteration of Labour since I first got interested in politics as a teenager. Why? Because they're the only party of the left with a chance of government. I'm Labour like a football team in this sense. Callaghan, yes. Foot, yes. Kinnock, yes. Blair, yes. Brown, yes. Miliband, yes. Corbyn, yes. And now Starmer - Yes. My enthusiasm waxes and wanes, and I only joined in 2017, but my vote can be counted on. The one and only thing that could stop me voting Labour would be if we went for a populist charlatan as leader.
Not even that, as you voted for Corbyn too
Yes, but his demerits were intellect, leadership skills, dogmatism. I saw no charlatan there. He wasn't devoid of integrity. I'm talking about a left wing BoJo equivalent, if one can imagine such a thing. That would probably see me voting LD or Green.
Is claiming to be present but not involved at a meeting of people celebrating the massacre of Jewish athletes at the Olympic Games a teensy bit charlatanish?
Simply not in the league of BoJo in the charlatan stakes. Like I say, I wouldn't have voted for him if he were.
"Flustered Boris Johnson today claimed there is 'nothing more to say' about the Owen Paterson case and refused to apologise as he was monstered for ducking a Commons showdown."
Wow ; I don't think he'll last long, if he continues like this.
Maybe he just has no other gear other than arrogance.
It depends entirely on his mps and whether he listens to them
Portugal has the highest vaccination rate, Sweden has spent less time under draconian restrictions than the UK. The UK's COVID death toll isn't great. I'd have our response to the virus as overall average to good, I don't think we can lay a claim to be "the best" though.
Definitely middling, absolute cock ups in some areas (e.g., nursing homes), but good elsewhere.
As I noted if there is any justice in the world then Jodie Comer's performance in Help should be enough on its own to bring the government down.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
I've put the bit that shows you don't understand what was done and why in bold. You can't "catch up" when the whole point of what we did — ordering everything, early approval, and stretched dose intervals — was to deliver vaccine to as many people as possible as early as possible.
Extending the dosing interval allowed more people to be vaccinated and likely led to longer lasting stronger immunity, while many in the EU stuck dogmatically to 3 weeks - (having digs at the UK for changing it) and may sadly be seeing the impact of that now on their case rates.
Portugal has the highest vaccination rate, Sweden has spent less time under draconian restrictions than the UK. The UK's COVID death toll isn't great. I'd have our response to the virus as overall average to good, I don't think we can lay a claim to be "the best" though.
Definitely middling, absolute cock ups in some areas (e.g., nursing homes), but good elsewhere.
As I noted if there is any justice in the world then Jodie Comer's performance in Help should be enough on its own to bring the government down.
If you have Disney+ she was very good in Free Guy too.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
Again that isn't a valid measurement. If the lockdown hadn't occurred up to the point that the vaccinations arrive, covid was going to swamp our health service.
And that would have resulted in a lot of people aged 50+ dying because it's possible no medical treatment would have been available.
We just don't know that. It seems that there would have been an almighty strain but we don't know about swamped. Going into an extremely mild spring and summer rather than the dead of winter and, as OGH Junior reminds us constantly, people would have modified their behaviour.
So we don't know what it would have done to the health service. Ask the Graun and every winter our health service is swamped.
Meanwhile the corollary of lockdown - the NHS closing for non-Covid conditions - is going to result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths from treatment not provided.
And the constant rallying call for restrictions every sodding Winter for years to come.
Can we be sure a (hypothetical future) Labour govt would resist the Unions/NHS bods on it?
"Flustered Boris Johnson today claimed there is 'nothing more to say' about the Owen Paterson case and refused to apologise as he was monstered for ducking a Commons showdown."
Wow ; I don't think he'll last long, if he continues like this.
Maybe he just has no other gear other than arrogance.
It depends entirely on his mps and whether he listens to them
His premiership is in their hands
He is proving a liability. If enough MP's start to think theirs seats are at risk, It might happen quite quickly. Let's hope it does. Tory voters won't put up with it.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Why?
Because the only valid method (and even this isn't 100% accurate) that can be used to measure deaths will be excess deaths (as there is no consistent definition of what is a Covid death).
Completely agreed that excess deaths are the only valid measure of measuring deaths.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Ultimately the only deaths count viewpoint is that the restrictions had no real cost. The alternative extreme would be that 6 months in lockdown for 60m people is worth 30m lost years of life.
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
There was a recent Health Foundation report that estimated the average number of years of life lost from a COVID death was 10.
So at excess deaths of ~120k then that's ~1.2 million lost years of life.
That's the equivalent of a single week of restrictions. Just one week, matches every single death through the entire pandemic to date.
From: "UK govt had the best response in Europe" to "UK govt is responsible for 30m lost years of life" in 30 minutes.
Portugal has the highest vaccination rate, Sweden has spent less time under draconian restrictions than the UK. The UK's COVID death toll isn't great. I'd have our response to the virus as overall average to good, I don't think we can lay a claim to be "the best" though.
Definitely middling, absolute cock ups in some areas (e.g., nursing homes), but good elsewhere.
As I noted if there is any justice in the world then Jodie Comer's performance in Help should be enough on its own to bring the government down.
If you have Disney+ she was very good in Free Guy too.
That's now my daughter's favourite movie.
I was a super not fan of Killing Eve but she has shown herself to be a magnificent actor.
Sky have now deleted their tweet about hospitals being 14 times busier than last year on covid, but you can still see the author of that rubbish busily defending it (32 replies, 0 likes).
It’s not particularly enjoyable to watch PB turn into a slagging match where posters round on each other.
A good swedge is a pb.com highlight. Particularly if it's a tory blue-on-blue.
I would love to see one of them turn into an IRL punch up.
Yep, there's been quite a lot of blue-on-blue discord on here recently. Put Big G, HYUFD and PT in the same room and it would be mayhem.
By contrast, the red-on-red action has been pretty tame - just BJO switching sides. As for the yellows, well, they just don't bother arguing with one another.
I think this is a metaphor for wider issues of party unity.
Remember BigG and PT both voted for Blair though unlike me, if Labour got into government again and the Conservatives went into opposition I could see at least BigG shifting back to Labour or the LDs again
Thank you for proving my point!
Remember I spent 13 years campaigning and voting for the Conservatives in opposition, eventually the cycle will turn again but I will still be voting for and backing the blues.
Just out of interest how old are you @HYUFD ? That comment puts you over 40 if you could vote in 97. I don't know why but I imagined you as late 20s or early 30s. My guess wasn't actually based on anything really.
I am just under 40, I could not vote in 1997 but I did canvass with a friend's mother who was a local Tory member.
I attended my first campaign rally in 1992 for Major in rural Gravesham when he was on his soapbox and have been involved campaigning for the Conservatives in some capacity in every general election since
Life begins at 40. Ask yourself what your values and principles are, then look at the party you are attached to like a limpet and realise you parted ways morally a long time before.
If you are a Majorite Tory why are you condoning Borisite blue Labour policies that you have opposed all this time? What is the point in you keeping Labour out only to do what Labour do? If you are a Majorite Tory why condone outrageous corruption?
That moment of absolute clarity when you realise the party is beneath you and you walk away is golden. I hope you enjoy it - and the personal cleansing of your own morality - as much as I did.
I am not a Majorite Tory, I am just a Tory.
I have campaigned for Major, Hague, IDS, Howard, Cameron, May and Boris (and briefly met Thatcher once at a reception)
And the rest? You'll back your party regardless of what it does or how it clashes with your own principles because it's your party?
Like a football team in other words.
To defend H here since I'm feeling robust and contrarian today. I think it's possible to be a lifelong Tory, come what may, without loss of integrity. Eg if your politics is driven by an aversion to the left you'll always support the only party of the right with a chance of government, ie the Cons. This is me too but in the opposite way. I've supported every iteration of Labour since I first got interested in politics as a teenager. Why? Because they're the only party of the left with a chance of government. I'm Labour like a football team in this sense. Callaghan, yes. Foot, yes. Kinnock, yes. Blair, yes. Brown, yes. Miliband, yes. Corbyn, yes. And now Starmer - Yes. My enthusiasm waxes and wanes, and I only joined in 2017, but my vote can be counted on. The one and only thing that could stop me voting Labour would be if we went for a populist charlatan as leader.
Not even that, as you voted for Corbyn too
Yes, but his demerits were intellect, leadership skills, dogmatism. I saw no charlatan there. He wasn't devoid of integrity. I'm talking about a left wing BoJo equivalent, if one can imagine such a thing. That would probably see me voting LD or Green.
Is claiming to be present but not involved at a meeting of people celebrating the massacre of Jewish athletes at the Olympic Games a teensy bit charlatanish?
Simply not in the league of BoJo in the charlatan stakes. Like I say, I wouldn't have voted for him if he were.
Indeed. Both charlatans but Boris a bigger one in your opinion.
Apparently the quote is based on dividing current hospital levels by the lowest number since the pandemic began. Which as a basis for the quote and the subsequent reporting is in flat out lie territory.
The problem is a divergence between narrative and fact. In which case the narrative takes precedence over facts.
It's also a quote from the NHS Chief Executive:
Ms Pritchard said there was "14 times the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 than we saw this time last year" - based on the latest published month-on-month NHS data for August.
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Well, Philip, you have said some really dumb things in th emany many hours you spend on here pointlessly defending the pointless, but this one tops the lot in terms of ignorance:
"HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe."
If any other country handled the pandemic better then please name any other country in Europe that was able to drop all legal restrictions before the UK?
If they'd done better, they'd have been able to do so. Who was it?
Well, that's just begging the question. Why is dropping all legal restrictions the hallmark of success? Deaths per population seems like a much more obvious number! Or one could look at economic output, or costs of government intervention... lots of different metrics are apparent.
It also seems silly to conflate different sorts of restrictions. Total lockdown is very different from, say, making people where masks on public transport. If a country still has a public transport mask mandate, I'm not going to view them as a failure if they have far fewer cases.
By the way, you remember the War on Drugs? Portugal dropped most legal restrictions on drugs. Does that mean Portugal had the best handling of the War on Drugs?
Years lost due to excess deaths, and years lost due to restrictions, which is higher?
Every month of restrictions is equivalent to 5.5 million lost years of life. So there'd need to be a shit-tonne more deaths than there have been to justify any restrictions at all.
Yes dropping restrictions is the only thing that matters post-vaccines.
Not all restrictions are the same. I suggest a public transport mask mandate is only a tiny infringement on life. At the other end of the scale, we have, for example, the French lockdown at its most severe, that was more restrictive than any of the UK lockdowns. So, when you talk about a month of restrictions, what do you mean? France at its worst? UK 1st lockdown? UK 2nd lockdown? uk 3rd lockdown? Tiers? The situation we were in just before "Freedom Day" when we weren't locked down, but there were still some restrictions? Would you like to replace your earlier wording about "all legal restrictions" with something more nuanced, say "weighted by the severity of the legal restriction"?
How do you come up with a number to compare years lost due to excess death versus years lost due to restriction? I didn't greatly enjoy lockdown, but it was a lot better than being dead. You've come up with a number: how? Do the rest of us agree with that number?
Most importantly, you're not comparing the right numbers! The UK has seen a lot of excess deaths. However, that's not the number we need for your calculation. You need to know how many deaths would there have been without those restrictions. We don't know what that number is. It would undoubtedly be far higher than the actual number of excess deaths seen. How much higher, we can make estimates using modelling, or comparisons to, e.g., Florida, but it's not going to be exact.
If so, he could be out and gone much more quickly than some expect.
I have lived through six changes of Prime Minister, at aan average of a bit under one change every seven years. They've mostly seemed to happen later than I hoped, and with the exception of Cameron later than I expected, but it's often felt like a surprise when it's finally happened nonetheless.
To defend H here since I'm feeling robust and contrarian today. I think it's possible to be a lifelong Tory, come what may, without loss of integrity. Eg if your politics is driven by an aversion to the left you'll always support the only party of the right with a chance of government, ie the Cons. This is me too but in the opposite way. I've supported every iteration of Labour since I first got interested in politics as a teenager. Why? Because they're the only party of the left with a chance of government. I'm Labour like a football team in this sense. Callaghan, yes. Foot, yes. Kinnock, yes. Blair, yes. Brown, yes. Miliband, yes. Corbyn, yes. And now Starmer - Yes. My enthusiasm waxes and wanes, and I only joined in 2017, but my vote can be counted on. The one and only thing that could stop me voting Labour would be if we went for a populist charlatan as leader.
Yes. It would be absurd and possibly counter-productive at the ballot box for Labour to go for a populist charlatan as leader.
Thankfully they never have. Ditto the Cons until this one. On which topic, charlatans, perhaps it would be useful for people to see my relative Integrity rankings for the PMs in my adult lifetime. Where Integrity = How honest and driven by sense of service to the nation. It goes -
In agreeing with Kinabalu's list I would like to make a clarification:
Does charlatan imply being self-consciously bogus? Blair started sincere and was gifted but was guilty of hubris and narcissism and corrupted by greed as well in the end. The ordering seems about right though.
In agreeing with Kinabalu's list I would like to make a clarification:
Does charlatan imply being self-consciously bogus? Blair started sincere and was gifted but was guilty of hubris and narcissism and corrupted by greed as well in the end. The ordering seems about right though.
I agree very much with the list.
I think Blair started a bit charlatan-y though, and this (or perhaps his messiah complex) got worse the longer he stayed in office.
Cameron is hard to place, I believe he is/was fundamentally decent, but also fundamentally complacent.
Although Brown undoubtedly dedicated to his notion of the country and working people - he retains a fundamental dishonesty about his own relationship with Blair - as seen in the recent documentary.
I see the usual suspects are about. I never said corruption shouldn't be dealt with , in facted I posted that it should. Why anyone should get so aerated by pointing out that the accusers hands might not be clean hands is a mystery.
I have also posted that Boris should be got rid of asap.
The usual suspects = Most of the people who post here.
And the support for your view point is where?
Can't see any of the Tories posting here supporting you can we? I wonder why? Does this never cross your mind?
I think most people who post here aren’t paying much attention to this conversation. It’s not particularly enjoyable to watch PB turn into a slagging match where posters round on each other.
Point taken. Although my criticism is exactly the lack of joy in any of SquareSum's post.
They are a positive ray of sunshine compared to @malcolmg .
Funnily enough I discussed that with @malcolmg yesterday. In my view there is a big difference and one I highlighted in my responses to @squareroot2 and that is humour. I don't think anyone can claim that Malcolm hasn't raised a smile on all our faces at sometime. He does it with panache.
Thanks kjh, lots of people on here are blinkered and unable to see humour , scorn and even sarcasm in responses. You are one of the perceptive ones able to avoid dogmatic cult viewpoints. @RobD@kjh
Euro narrative about to switch from worrying about cases, to point out how cases are not really the important factor.
5..4..3..2..
That would neatly mirror the Brexity narrative changing from "cases aren't important" to "look at all those cases!", so...
Why would they change their tune on that? Cases don't matter as long as it isn't leading to a big uptick in hospitalisations/deaths. Calling commentators out on their hypocrisy, however....
A few HAVE been trumpeting the rise in cases in recent days. Delighting in it, even.
Really, people have been delighting in it?
Seems that way to me.
There's no delight in the people of Europe being let down by their politicians being unable to tell the scientists to get fucked. They're in for a pretty tough winter of lockdowns and not being able to see family and friends over Christmas. The fault is with their weak politicians not being able to withstand a few bad headlines over the deaths of vaccine refusers.
Our politicians are of course, absolutely tickety-boo! Silly old foreigners. What they need is a load of Boris Johnsons or Owen Pattersons to show them how strong and principled politicians operate!
He was clearly talking about their response to the current stage of pandemic, rather than in general.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has not exactly been anything to gloat about. And before you say The Vaccine Programme", (which the rest of the developed world has largely caught up and surpassed us), perhaps we should remember Churchill's quote "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes". That ought to be on Johnson's political epitaph.
HMG's handling of the pandemic has been the best in Europe.
We've been able to be out of restrictions for five months and counting now, while almost no other nation in Europe has been. We've got herd immunity with zero restrictions and are going into the winter able to live our lives while other countries are now contemplating lockdown.
The two biggest issues of the pandemic have been the vaccines and when to drop restrictions. The UK has got both of those big calls right; facilitated by the vaccine rollout being able to drop all restrictions in the summer and having our exit wave over and done with before winter flu hits was absolutely the right call.
Double the deaths per capita of Germany, higher than France, Portugal, Spain etc.? Compare us to EU countries, we'd be 18th out of 28 on that metric.
A fair-minded commentator would not exclude that pretty important way of looking at the overall success of our handling of it.
Its way down the list in order of importance.
Life is more important than death. How many months have they wasted under legal restrictions? How many lives equivalent is that?
Philip, no. The overall death rate is really very important. I'm a little sad that I even need to assert this.
Can I go for a middle ground between 'way down the list in order of importance' and 'really very important'? It's quite important, along with other measures. It's definitely not the only thing of importance - we clearly wouldn't lock down the whole country to prevent 'just one death', so for all of us its a balancing act between health outcomes and impacts. But it's one of the best measures for comparing between countries, as rates of testing etc vary so wildly. Excess deaths is a much better measure than headline deaths from covid, for reasons well rehearsed. Even here though, there will be aspects beyond the ability of different governments to influence in the timescale of a pandemic, like demographic structure, general levels of health, etc, as well as issues like climate and geography which we still don't fully understand the impact of.
By excess deaths, the UK has so far done quite poorly, though many others have done much worse still. Nor has the UK done that well on limiting the impacts on its citizens lives - these things are difficult to compare, because there are so many aspects to restrictions which have been put in place, but we in the UK have been hit pretty hard by restrictions on our lives. However, this isn't over yet - the UK would appear to be, if not out of the woods yet, to have the edge of the woods in sight both in respect of health impacts and restrictions on people's lives. Many other countries, particularly our neighbours in Europe, still have restrictions where we do not (which is both a negative in absolute terms but will have an economic impact too) - so the balance of 'who has done best on restrictions' is tilting back again towards the UK (as I said earlier, who has done 'best' on this measure will rarely be possible to say for sure). Worryingly, it looks like excess deaths are heading upwards on mainland Europe too again, relative to ours.
Perfectly sensible post
UK would win the most money squandered and laundered category by a mile.
Comments
Apparently the quote is based on dividing current hospital levels by the lowest number since the pandemic began. Which as a basis for the quote and the subsequent reporting is in flat out lie territory.
That wasn't my question though. My question was why deaths is more important than restrictions on life?
Death is important, but life is more important.
Am I missing a subtle point here?
Winning over Redwall would require a very different set of priorities. Mostly about being kind of small rodents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwall
Given the average age of people who sadly passed away, you don't have to put a very high percentage weight on the cost of restrictions to bring it in to parity with the years of life directly lost.
And that would have resulted in a lot of people aged 50+ dying because it's possible no medical treatment would have been available.
It's great that places have now got even more done, and we should aim to be top in that respect and push even more, but the problem at hand was no one was vaccinated, and our response managed to get a massive number done early. Which given where we were wave wise, is a damn good thing. That isn't changed by others getting .1% more done or whatever.
If you want an honest accounting of the success or failure of any government's Covid response, you need to at least include deaths in some shape or form. I think you have to be pretty blinkered to exclude it.
Thatcher
Brown
May
Major
Blair
Cameron
Johnson.
It also seems silly to conflate different sorts of restrictions. Total lockdown is very different from, say, making people where masks on public transport. If a country still has a public transport mask mandate, I'm not going to view them as a failure if they have far fewer cases.
By the way, you remember the War on Drugs? Portugal dropped most legal restrictions on drugs. Does that mean Portugal had the best handling of the War on Drugs?
So we don't know what it would have done to the health service. Ask the Graun and every winter our health service is swamped.
Meanwhile the corollary of lockdown - the NHS closing for non-Covid conditions - is going to result in tens if not hundreds of thousands of deaths from treatment not provided.
Restrictions to get us through to vaccinations were arguably justifiable, but only just, for me.
Restrictions post-vaccines are absolutely ridiculous.
The tens of millions of lost years of life due to restrictions need considering far more than has been done so far.
Wow ; I don't think he'll last long, if he continues like this.
Maybe he just has no other gear other than arrogance.
Actually I don't think he was being silly or disingenous, he's simply one of the vast majority of people who don't understand what we were doing. It's the difference between speed (how soon you can vaccinate people) and capacity (how many people can you vaccinate). We were focussed on the former. You can't beat what we were trying to do without a time machine.
Every month of restrictions is equivalent to 5.5 million lost years of life. So there'd need to be a shit-tonne more deaths than there have been to justify any restrictions at all.
Yes dropping restrictions is the only thing that matters post-vaccines.
come back in March 2022 (if not 2023) rather than following daily figures.
How many years lost attributable to deaths have there been?
How many years lost attributable to restrictions have there been?
67m people restricted for even just a week is 1.2 million lost years of life.
Can we be sure a (hypothetical future) Labour govt would resist the Unions/NHS bods on it?
That's the equivalent of a single week of restrictions. Just one week, matches every single death through the entire pandemic to date.
His premiership is in their hands
That's now my daughter's favourite movie.
NEW THREAD
Ms Pritchard said there was "14 times the number of people in hospital with COVID-19 than we saw this time last year" - based on the latest published month-on-month NHS data for August.
How do you come up with a number to compare years lost due to excess death versus years lost due to restriction? I didn't greatly enjoy lockdown, but it was a lot better than being dead. You've come up with a number: how? Do the rest of us agree with that number?
Most importantly, you're not comparing the right numbers! The UK has seen a lot of excess deaths. However, that's not the number we need for your calculation. You need to know how many deaths would there have been without those restrictions. We don't know what that number is. It would undoubtedly be far higher than the actual number of excess deaths seen. How much higher, we can make estimates using modelling, or comparisons to, e.g., Florida, but it's not going to be exact.
Does charlatan imply being self-consciously bogus? Blair started sincere and was gifted but was guilty of hubris and narcissism and corrupted by greed as well in the end. The ordering seems about right though.
I think Blair started a bit charlatan-y though, and this (or perhaps his messiah complex) got worse the longer he stayed in office.
Cameron is hard to place, I believe he is/was fundamentally decent, but also fundamentally complacent.
Although Brown undoubtedly dedicated to his notion of the country and working people - he retains a fundamental dishonesty about his own relationship with Blair - as seen in the recent documentary.
@RobD @kjh