If that's true, and I have no reason to doubt Israeli data, then I think the UK is pretty much in the clear, we were already close to the herd immunity threshold with delta, it may mean an extra couple of weeks with higher cases but no more than than I think. I worry for low vaccinated European countries. In winter Omicron could be very, very deadly.
The unvaccinated are screwed.
To the extent that that is by choice, seriously fcuk em, and yay for the gene pool.
Doesn't that action weaken the gene pool? Or is "yay" ironic?
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
That would be my guess - is a poorer country going to have the resources to prolong such a struggle?
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Although we should, at least to some extent. Had Iain Duncan Smith had the brains to ask the right questions he could have stopped British involvement dead in its tracks.
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Although we should, at least to some extent. Had Iain Duncan Smith had the brains to ask the right questions he could have stopped British involvement dead in its tracks.
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
IDS was cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq.
From the moment of his election, pretty well.
Because he is basically thick and likes to play soldiers.
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
And the Saffas have got the blame for it – because they identified it!
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
I suppose in that scenario people would agitate for a lockdown purely for the unvaxxed. However, I think it's fairly marginal here because vulnerable/elderly groups are so highly vaccinated.
Data isn't from Israel, its from South Africa. It has been passed to the Israeli's to look at, but somebody leaks it to a media channel. Nothing is confirmed yet.
Yep, but summarising so far about 30% more transmissible, up to twice the reinfection rate, about the same moribidity for the vaccinated, but about double for the unvaccinated. No aspect here is good news, this is worse or equal to Delta across the board. The only saving grace is that vaccines still seem to work well enough to keep most people out of hospital. Of course the sample size here is so small that these figures are only preliminary and likely to shift a fair bit as more data comes in and time passes.
To investigate the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in the immune population, we co-incubated authentic virus with a highly neutralizing plasma from a COVID-19 convalescent patient. The plasma fully neutralized the virus for 7 passages, but after 45 days, the deletion of F140 in the spike N-terminal domain (NTD) N3 loop led to partial breakthrough. At day 73, an E484K substitution in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) occurred, followed at day 80 by an insertion in the NTD N5 loop containing a new glycan sequon, which generated a variant completely resistant to plasma neutralization.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
When was this chap in London I ask myself? I'll bet it doesn't fit with the original timeframe that this was cooked up in Botswana on Wednesday.
Makes you wonder doesn't it.
Not really, because if you ever thought detected in = cooked up in, in the first place, I doubt anything on earth has the power to make you actually think.
Can I have a translation please.
You just seem to be a bit off the pace, intellectually speaking. Like saying in 2021 that the discovery of dinosaur fossils makes you wonder about the theory that the world was created in mid October 4004 BC.
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Although we should, at least to some extent. Had Iain Duncan Smith had the brains to ask the right questions he could have stopped British involvement dead in its tracks.
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
Very good figures, same day last week comparable are: 42484/165/768
And Starmer just now saying the measures do not go far enough
For all his faults, and he has many, I am pleased Boris is PM at this moment and not Starmer
They have both rolled the dice today and both are potential hostages to fortune. Johnson for Christmas WON'T be cancelled and Starmer for stuff like 8 day isolation for inbound travellers etc, etc. It all depends on events.
For what it's worth I hope Johnson's gamble pays off. If it doesn't we are all up the creek. If Starmer is wrong it matters not one way nor the other, he is in oopposition. Remember, no one blames the Conservatives for invading Iraq.
Although we should, at least to some extent. Had Iain Duncan Smith had the brains to ask the right questions he could have stopped British involvement dead in its tracks.
A real tragedy Kenneth Clarke, who was asking the right questions and noticed he was getting all the wrong answers, was not Leader of the Opposition at the time.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
When was this chap in London I ask myself? I'll bet it doesn't fit with the original timeframe that this was cooked up in Botswana on Wednesday.
Makes you wonder doesn't it.
Not really, because if you ever thought detected in = cooked up in, in the first place, I doubt anything on earth has the power to make you actually think.
Can I have a translation please.
You just seem to be a bit off the pace, intellectually speaking. Like saying in 2021 that the discovery of dinosaur fossils makes you wonder about the theory that the world was created in mid October 4004 BC.
I am glad that I am extremely comfortable in my own intellectual capabilities not to be concerned by a random person off the internet thinks.
You also seemed to have misunderstood my point, which was I think it is becoming increasingly clear that this variant has been around a fair bit longer than just a few days. In fact we already know this from the confirmed cases. One of the UK ones was visiting KFC over 2 weeks ago while being infectious.
It then makes you wonder, just how long, no more "conspiracy" beyond that. Is the epicentre Southern Africa, clearly, where was the exact origin, it is always very difficult to say precisely.
Data isn't from Israel, its from South Africa. It has been passed to the Israeli's to look at, but somebody leaks it to a media channel. Nothing is confirmed yet.
Yep, but summarising so far about 30% more transmissible, up to twice the reinfection rate, about the same moribidity for the vaccinated, but about double for the unvaccinated. No aspect here is good news, this is worse or equal to Delta across the board. The only saving grace is that vaccines still seem to work well enough to keep most people out of hospital. Of course the sample size here is so small that these figures are only preliminary and likely to shift a fair bit as more data comes in and time passes.
Apart from the minor point that the vaccines work.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
It matters in the context of the next GE campaign - The Tories, if Boris is right, can point out they freed us whilst Labour clamoured for lockdown - it is all about the next GE campaign. I was thinking earlier on that pollsters shouldn't ask "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow" but "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow, taking into account there would have had been 2 months campaigning" and "Who do you think will perform better in the Election debates"
No it doesn't, unless every couple of months between now and the next GE Starmer keeps calling it wrong and Johnson keeps calling it right, or there is indeed an election tomorrow. Besides which Covid will be just one of a number of GE issues for Johnson to call right by then. Oh, and Johnson won't do the debates he will again use a surrogate.
You think the only political topics people have talked about for the last two years won't have any bearing on the next GE? Fair enough, agree to disagree
Of course they will, but don't you think the bulk of the vaccine bonus is already baked in for Johnson, there is probably a little more to come from the boosters.
When the Government's Covid post-mortem analysis is in Johnson's performance report will be mixed to say the least.
I am also not convinced Johnson getting Christmas right gives him many smartie points, getting it wrong loses lots.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
That Israeli story if true, indicates by far the best strategy would be to mop up the last of the anti vaxxers with nature’s own vaccine now. Rather than taking any useful measures which might suppress the spread of delta and leave a bigger pool of naive immune systems for Omicron to smash into once it’s the ascendant strain.
Which happily enough, seems to be exactly the consequence of this week’s policy decisions. Might be luck but let’s give benefit of the doubt, looks like someone has thought this through quite cleverly.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
When was this chap in London I ask myself? I'll bet it doesn't fit with the original timeframe that this was cooked up in Botswana on Wednesday.
Makes you wonder doesn't it.
Not really, because if you ever thought detected in = cooked up in, in the first place, I doubt anything on earth has the power to make you actually think.
Can I have a translation please.
You just seem to be a bit off the pace, intellectually speaking. Like saying in 2021 that the discovery of dinosaur fossils makes you wonder about the theory that the world was created in mid October 4004 BC.
I am glad that I am extremely comfortable in my own intellectual capabilities not to be concerned by a random person off the internet thinks.
You also seemed to have misunderstood my point, which was I think it is becoming increasingly clear that this variant has been around a fair bit longer than just a few days. In fact we already know this from the confirmed cases. It then makes you wonder, just how long, no more "conspiracy" beyond that.
But who in the name of God, assuming they can simultaneously walk and chew gum, ever deduced "this was only detected a few days ago, therefore this has only been around for a few days"?
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
It matters in the context of the next GE campaign - The Tories, if Boris is right, can point out they freed us whilst Labour clamoured for lockdown - it is all about the next GE campaign. I was thinking earlier on that pollsters shouldn't ask "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow" but "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow, taking into account there would have had been 2 months campaigning" and "Who do you think will perform better in the Election debates"
No it doesn't, unless every couple of months between now and the next GE Starmer keeps calling it wrong and Johnson keeps calling it right, or there is indeed an election tomorrow. Besides which Covid will be just one of a number of GE issues for Johnson to call right by then. Oh, and Johnson won't do the debates he will again use a surrogate.
You think the only political topics people have talked about for the last two years won't have any bearing on the next GE? Fair enough, agree to disagree
Of course they will, but don't you think the bulk of the vaccine bonus is already baked in for Johnson, there is probably a little more to come from the boosters.
When the Government's Covid post-mortem analysis is in Johnson's performance report will be mixed to say the least.
I am also not convinced Johnson getting Christmas right gives him many smartie points, getting it wrong loses lots.
Starmer's call by contrast is largely irrelevant.
I am saying it will give the Tories some ammo at the next GE - it is one of the biggest decisions in modern history - whether to impose restrictions of people freedoms or not. If Boris doesn't,and is proven correct, for a second time whilst Sir Keir is haranguing him to, of course the Tories will use it at the next GE, as well as their vaccine successes
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
They abdicated risk management when Gordon Brown removed the rules that ensured risk management, and the Bank of England oversight that were responsible for it.
Brownian box ticking via thousands of forms isn't a substitute for a proper risk management system, and having a decent reserve ratio ranks pretty high on risk management.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Our peak last winter was 39,254 people in hospital, so that study would suggest it's now impossible to exceed that figure, unless a variant can substantially evade existing immunity, or is substantially more likely to cause serious illness to those with no immunity than Delta.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
Looks like fantastic news and a vindication of expediting the booster programme. Fair play to Javid.
Two cardiologists from Sheba Medical Center were verified as infected with the Omicron variant, a spokesperson for the hospital confirmed. He said they were experiencing “very light symptoms.” One of the doctors, in his 50s, brought the variant into Israel on return from a medical conference in London.
When was this chap in London I ask myself? I'll bet it doesn't fit with the original timeframe that this was cooked up in Botswana on Wednesday.
Makes you wonder doesn't it.
Not really, because if you ever thought detected in = cooked up in, in the first place, I doubt anything on earth has the power to make you actually think.
Can I have a translation please.
You just seem to be a bit off the pace, intellectually speaking. Like saying in 2021 that the discovery of dinosaur fossils makes you wonder about the theory that the world was created in mid October 4004 BC.
I am glad that I am extremely comfortable in my own intellectual capabilities not to be concerned by a random person off the internet thinks.
You also seemed to have misunderstood my point, which was I think it is becoming increasingly clear that this variant has been around a fair bit longer than just a few days. In fact we already know this from the confirmed cases. It then makes you wonder, just how long, no more "conspiracy" beyond that.
But who in the name of God, assuming they can simultaneously walk and chew gum, ever deduced "this was only detected a few days ago, therefore this has only been around for a few days"?
Next you'll be telling us that when the extremities of a rabbit have a larger angular separation than those of a blue whale, the theory that the rabbit is larger than the whale is not a slam dunk
How cheap is to sequence a genome now? Did it hit $1000 yet? What’s the explanation for why most countries are not even bothering to try?
See the reaction to SA being honest.
Credit to Australia. That’s a big percentage of their cases. Most of Europe should be ashamed. Equally dreadfully low number for India. Doesn’t bode well for any hopes of a post covid NATO type organisation against Infectious disease, even putting China to one side.
Some of those numbers are weird. Earlier chart had Denmark sequencing a third of their cases, but in this later one they've only done 753 sequences in total? That doesn't add up.
Some of those numbers are weird. Earlier chart had Denmark sequencing a third of their cases, but in this later one they've only done 753 sequences in total? That doesn't add up.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
A better example might be Black Wednesday. Brown was a full-throated supporter of the ERM long after it had become obvious even to Major and Lamont that we would have to withdraw. But nobody ever holds that against him even though had he been in charge things would have been fifty times worse.
Similarly it was as well for George Osborne's reputation, such as remains, that he wasn't in charge when Lehmanns went belly up. Mouse in the headlights would describe his demeanour quite well.
You have perfectly explained why contrary to what BigG and Isam are touting, it matters not a jot if Starmer calls Covid wrong today. It is far more important for Johnson to call it right however.
It matters in the context of the next GE campaign - The Tories, if Boris is right, can point out they freed us whilst Labour clamoured for lockdown - it is all about the next GE campaign. I was thinking earlier on that pollsters shouldn't ask "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow" but "How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow, taking into account there would have had been 2 months campaigning" and "Who do you think will perform better in the Election debates"
No it doesn't, unless every couple of months between now and the next GE Starmer keeps calling it wrong and Johnson keeps calling it right, or there is indeed an election tomorrow. Besides which Covid will be just one of a number of GE issues for Johnson to call right by then. Oh, and Johnson won't do the debates he will again use a surrogate.
You think the only political topics people have talked about for the last two years won't have any bearing on the next GE? Fair enough, agree to disagree
Of course they will, but don't you think the bulk of the vaccine bonus is already baked in for Johnson, there is probably a little more to come from the boosters.
When the Government's Covid post-mortem analysis is in Johnson's performance report will be mixed to say the least.
I am also not convinced Johnson getting Christmas right gives him many smartie points, getting it wrong loses lots.
Starmer's call by contrast is largely irrelevant.
I am saying it will give the Tories some ammo at the next GE - it is one of the biggest decisions in modern history - whether to impose restrictions of people freedoms or not. If Boris doesn't,and is proven correct, for a second time whilst Sir Keir is haranguing him to, of course the Tories will use it at the next GE, as well as their vaccine successes
Maybe, but I doubt it will have the net benefit you assume. The context of the too late initial lockdown, the cock up of September 2020 and his failure to save Christmas 2020 will have as much bearing in the medium term as him having saved Christmas 2021, which remains to be seen..
I may be completely wrong. I have been surprised that vaccinations are the gift that keeps on giving for Johnson. He will undoubtedly get a boost from the boosters too.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Some of those numbers are weird. Earlier chart had Denmark sequencing a third of their cases, but in this later one they've only done 753 sequences in total? That doesn't add up.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Yes, that 2.4x figure is definitely pretty bloody scary, it also looks like acquired immunity is only diluted by a small amount so people who got delta this summer should also be fine if this data is good.
Data isn't from Israel, its from South Africa. It has been passed to the Israeli's to look at, but somebody leaks it to a media channel. Nothing is confirmed yet.
Yep, but summarising so far about 30% more transmissible, up to twice the reinfection rate, about the same moribidity for the vaccinated, but about double for the unvaccinated. No aspect here is good news, this is worse or equal to Delta across the board. The only saving grace is that vaccines still seem to work well enough to keep most people out of hospital. Of course the sample size here is so small that these figures are only preliminary and likely to shift a fair bit as more data comes in and time passes.
I HATE TO BRAG, but this is uncannily close to my ‘official’ predictions the other night
Somewhat more transmissible, about as bad as Delta for severity, not a major problem for the vaxxed, shit for the unvaxxed
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
Some of those numbers are weird. Earlier chart had Denmark sequencing a third of their cases, but in this later one they've only done 753 sequences in total? That doesn't add up.
I'm not going to lie, if you'd asked me where Cambodia would be on that chart, I wouldn't have said third.
It is odd. My guess: China is sequencing all of Cambodia’s data, because China wants to know more about Covid, but China has so few cases of its own. Cambodia is a vassal state of China, these days
I'm not going to lie, if you'd asked me where Cambodia would be on that chart, I wouldn't have said third.
It is odd. My guess: China is sequencing all of Cambodia’s data, because China wants to know more about Covid, but China has so few cases of its own. Cambodia is a vassal state of China, these days
Quite a lot of bats with coronas in Cambodia, some very much like CV-19.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
I'm not going to lie, if you'd asked me where Cambodia would be on that chart, I wouldn't have said third.
It is odd. My guess: China is sequencing all of Cambodia’s data, because China wants to know more about Covid, but China has so few cases of its own. Cambodia is a vassal state of China, these days
I think we have discussed on here the dodgy nature of all the football shirt sponsors of betting companies we have never heard of, which are really just for the Chinese market. I knew they were mostly run out of the Philippines, what I didn't realise is because of a deal they did with China in regards allowing skilled labour in.
China initially thought this was another good move to spread their influence, except now 100-150k Chinese nationals are there in order to facilitate the illegal gambling of Chinese nationals who are in China.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
I'm in. I'll do three days meat free to keep the cantankerous old fucker alive.
I think it's highly likely Omicron was brewed up in an immunocompromised individual from a richer country. Probably on convalescent plasma and whatnot.
And the Saffas have got the blame for it – because they identified it!
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
No data, but an awful lot have had Covid too. Greater than 90% show antibodies.
Why is Dura refusing the Bill Gates sponsored microchipping?
Tested on animals.
Wasn't it reported the other day some youngish guy who was a vegan and objected for that very reason died after catching COVID.....his dying words, he wished he had got it.
Why is Dura refusing the Bill Gates sponsored microchipping?
Tested on animals.
Wasn't it reported the other day some youngish guy who was a vegan and objected for that very reason died after catching COVID.....his dying words, he wished he had got it.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
I'm in. I'll do three days meat free to keep the cantankerous old fucker alive.
Yep, me too. 3 days without meat. Pescatarian allowed?
In return Dura has to get the jab. He can save his life while saving about 100 animals and maybe turning 2 of us veggie, if we like the experience. Win win
I'm not going to lie, if you'd asked me where Cambodia would be on that chart, I wouldn't have said third.
It is odd. My guess: China is sequencing all of Cambodia’s data, because China wants to know more about Covid, but China has so few cases of its own. Cambodia is a vassal state of China, these days
Quite a lot of bats with coronas in Cambodia, some very much like CV-19.
One thing that was a bit puzzling was the rise in cases after half term, the R value had fallen to a level that should have allowed for schools to reopen without seeing any real rise in cases with Delta, with Omicron having a 30% transmission advantage over Delta we may actually already be in the middle of our Omicron wave but we haven't necessarily been looking for a new variant. Again, if we look at the latest slowish drop off that also lines up with a higher transmissibility variant pushing the herd immunity threshold up to ~93% from ~90%.
I wouldn't be surprised if when we go back and sequence the ONS samples there's a significant proportion with S-gene dropout for Omicron that may have been put down to Alpha.
It also could explain the very, very rapid rise in countries with overall immunity rates under 80% in Europe. Hopefully the government is doing random sampling of swabs from the beginning of November to now for S-gene dropout and then going back and looking at case outcomes for those people who tested positive with vaccine and prior acquired immunity status if it's known.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
I'm in. I'll do three days meat free to keep the cantankerous old fucker alive.
In retrospect that didn't sound as generous-spirited as I'd hoped. Still, there it is. Come on Dura.
Some of those numbers are weird. Earlier chart had Denmark sequencing a third of their cases, but in this later one they've only done 753 sequences in total? That doesn't add up.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
No data, but an awful lot have had Covid too. Greater than 90% show antibodies.
Our vaccinations skew strongly to the older, more vulnerable age groups. That makes a big difference too.
Max gave the link to someone else recently. Probably quite easy to find if you go through his recent comments.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Why is Dura refusing the Bill Gates sponsored microchipping?
Tested on animals.
Wasn't it reported the other day some youngish guy who was a vegan and objected for that very reason died after catching COVID.....his dying words, he wished he had got it.
Why is Dura refusing the Bill Gates sponsored microchipping?
Tested on animals.
Wasn't it reported the other day some youngish guy who was a vegan and objected for that very reason died after catching COVID.....his dying words, he wished he had got it.
I presume if you take this to the nth degree, I would have thought basically every modern medicine has been tested on animals at some point or involves compounds that have been, no?
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
Well for a start how many of those 24 million are children who will not get adverse symptom? According to the ONS 20% of the population (which they have as 68 million) is under 16. That is around 13 million or so of the 22 million. So you are looking at around 11 million unvaccinated. And how many of those 11 million have had covid already? The numbers start to decline rapidly when you look at the reasonable exclusions.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Because the possible presence of non human intelligence in our skies and seas is absolutely fascinating. Surely?
Almost as fascinating is the shrugging reaction from humans….
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
Well for a start how many of those 24 million are children who will not get adverse symptom? According to the ONS 20% of the population (which they have as 68 million) is under 16. That is around 13 million or so of the 22 million. So you are looking at around 11 million unvaccinated. And how many of those 11 million have had covid already? The numbers start to decline rapidly when you look at the reasonable exclusions.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
Sure, the number of people in the UK is ~67m of whom 46m 18+ are double vaxxed, in addition monitoring by Cambridge and Imperial shows that a further 13-17m kids and adults have immunity from prior infection. Then number of virus naive people in the UK is now thought to be between 5m and 8m people mostly in younger age categories.
Additionally, hospitalisation is not uniform among age groups in the UK vaccine uptake among the key 60+ age group is close to 100% so the potential for hospitalisations is low in an age group that is most at risk of being hospitalised. PHE regularly produces an antibody monitoring study for UK adults and in those key age groups antibody presence from vaccines is almost always above 95% of those sampled and overall antibody presence is close to 100% when antibodies produced by natural infection are rolled in.
Finally, the spread of virus naive people is primarily in the under 24 age category due to lower vaccination rates, the hospitalisation rate for these people is very low, as in if it's 1/10,000 being hospitalised that would be a surprise. For kids under 12 where there is no vaccination but high natural immunity there is almost zero hospitalisation, during the whole pandemic only a few hundred kids have needed hospital treatment and the survival rate is almost 100%.
The Delta exit wave has essentially filled in the immunity gaps that the UK had after our reasonable but not outstanding vaccine campaign.
Aiui the number will get smaller as more over 60s get their third doses.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
Sure, the number of people in the UK is ~67m of whom 46m 18+ are double vaxxed, in addition monitoring by Cambridge and Imperial shows that a further 13-17m kids and adults have immunity from prior infection. Then number of virus naive people in the UK is now thought to be between 5m and 8m people mostly in younger age categories.
Additionally, hospitalisation is not uniform among age groups in the UK vaccine uptake among the key 60+ age group is close to 100% so the potential for hospitalisations is low in an age group that is most at risk of being hospitalised. PHE regularly produces an antibody monitoring study for UK adults and in those key age groups antibody presence from vaccines is almost always above 95% of those sampled and overall antibody presence is close to 100% when antibodies produced by natural infection are rolled in.
Finally, the spread of virus naive people is primarily in the under 24 age category due to lower vaccination rates, the hospitalisation rate for these people is very low, as in if it's 1/10,000 being hospitalised that would be a surprise. For kids under 12 where there is no vaccination but high natural immunity there is almost zero hospitalisation, during the whole pandemic only a few hundred kids have needed hospital treatment and the survival rate is almost 100%.
The Delta exit wave has essentially filled in the immunity gaps that the UK had after our reasonable but not outstanding vaccine campaign.
Aiui the number will get smaller as more over 60s get their third doses.
Good summary.
One note: there is that troubling and possibly anecdotal evidence from SA of “toddlers” going into hospital with suspected Omicron
I have not seen it properly evidenced or verified, let alone scientifically investigated, but just a tiny reason for caution…
Why is Dura refusing the Bill Gates sponsored microchipping?
Tested on animals.
Wasn't it reported the other day some youngish guy who was a vegan and objected for that very reason died after catching COVID.....his dying words, he wished he had got it.
I presume if you take this to the nth degree, I would have thought basically every modern medicine has been tested on animals at some point or involves compounds that have been, no?
One would have thought so. How about buildings constructed using whipped horses? Or companies who made money from investors who were factory farmers? I've every admiration for vegans. It would be better for everyone if more were. But this smacks of fanaticism.
PRELIMINARY DATA but good news for your afternoon! Pfizer vaccine’s is only SLIGHTLY less effective in preventing infection with Omicron than with Delta- 90% as opposed to 95%- while it is AS EFFECTIVE in preventing serious symptoms- around 93% – at least for those boosted! There are indications that individuals fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, within six months or with the booster, are also protected against the Omicron variant, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said Tuesday, after another two cases of individuals infected with the variant were identified, bringing the total to four. “In the coming days we will have more accurate information about the efficacy of the vaccine against Omicron but there is already room for optimism, and there are initial indications that those who are vaccinated with a vaccine STILL valid or with a booster, will also be protected from this variant.” In addition, according to the report, the ability of the variant to infect is higher than Delta but not as much as feared- around 1.3 times higher. At the same time, those not inoculated have a 2.4 times greater chances of developing serious symptoms- a significant figure. You can read this and more here: https://jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/covid-1st-data-about-vaccine-efficacy-against-omicron-expected-tuesday-687392
TLDR Get vaccinated, get boosted.
What a relief - if it is true. But what a scary number for the unvaxxed. Get yer fucking jab, @Dura_Ace
Maybe we could strike a bargain with Dura. If he gets his jab, we’ll see how many people here we can get to go meatless the day after.
I'm in. I'll do three days meat free to keep the cantankerous old fucker alive.
Three days without meat to save the life of someone who is permanently 1 sneeze away from becoming a brief but bright fireball just to the side of the M40? I'll think it over.
For the zillionth time (does this really need repeating??) more regulation is not synonymous with better regulation. It's one of the most bizarre features of people on the Left that they seem to be totally incapable of getting their heads around this simplest of propositions. And I think it's a genuine intellectual failure in them, not just the obvious one of seeking to excuse a Labour Chancellor for the catastrophic dog's breakfast he made of financial regulation.
Semi agreed. The regime put in place was rubbish and failed but there is no way on this earth that the old one, let alone any the Cons (who were fully signed up to 'light touch') would conceivably have implemented, could have headed off the crash of 08 or mitigated its impact on us to any significant degree.
There is "the crash of 08" with its attendant CDS and so forth, and there is the first bank panic in the UK for XX years with people queuing round the block to get their money out. The former of course not; the latter, perhaps.
The business model in question would need to have been prohibited in order to stop that. But the political culture of the time was 'these guys know what they're doing, leave them be, count the tax pounds'. Would this have been different with George Osborne or John McDonnell instead of Gordon Brown as Chancellor? (I now copy your last sentence).
The Bank of England is still in charge of monitoring bank capital ratios and blocks RBS from buying ABN Amro. The Bank of England tells Northern Rock it's business model is built on sand and to hold 8% capital, not 0%. The Bank of England tells HBOS the same and to hold 8% reserve capital.
That alone changes the nature and severity of the banking crisis in 08. You want to rewrite history and pretend it was investment banks that failed in the UK, it wasn't, it was standard old retail banks that shat the bed and needed bailing out.
I still think we should have let all of them go bankrupt and stood behind the depositors. It was a mistake to for the state to step in and socialise losses.
I'm not rewriting history. You're constructing an alternative history whereby under the 'light touch' laissez faire Tories, the City's reckless exuberance (being kind there) would have been tamed to such an extent that when global money markets had their near fatal seizure we here would have been largely protected. I find this fanciful in the extreme. Also the distinction between retail and investment banks' behaviour isn't a clear one. Eg, a large part of RBS's problem was paying a ludicrous amount for the poison pill that was ABN. It was full of junk. Barclays and the much vaunted Bob Diamond avoided that fate by the sheer dumb luck of being outbid by a bigger and more hubristic fool. Investment banks (and bankers) played a full part in the debacle on both sides of the Atlantic.
Ask yourself this, why after such a long period of it not happening why did so many banks go bust after Gordon Brown changed the rules?
Now I've spent the last decade working in banking and financial services regulation/compliance so I'm obviously an ingénue in these matters, so be gentle.
Because the 08 crash and subsequent markets seizure exposed the fact that the City had long abdicated on risk management in a breathless chase for remuneration and status. Is my answer.
Unless you're talking about a stream of failures before that?
That Tory manifesto from 2005 again, in the wake of the pressure from Hannan and others' a year earlier to fully "Icelandise" the UK financial sector :
"The best guarantee of future prosperity is a dynamic economy. New technology and the speed of global capital flows punish the inflexible and the sluggish. We need to reward risk-taking ...."
Yep. There is mucho bollocks being talked in places. Brown deserves his big black mark on this - he fell for the myth of City 'flair plus competence' and he WAS the CoE for heavens sake - but there is simply no way it wouldn't have panned out similar or worse under the Cons. But of course we can't prove this. So the claim persists. Grrr.
Before Northern Rock, there was 150 years since the last British bank run. A period where the Conservative Party held office the majority of the time. But don’t let that get in the way of your nonsense.
Suggest you get back to your specialist field of flying saucers.
You’re a bit touchy.
- You can't go saying I'm talking nonsense when you clearly haven't the first clue about it!
Do I ever tell you you're talking nonsense on the saucers? No, I don't. I read and have a think.
Perhaps one day I’ll meet you IRL and you can thereafter review my cv and decide if I am more or less qualified than you to talk about risk within the banking system.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
The thing about UAPs is, so what? There is no doubt that there is weird and inexplicable shit going on, but what are we meant to do about it? Assume an Independence Day type alien megaship parks itself in geostationary orbit, and just sits there, what would we do about it? We'd wet our knickers about it and have experts giving it large on the telly about it for 6 months, but when there's no more to say, or do, about it, we'd just crack on with normal life. It's an axiom of advertising that you end up telling your target audience what to do next. UAP fanbois please note.
Because the possible presence of non human intelligence in our skies and seas is absolutely fascinating. Surely?
Almost as fascinating is the shrugging reaction from humans….
Absolutely, but when all we know is, There is some seriously strange shit going down, we run into the maxim: whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent." The only recent development has been, an admission by the Pentagon that strange shit is going down. We knew that anyway.
Just watched the most dominant victory in football ever. Possession 86-14, Shots 64-0, Shots on target 31-0, corners 15-0. The result; England Ladies 20, Latvia Ladies 0. Four hat tricks and one player scored 4 having never scored before.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
Sure, the number of people in the UK is ~67m of whom 46m 18+ are double vaxxed, in addition monitoring by Cambridge and Imperial shows that a further 13-17m kids and adults have immunity from prior infection. Then number of virus naive people in the UK is now thought to be between 5m and 8m people mostly in younger age categories.
Additionally, hospitalisation is not uniform among age groups in the UK vaccine uptake among the key 60+ age group is close to 100% so the potential for hospitalisations is low in an age group that is most at risk of being hospitalised. PHE regularly produces an antibody monitoring study for UK adults and in those key age groups antibody presence from vaccines is almost always above 95% of those sampled and overall antibody presence is close to 100% when antibodies produced by natural infection are rolled in.
Finally, the spread of virus naive people is primarily in the under 24 age category due to lower vaccination rates, the hospitalisation rate for these people is very low, as in if it's 1/10,000 being hospitalised that would be a surprise. For kids under 12 where there is no vaccination but high natural immunity there is almost zero hospitalisation, during the whole pandemic only a few hundred kids have needed hospital treatment and the survival rate is almost 100%.
The Delta exit wave has essentially filled in the immunity gaps that the UK had after our reasonable but not outstanding vaccine campaign.
Aiui the number will get smaller as more over 60s get their third doses.
Good summary.
One note: there is that troubling and possibly anecdotal evidence from SA of “toddlers” going into hospital with suspected Omicron
I have not seen it properly evidenced or verified, let alone scientifically investigated, but just a tiny reason for caution…
We have this with every variant, I remember the blue tick wankers saying that Boris was killing kids by getting rid of the bubbles for the school year this September because Delta was magically completely different from Alpha. Even last year with Alpha we had reports of kids being hospitalised at a higher rate but then it just turned out that no, hospitals had just started testing everyone so registered positive tests among kids that came in for other issues. We also had that Kawasaki disease scare right at the beginning which was, again, egged on by the same blue tick wankers looking to cause panic for likes.
I'm not ruling out the possibility, though my reasoning for being sceptical is sound. The doctor on Sunday explained that it was all to do with ACE-2 receptors, old people have loads, under 40s have not many and kids have barely any. It's extremely difficult for the virus to actually enter cells in key parts of the body for kids which is why they don't present severe symptoms.
What's the play if Omicron has no vaccine escape but is absolutely devastating to the unvaxxed?
An exceptionally tough decision for the PM. An NHS overrun with anti-vaxxers hurts all of us, so do we put then at the back of the queue for treatment? Or do we have to accept a lockdown?
We don't really have enough people in the non-immune categories for that to happen. The LSHTM model was quite prescient in that it predicted what hospitalisations would look like if everyone in the country was exposed to the virus tomorrow, it works out to about 40k people hospitalised here. It's not an earth shattering figure.
Can you talk us through the numbers, or give a link? The Uk population is about 70 million, of whom 70% are fully vaccinated. Assume that nobody who is fully vaccinated catches a case of Covid serious enough to be hospitalised. That leaves 24 million people who are not fully vaccinated yet. You say that if they were all exposed to the virus tomorrow, less than 0.2% would be hospitalised? That would be excellent news, but it doesn't sound right.
Sure, the number of people in the UK is ~67m of whom 46m 18+ are double vaxxed, in addition monitoring by Cambridge and Imperial shows that a further 13-17m kids and adults have immunity from prior infection. Then number of virus naive people in the UK is now thought to be between 5m and 8m people mostly in younger age categories.
Additionally, hospitalisation is not uniform among age groups in the UK vaccine uptake among the key 60+ age group is close to 100% so the potential for hospitalisations is low in an age group that is most at risk of being hospitalised. PHE regularly produces an antibody monitoring study for UK adults and in those key age groups antibody presence from vaccines is almost always above 95% of those sampled and overall antibody presence is close to 100% when antibodies produced by natural infection are rolled in.
Finally, the spread of virus naive people is primarily in the under 24 age category due to lower vaccination rates, the hospitalisation rate for these people is very low, as in if it's 1/10,000 being hospitalised that would be a surprise. For kids under 12 where there is no vaccination but high natural immunity there is almost zero hospitalisation, during the whole pandemic only a few hundred kids have needed hospital treatment and the survival rate is almost 100%.
The Delta exit wave has essentially filled in the immunity gaps that the UK had after our reasonable but not outstanding vaccine campaign.
Aiui the number will get smaller as more over 60s get their third doses.
Good summary.
One note: there is that troubling and possibly anecdotal evidence from SA of “toddlers” going into hospital with suspected Omicron
I have not seen it properly evidenced or verified, let alone scientifically investigated, but just a tiny reason for caution…
We have this with every variant, I remember the blue tick wankers saying that Boris was killing kids by getting rid of the bubbles for the school year this September because Delta was magically completely different from Alpha. Even last year with Alpha we had reports of kids being hospitalised at a higher rate but then it just turned out that no, hospitals had just started testing everyone so registered positive tests among kids that came in for other issues. We also had that Kawasaki disease scare right at the beginning which was, again, egged on by the same blue tick wankers looking to cause panic for likes.
I'm not ruling out the possibility, though my reasoning for being sceptical is sound. The doctor on Sunday explained that it was all to do with ACE-2 receptors, old people have loads, under 40s have not many and kids have barely any. It's extremely difficult for the virus to actually enter cells in key parts of the body for kids which is why they don't present severe symptoms.
Don't forget the 99% of survivors also get long covid...
Comments
Because he is basically thick and likes to play soldiers.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.28.424451v1
To investigate the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in the immune population, we co-incubated authentic virus with a highly neutralizing plasma from a COVID-19 convalescent patient. The plasma fully neutralized the virus for 7 passages, but after 45 days, the deletion of F140 in the spike N-terminal domain (NTD) N3 loop led to partial breakthrough. At day 73, an E484K substitution in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) occurred, followed at day 80 by an insertion in the NTD N5 loop containing a new glycan sequon, which generated a variant completely resistant to plasma neutralization.
Also on UAPs, you are much like most people and have clearly still done no serious thinking or reading on the recent public discourse in the US. If you had, you would be thinking about it with a more open mind and frankly be amused that some people still think it a topic worthy of stigma or ridicule, bearing in mind the comments even in the last month by for example the serving Administrator of NASA or Michio Kaku, cofounder of string theory.
You also seemed to have misunderstood my point, which was I think it is becoming increasingly clear that this variant has been around a fair bit longer than just a few days. In fact we already know this from the confirmed cases. One of the UK ones was visiting KFC over 2 weeks ago while being infectious.
It then makes you wonder, just how long, no more "conspiracy" beyond that. Is the epicentre Southern Africa, clearly, where was the exact origin, it is always very difficult to say precisely.
When the Government's Covid post-mortem analysis is in Johnson's performance report will be mixed to say the least.
I am also not convinced Johnson getting Christmas right gives him many smartie points, getting it wrong loses lots.
Starmer's call by contrast is largely irrelevant.
Which happily enough, seems to be exactly the consequence of this week’s policy decisions. Might be luck but let’s give benefit of the doubt, looks like someone has thought this through quite cleverly.
The countries doing the heavy lifting globally:
btw, kudos Ireland, who have uploaded the 3rd-most raw reads for their SARS-CoV-2 genomes. We're having a lot of discussion about potential artifacts, and it's great when one can easily figure out the answer to these questions by diving into the reads https://covid19dataportal.org/sequences?db=sra-experiment-covid19&size=15&crossReferencesOption=all#search-content
https://twitter.com/theosanderson/status/1465113260475269120?s=20
Brownian box ticking via thousands of forms isn't a substitute for a proper risk management system, and having a decent reserve ratio ranks pretty high on risk management.
5.
I wonder rather watch the complete 9hrs of the Beatles documentary.
Covid: Greece to fine over-60s who refuse Covid-19 vaccine
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59474808
(Apols if it has already been posted, I haven't time to read full threads atm.)
€100 per month is serious money in Greece. They must be in a state of near panic.
They're doing the sequencing, just not sending it to this database.
I may be completely wrong. I have been surprised that vaccinations are the gift that keeps on giving for Johnson. He will undoubtedly get a boost from the boosters too.
I can do better than that. I actually have a weird minor cold RIGHT NOW
I HATE TO BRAG, but this is uncannily close to my ‘official’ predictions the other night
Somewhat more transmissible, about as bad as Delta for severity, not a major problem for the vaxxed, shit for the unvaxxed
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2021/11/30/christian-horner-exclusive-lewis-hamilton-vs-max-verstappen/
China initially thought this was another good move to spread their influence, except now 100-150k Chinese nationals are there in order to facilitate the illegal gambling of Chinese nationals who are in China.
It’s taken @kinabalu about 18 months to accept the premise that Lab Leak is plausible. He is a reasonably intelligent guy (but no genius), with a fantastically narrow and settled mind. You have to PRISE it open. I’d give up on UAPs if I were you
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/uk-news/vegan-who-refused-vaccine-because-22306094
In return Dura has to get the jab. He can save his life while saving about 100 animals and maybe turning 2 of us veggie, if we like the experience. Win win
I wouldn't be surprised if when we go back and sequence the ONS samples there's a significant proportion with S-gene dropout for Omicron that may have been put down to Alpha.
It also could explain the very, very rapid rise in countries with overall immunity rates under 80% in Europe. Hopefully the government is doing random sampling of swabs from the beginning of November to now for S-gene dropout and then going back and looking at case outcomes for those people who tested positive with vaccine and prior acquired immunity status if it's known.
Max gave the link to someone else recently. Probably quite easy to find if you go through his recent comments.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/30/boris-johnson-contradicts-expert-advice-to-cancel-christmas-socialising
They say breakthrough infections in those previously infected are twice the rate as for Delta (bad)
But for the fully vaccinated the efficacy goes down just from 95 to 90% (good).
But isn’t that vaccine data equivalent to a doubling of breakthrough risk (10% vs 5%)?
Still pretty decent data to be honest, because both numbers suggest immune escape isn’t that great.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/59481154
Which means kit clashes for one thing.
Mo Salah knows a thing about to the Great Leap Forward in the penalty area.
Almost as fascinating is the shrugging reaction from humans….
Additionally, hospitalisation is not uniform among age groups in the UK vaccine uptake among the key 60+ age group is close to 100% so the potential for hospitalisations is low in an age group that is most at risk of being hospitalised. PHE regularly produces an antibody monitoring study for UK adults and in those key age groups antibody presence from vaccines is almost always above 95% of those sampled and overall antibody presence is close to 100% when antibodies produced by natural infection are rolled in.
Finally, the spread of virus naive people is primarily in the under 24 age category due to lower vaccination rates, the hospitalisation rate for these people is very low, as in if it's 1/10,000 being hospitalised that would be a surprise. For kids under 12 where there is no vaccination but high natural immunity there is almost zero hospitalisation, during the whole pandemic only a few hundred kids have needed hospital treatment and the survival rate is almost 100%.
The Delta exit wave has essentially filled in the immunity gaps that the UK had after our reasonable but not outstanding vaccine campaign.
Aiui the number will get smaller as more over 60s get their third doses.
One note: there is that troubling and possibly anecdotal evidence from SA of “toddlers” going into hospital with suspected Omicron
I have not seen it properly evidenced or verified, let alone scientifically investigated, but just a tiny reason for caution…
How about buildings constructed using whipped horses? Or companies who made money from investors who were factory farmers?
I've every admiration for vegans. It would be better for everyone if more were.
But this smacks of fanaticism.
But I missed that tiny window of opportunity.
It may never happen again.
I'm not ruling out the possibility, though my reasoning for being sceptical is sound. The doctor on Sunday explained that it was all to do with ACE-2 receptors, old people have loads, under 40s have not many and kids have barely any. It's extremely difficult for the virus to actually enter cells in key parts of the body for kids which is why they don't present severe symptoms.