‘If you have “F*** You Money”, and you don’t say “F*** You”, who’s going to?’ - Joe Rogan.
Yes, we definitely need insight from a bald far right enabler who sells nootropic brain pills that don't do anything to the lackwitted and gullible.
While we are on the subject of American far right hypocrites, the tale of Tucker Carlson lobbying Hunter Biden to get his son into Georgetown, which is basically a finishing school for the kind of preppy elitist inside the beltway types that Carlson pretends to despise every night on Fox News, is hilarious. What a fucking fraud.
Why are you surprised - in between declaring the other side is the devil incarnate, let's do business.
The ultimate example of this is in Northern Ireland - where the Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries have carved up various illegal businesses. They have worked together with remarkably little friction, on drug dealing, for years.
Oh I am utterly not surprised. These Republican anti elitists are the most full of shit people you will ever come across.
All anti-elites are full of shit. Their main aim (or is it achievement?) is to become elite themselves.
Hence the identify of the richest person in Venezuela. Or Cuba.
Funny (maybe true) story - during Soviet times, the KGB amassed a very considerable slush fund overseas. Invested in stock markets, rental property etc. When the coup against Gorbachev was attempted, they tried to use some of the funds. But the bank accounts were empty. Someone had stolen their stolen money. The story goes that some ex-CIA guys, kicked out over Iran-Contra, decided to improve their 401ks....
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
My issue with the modelling is that I believe what was being shown to government was cherry picked by someone (I don't know who) to make them take action. This was done with honest intentions as that person believed action needed to be taken and wouldn't have been if a more realistic set of models had been shown. But it was badly handled.
There was a fucking communist on SAGE who confessed she wanted to reorder society to fit her idiot Marxist theories. Ugh
Never again
They won't find the public so receptive next time.
I don’t know about that. A bit of fear is all it takes
Not bad header. But at the time, the consensus in the country and on PB, save for a precious few people (and I 92% include myself in that latter group) were cheering on the restrictions. Even pre-vaccine, which seems to have been a watershed for some, very few and very few on PB spotted the dangers of lockdown as a principle, rather than the effect it might have on the virus.
Sure, the government saw how in northern Italy people were almost literally dying on the streets but there was always another route short of legal enforcement (with all the pitfalls that @Cyclefree correctly points out).
And then literally one by one on PB people realised that all along it was the principle that was the danger. And now everyone is applauding this article who were huge lockdown fans at the time.
And of course, when reviewing the largest restriction on liberty in living memory, someone is going to say seatbelts.
Is still support the principle of lockdowns, when needed (I think they were needed for periods of this pandemic, particularly pre-vaccine - as I think has been my expressed view throughout).
The laws were rushed, for obvious reasons. The guidelines were incoherent and often nonsensical. I remember going for a walk with my father in law and my son while my wife went for a walk with my mother in law and our daughter, along the same road, a few tens of yards apart because that was, I believe, the law at that point. Clearly that was no difference, from a disease spread point of view, to us all walking together.
I have a lot of sympathy with rushed laws and guidance at the start of the first lockdown. Arguably they should have been drafted and debated early in the year, but I don't think any of us really believed it would get so bad at that point. For the later lockdowns (partly with hindsight) there should have been proper debate and scrutiny in advance of a range of restriction options, from which the government could then choose as needed. Any deviation should require full debate or have a very strict time limit.
Now is the time to do these things, while they are fresh in the mind. Get the epidemiologists to write up some options for different kinds of pathogens, airbourne, surface-spread and sensible restrictions in various levels. Get those voted on and put into a set of restrictions that can be triggered as needed, with a strict time limit before a vote is needed to maintain them. They should also be reviewed with each new government, perhaps. We were caught unprepared, which was understandable, but now is the time to ensure we are better prepared next time and to have the debate about what is and is not acceptable. The epidemiologists should inform that debate, so should the NHS leaders, but also advocacy groups for those who were worst hit by lockdown, those who live alone, who are elderly - or young - and isolated without going into work and socialising. When all that is done, we need the police and CPS to agree guidelines on enforcement and have thes reviewed, to stop the ridiculous harassment we saw of people doing lawful things this time round. Guidance, if issued, should be made clearly distinct from the law: "In addition to the things restricted by law, we also ask you to avoid the following, as much as you can, to reduce spread..."
Great post.
But I still prefer guidance, nudges, education, and appropriate compensation rather than laws. Once the lockdown genie is out of the bottle (too late, I appreciate) then that becomes a policy tool for any number of situations. Ask Walter Wolfgang.
Yep. One of the interesting questions is to what extent guidance, in the absent of laws, would have been effective. Sweden has some interesting data there (more than on relationship between laws and cases/deaths) as there was a big drop in travel etc even though there was little forbidden by law early on. Of course, Sweden is not UK, so there are limits to what can be inferred.
I think there was a need for laws for businesses, i.e. mandating closure of some. Otherwise it's much harder to provide needed support and prevent pressure on employees to come into the office anyway. But another thing to be reviewed. Later rules were less strict on homeworking. If they were still effective, then go with that, I guess.
In the UK, wave 1 of Covid had peaked before lockdown.
Citation ( and a mountain of salt) required.
Peak deaths was the 8th April 2020, 3 weeks back from there is before lockdown
Which assumes an exact 3 weeks to death for every patient - citation for that one?
Your response is exactly the issue that led to the lockdown fanaticism, shouting down anyone who goes against the narrative, of course 3 weeks is not an exact figure for every death, its an average.
The thread header is very well written but it is naive. There isn't any circumstance that any Government in the UK could have avoided lockdown and the other restrictions. The press would have wound the public up to make the Government complete hate figures for causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people. I think the Government probably intorduced the least restrictions it could based on the poor scientific advice and the nightmare press that exists in this country. The most sickening being Kay Burley and Beth Rigby.
I was completely ridiculed on this site for even suggesting that maybe lockdowns wrere not effective in May/June 2020 and now with hindsight people have a different view, but to blame the Government for introducing the lock down when 95% of people and just about all "expert scientists" agreed with it is a bit rich.
It's also the mode figure for a distribution which is not only the combination of three distributions with different variables but has a skew.
You've got: infection to illness, plus illness to hospitalisation, plus hospitalisation to death. Each varies considerably and an average conceals much of the distribution.
Simon Nichols ran a more detailed analysis and got a different figure for mode to median and mean (which is not surprising) and he got a 15 day mode for a 19 day mean.
The seven day average of deaths on death certificates in England peaked for the first wave on the 10th of April (1,180) and the individual day record was the 8th of April (1,286). That would give a (loose) central estimate of incidence peaking around the 24th-26th of March.
And we don't have to take any calculation's word for it. We can look at the increases and decreases of incidence and later death from the ONS survey and death certificates.
Four separate peaks came in with delays of 9 days, 16 days, 23 days, and 13 days between incidence peaking and deaths peaking. An average of 15.25 days, but with a fairly wide variability - which is what we'd expect.
Press starting to ramp up the monkeyspunkypox fear this morning. It's out there!
Yeah, what's going on with that? My understanding is that Monkeypox was a rare mostly tropical virus that didn't spread very easily at all?
Has it mutated to become more transmissible?
Very doubtful. I mean it's 40 odd cases in half a dozen countries which doesn't suggest easy community transmission, no clusters. It seems to spread via sex, close skin contact, touching infected clothing and they've tagged in some vague thing about 'droplets' and extended face to face contact
Is “extended face to face contact” what used to be called making out?
Gobbing in each other's mouths I think. WHO having a meeting about simian death spunk right now.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Not too many people "of a certain age" at nightclubs and raves and, I believe, such people read the newspapers also.
So lock them down. Voluntarily. Compensate them.
But the principle is more important than the outcome. The country is now accustomed to what were hitherto unprecedented restrictions on liberty. When else might such laws be deployed. We don't know but it's a known unknown or an unknown unknown but it's out there.
To an extent I don't disagree with your analysis, however in the weeks of extremely restrictive lockdowns, the Government indulged in them for what they considered to be reasons of public safety as opposed to an opportunity to impose Soviet style authoritarian controls for the sake of subduing the great unwashed.
PB Libertarians are furiously rewriting history this morning.
Not at all. At some point you have to ask about the quid pro quo. They indulged in them because they worried that the NHS would be overwhelmed and that would not be a good look for any government. And even if they did it from the goodness of their hearts because of public safety I would still question whether such measures were appropriate in terms of the restrictions on liberty.
OK - March 2020 everyone was panicking (not those at Cheltenham or on the Central Line but I digress) and I get that with the pictures from Northern Italy the government went into panic mode also. It was the unknown and a national lockdown was an understandable circuit break. Which is where @Cyclefree's article comes in. Because it was introduced with such cavalier disregard for due process that actually there can be questions asked about its validity as a response given the huge sacrifices in liberty, process and executive power that it entailed.
Dare I say that X thousand deaths were worth the principle of liberty (trying not to over-dramatise)? Perhaps.
Perhaps the lack of due process, despite advance warning of the pandemic from Italy and elsewhere, is that the Prime Minister thinks he is above law and custom, and his chief of staff thought he should be.
Well I yield to no one in my position as foremost believer of Boris to be a useless solipsistic twat but thank the lord he and his evidently libertarian instincts and sheer arrogance were in charge. He still - I think unwillingly - yielded to the 5pm government by Chief Medical Officer but I can't help but thinking that with almost anyone else in charge (saving Steve Baker et al) we would have been in an even worse (ie fewer liberties) position than we were and for longer.
Totally agree mate, with PM Starmer we'd probably still have mask mandates and travel restrictions in place today like much of continental Europe. We'd never have had the July 2021 removal of domestic restrictions and we'd have vaccine passports in force for well over a year now.
Whatever else one thinks about Boris, he's the correct PM to have had. Dave and Blair would also have been tended towards freedom as well. PM Starmer, May and Brown would all have cracked down much harder and we'd have been unlikely to ever see the end of COVID measures once they were handed all that control over people's lives. Scottish people have lucked out that the Westminster government has constantly pushed on removing restrictions, otherwise Sturgeon would still have everything in place.
What I'd like to see now is the dismantling of the final COVID measures, I'd order Ofcom to start looking into the removal of social distancing and plastic screens on TV shows etc... Just bin all of the bullshit from COVID.
I agree with that post except for the comment about Continental Europe. You refer to restrictions still in existence today compared to us. I can only speak of a couple of countries and that is not correct. Looking at @Leon travel reports it also doesn't seem to be so for the places he has travelled to either. We have all moved on I think.
The TV is sclerotic. On BBC breakfast - no limits on people on the safa. Have I got news for you - screens between panelists. Madness.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
My issue with the modelling is that I believe what was being shown to government was cherry picked by someone (I don't know who) to make them take action. This was done with honest intentions as that person believed action needed to be taken and wouldn't have been if a more realistic set of models had been shown. But it was badly handled.
There was a fucking communist on SAGE who confessed she wanted to reorder society to fit her idiot Marxist theories. Ugh
Never again
She was also on diet sage.
I was going to setup Continuity Independent Sage.
All I need are a large number of people with loud opinions and no actual definable skills in the area.
Why @Malmesbury, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for £989 per hour plus VAT outside IR35, I'm your huckleberry.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
The average age people died of Covid-19 was 82. The average age people die in general is 82.
Hmm, we need an Actuary to pop up and pick this apart.
This will all be in the distribution. The median age of death is about 3 years higher, and the modal higher still.
There is also the measurement error in determining what people actually died of (rather than with), and the conversion to loss of QALYs.
According to Bart, old people die anyway, so what's the problem?
Let's be frank, people with dementia go into a Care Home to be comforted and looked after until they die, not to be treated, recover and go home. Indeed most admissions die within twelve months, of which my nan was within that number too.
So yes locking down the healthy to prevent the deaths of those being comforted until they die is not right or responsible.
Locking down those being comforted until they die so they can't see their loved ones in their final months isn't humane either.
My nan died in a Care Home being denied visitors and not seeing her loved ones in her final months. That was cruel, heartless and is the reality of your supposed "kindness" of lockdown.
Never again.
Old people's homes, care homes, nursing homes and hospices are not all the same thing. Your argument applies solely to the last, and perhaps the second and third depending on the medical condition.
Everything I said was true for the Care sector in general.
People have throughout made the BS argument that since the average life expectancy at 80 is 90, that the average death is ten years life lost. But it's utterly wrong, since people who die are not average and otherwise nobody would ever die. The average 80 year old does not live in a Care home, they live in their own home.
For the Care sector in general the median life expectancy is less than twelve months after admission. So locking down for a year or two, just denies most their final months with loved ones.
Death is sad and it hit me hard when my nan died, but death comes to us all and I think it would have been kinder to her if she'd been allowed to see her loved ones in her final months rather than be locked away left to die alone. Even if she'd died sooner, it would still be kinder.
I hate what happened to this country with a passion. It was cruel and unnecessary, unprincipled and wrong. Simply saying "yes but people died" does not make death wrong, or less inevitable, or locking people away from loved ones until they die a kindness.
On the otgher hand, anti-lockdown libertarians werew taking the completely opposite position on stats - using the total life expectancy in completely misleading ways.
Nevertheless, you're absolutely right in saying that those entering care homes are not statistically representative of the wider population. Even so, the care homes sector has a very wide range of inhabitants, even in the old folks homes. A friend's mum, for instance, was in one for about 12 years, because she had MS and ultimately died of it, while being bright as a button mentally all the time. That's the opposite of the very real dementia category.
Add to that the legal issues involved and the liability of care home operators.
This is the sort of thing that needs a proper and objective analysis in the future inquiry - and also to be considered in future pandemic planning. If it was not done in past planning, or was ignored, that was a serious omission.
Indeed it is complicated but on average your friends mum is the exception and not the norm.
Part of the problem is that people can be too precious about death and treat every death as a tragedy, but there are tragedies worse than death.
The media facilitates this. Soft sob stories interviewing "bereaved" families and "blaming" their deaths etc as if the deaths should have been prevented.
The amount of interviews of things like "my 98 year old father/grandfather etc caught COVID in a Care Home and died, he should have been protected". Sorry to be harsh, but death was coming for your 98 year old relative either way, if not now it wasn't much further away - what we should have been doing is allowing them to make the most of whatever precious time they had left, not denying them visitors so they died alone and cut off from loved ones.
It's similar to your point the other day about war. War is not always worse than unjust peace.
For all his faults, I think it's on balance, a good thing, that we had a PM who was lazy, and unenthusiastic about lockdowns. A PM who was zealous, and who imposed them efficiently, would have been a lot worse.
The polls do show a trend away from the conservatives but why anybody should be surprised I really do not know
Forget partygate and beergate , every day voters are seeing price rises they have never experienced before and are frightened
All we hear from Boris and Rishi is that help is coming at some ill defined later date and to be honest they are so utterly out of touch they have gifted the narrative to labour
Rishi appearing on the rich list just compounds opinion, though I do not think his wife's' wealth should be relevant
In years to come the last few months, Ukraine excepted, will be an example by those teaching politics how to do a right royal 'Ratner' on your brand
Mr Sunak's wife's wealth is highly relevant politically. All too much so. It would be almost impossible for Mr Sunak to avoid a conflict of interest as regards taxation policy, for instance. Not his fault - except insofar as he has accepted the job of CotE, obviously.
I see SKS is getting quite a lot of flak over Covid lockdowns, and many PBers are absolutely certain that things would have been worse had he been PM. How on earth do you know? You can't. He wasn't PM; he was LOTO, and opposition is a key word here.
Nobody has a clue what SKS would have done had he been PM during peak Covid. Could have been better than BJ, could have been worse. I have my own suspicions/speculation, though I don't share the crystal ball certainty of many on here.
We don't *know* but given he spent the pandemic repeatedly calling to lockdown longer and harder I think we can make a pretty safe guess/assumption... Unless he was being entirely disingenuous with his criticisms of the government? Which would raise it's own questions...
Didn't he want to lockdown during Christmas 2021 for example?
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
My issue with the modelling is that I believe what was being shown to government was cherry picked by someone (I don't know who) to make them take action. This was done with honest intentions as that person believed action needed to be taken and wouldn't have been if a more realistic set of models had been shown. But it was badly handled.
There was a fucking communist on SAGE who confessed she wanted to reorder society to fit her idiot Marxist theories. Ugh
Never again
She was also on diet sage.
I was going to setup Continuity Independent Sage.
All I need are a large number of people with loud opinions and no actual definable skills in the area.
Why @Malmesbury, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for £989 per hour plus VAT outside IR35, I'm your huckleberry.
The polls do show a trend away from the conservatives but why anybody should be surprised I really do not know
Forget partygate and beergate , every day voters are seeing price rises they have never experienced before and are frightened
All we hear from Boris and Rishi is that help is coming at some ill defined later date and to be honest they are so utterly out of touch they have gifted the narrative to labour
Rishi appearing on the rich list just compounds opinion, though I do not think his wife's' wealth should be relevant
In years to come the last few months, Ukraine excepted, will be an example by those teaching politics how to do a right royal 'Ratner' on your brand
Indeed. I do not know many people outside the political bubble talking about who ate what cake or what curry during lockdown.
I do hear a lot of frightened noises about prices of the weekly shop going up, prices of petrol going up, not being able to afford heating when winter comes around.
By 2024 nobody will be talking about partygate. They will be talking about how much poorer everyone is, and how much more expensive everything is. The optics of a chancellor worth over 700 million at such a time are not good.
There is a "let them eat cake" joke in here somewhere but I am too tired to make it.
I see SKS is getting quite a lot of flak over Covid lockdowns, and many PBers are absolutely certain that things would have been worse had he been PM. How on earth do you know? You can't. He wasn't PM; he was LOTO, and opposition is a key word here.
Nobody has a clue what SKS would have done had he been PM during peak Covid. Could have been better than BJ, could have been worse. I have my own suspicions/speculation, though I don't share the crystal ball certainty of many on here.
We don't *know* but given he spent the pandemic repeatedly calling to lockdown longer and harder I think we can make a pretty educated guess/assumption... Unless he was being entirely disingenuous with his criticisms of the government? Which would raise it's own questions...
Didn't he want to lockdown during Christmas 2021 for example?
Disingenuous would imply a pack of integrity. Which we have been told cannot be so.
Not bad header. But at the time, the consensus in the country and on PB, save for a precious few people (and I 92% include myself in that latter group) were cheering on the restrictions. Even pre-vaccine, which seems to have been a watershed for some, very few and very few on PB spotted the dangers of lockdown as a principle, rather than the effect it might have on the virus.
Sure, the government saw how in northern Italy people were almost literally dying on the streets but there was always another route short of legal enforcement (with all the pitfalls that @Cyclefree correctly points out).
And then literally one by one on PB people realised that all along it was the principle that was the danger. And now everyone is applauding this article who were huge lockdown fans at the time.
And of course, when reviewing the largest restriction on liberty in living memory, someone is going to say seatbelts.
Is still support the principle of lockdowns, when needed (I think they were needed for periods of this pandemic, particularly pre-vaccine - as I think has been my expressed view throughout).
The laws were rushed, for obvious reasons. The guidelines were incoherent and often nonsensical. I remember going for a walk with my father in law and my son while my wife went for a walk with my mother in law and our daughter, along the same road, a few tens of yards apart because that was, I believe, the law at that point. Clearly that was no difference, from a disease spread point of view, to us all walking together.
I have a lot of sympathy with rushed laws and guidance at the start of the first lockdown. Arguably they should have been drafted and debated early in the year, but I don't think any of us really believed it would get so bad at that point. For the later lockdowns (partly with hindsight) there should have been proper debate and scrutiny in advance of a range of restriction options, from which the government could then choose as needed. Any deviation should require full debate or have a very strict time limit.
Now is the time to do these things, while they are fresh in the mind. Get the epidemiologists to write up some options for different kinds of pathogens, airbourne, surface-spread and sensible restrictions in various levels. Get those voted on and put into a set of restrictions that can be triggered as needed, with a strict time limit before a vote is needed to maintain them. They should also be reviewed with each new government, perhaps. We were caught unprepared, which was understandable, but now is the time to ensure we are better prepared next time and to have the debate about what is and is not acceptable. The epidemiologists should inform that debate, so should the NHS leaders, but also advocacy groups for those who were worst hit by lockdown, those who live alone, who are elderly - or young - and isolated without going into work and socialising. When all that is done, we need the police and CPS to agree guidelines on enforcement and have thes reviewed, to stop the ridiculous harassment we saw of people doing lawful things this time round. Guidance, if issued, should be made clearly distinct from the law: "In addition to the things restricted by law, we also ask you to avoid the following, as much as you can, to reduce spread..."
Great post.
But I still prefer guidance, nudges, education, and appropriate compensation rather than laws. Once the lockdown genie is out of the bottle (too late, I appreciate) then that becomes a policy tool for any number of situations. Ask Walter Wolfgang.
Yep. One of the interesting questions is to what extent guidance, in the absent of laws, would have been effective. Sweden has some interesting data there (more than on relationship between laws and cases/deaths) as there was a big drop in travel etc even though there was little forbidden by law early on. Of course, Sweden is not UK, so there are limits to what can be inferred.
I think there was a need for laws for businesses, i.e. mandating closure of some. Otherwise it's much harder to provide needed support and prevent pressure on employees to come into the office anyway. But another thing to be reviewed. Later rules were less strict on homeworking. If they were still effective, then go with that, I guess.
In the UK, wave 1 of Covid had peaked before lockdown.
Citation ( and a mountain of salt) required.
Peak deaths was the 8th April 2020, 3 weeks back from there is before lockdown
Which assumes an exact 3 weeks to death for every patient - citation for that one?
Your response is exactly the issue that led to the lockdown fanaticism, shouting down anyone who goes against the narrative, of course 3 weeks is not an exact figure for every death, its an average.
The thread header is very well written but it is naive. There isn't any circumstance that any Government in the UK could have avoided lockdown and the other restrictions. The press would have wound the public up to make the Government complete hate figures for causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people. I think the Government probably intorduced the least restrictions it could based on the poor scientific advice and the nightmare press that exists in this country. The most sickening being Kay Burley and Beth Rigby.
I was completely ridiculed on this site for even suggesting that maybe lockdowns wrere not effective in May/June 2020 and now with hindsight people have a different view, but to blame the Government for introducing the lock down when 95% of people and just about all "expert scientists" agreed with it is a bit rich.
It's also the mode figure for a distribution which is not only the combination of three distributions with different variables but has a skew.
You've got: infection to illness, plus illness to hospitalisation, plus hospitalisation to death. Each varies considerably and an average conceals much of the distribution.
Simon Nichols ran a more detailed analysis and got a different figure for mode to median and mean (which is not surprising) and he got a 15 day mode for a 19 day mean.
The seven day average of deaths on death certificates in England peaked for the first wave on the 10th of April (1,180) and the individual day record was the 8th of April (1,286). That would give a (loose) central estimate of incidence peaking around the 24th-26th of March.
And we don't have to take any calculation's word for it. We can look at the increases and decreases of incidence and later death from the ONS survey and death certificates.
Four separate peaks came in with delays of 9 days, 16 days, 23 days, and 13 days between incidence peaking and deaths peaking. An average of 15.25 days, but with a fairly wide variability - which is what we'd expect.
Does that mean the PM could simply at some point in the future become a French citizen because 'an article of the French civil code allows these people to regain French nationality by simple declaration, subject to justifying “manifest cultural, professional, economic or family ties” with France' because Stanley is now a French citizen?
You can just see it happening, can't you? Shortly after the PM is dragged from No 10 he cheerfully, shamelessly, claims a French passport. Happily regaining all the rights he has stripped from me.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
Does that mean the PM could simply at some point in the future become a French citizen because 'an article of the French civil code allows these people to regain French nationality by simple declaration, subject to justifying “manifest cultural, professional, economic or family ties” with France' because his Stanley is now a French citizen?
You can just see it happening, can't you? Shortly after the PM is dragged from No 10 he cheerfully, shamelessly, claims a French passport. Happily regaining all the rights he has stripped from me.
I see SKS is getting quite a lot of flak over Covid lockdowns, and many PBers are absolutely certain that things would have been worse had he been PM. How on earth do you know? You can't. He wasn't PM; he was LOTO, and opposition is a key word here.
Nobody has a clue what SKS would have done had he been PM during peak Covid. Could have been better than BJ, could have been worse. I have my own suspicions/speculation, though I don't share the crystal ball certainty of many on here.
We don't *know* but given he spent the pandemic repeatedly calling to lockdown longer and harder I think we can make a pretty safe guess/assumption... Unless he was being entirely disingenuous with his criticisms of the government? Which would raise it's own questions...
Didn't he want to lockdown during Christmas 2021 for example?
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
My issue with the modelling is that I believe what was being shown to government was cherry picked by someone (I don't know who) to make them take action. This was done with honest intentions as that person believed action needed to be taken and wouldn't have been if a more realistic set of models had been shown. But it was badly handled.
There was a fucking communist on SAGE who confessed she wanted to reorder society to fit her idiot Marxist theories. Ugh
Never again
As I said, McCarthyism. Cancel her.
Get those twats who were wanking over strong man Putin cos he was preserving Judaeo Christian society in the dock as well.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
My issue with the modelling is that I believe what was being shown to government was cherry picked by someone (I don't know who) to make them take action. This was done with honest intentions as that person believed action needed to be taken and wouldn't have been if a more realistic set of models had been shown. But it was badly handled.
There was a fucking communist on SAGE who confessed she wanted to reorder society to fit her idiot Marxist theories. Ugh
Never again
She was also on diet sage.
I was going to setup Continuity Independent Sage.
All I need are a large number of people with loud opinions and no actual definable skills in the area.
Why @Malmesbury, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for £989 per hour plus VAT outside IR35, I'm your huckleberry.
In that case I’ll set up The Real Independent Sage !
Not bad header. But at the time, the consensus in the country and on PB, save for a precious few people (and I 92% include myself in that latter group) were cheering on the restrictions. Even pre-vaccine, which seems to have been a watershed for some, very few and very few on PB spotted the dangers of lockdown as a principle, rather than the effect it might have on the virus.
Sure, the government saw how in northern Italy people were almost literally dying on the streets but there was always another route short of legal enforcement (with all the pitfalls that @Cyclefree correctly points out).
And then literally one by one on PB people realised that all along it was the principle that was the danger. And now everyone is applauding this article who were huge lockdown fans at the time.
And of course, when reviewing the largest restriction on liberty in living memory, someone is going to say seatbelts.
Is still support the principle of lockdowns, when needed (I think they were needed for periods of this pandemic, particularly pre-vaccine - as I think has been my expressed view throughout).
The laws were rushed, for obvious reasons. The guidelines were incoherent and often nonsensical. I remember going for a walk with my father in law and my son while my wife went for a walk with my mother in law and our daughter, along the same road, a few tens of yards apart because that was, I believe, the law at that point. Clearly that was no difference, from a disease spread point of view, to us all walking together.
I have a lot of sympathy with rushed laws and guidance at the start of the first lockdown. Arguably they should have been drafted and debated early in the year, but I don't think any of us really believed it would get so bad at that point. For the later lockdowns (partly with hindsight) there should have been proper debate and scrutiny in advance of a range of restriction options, from which the government could then choose as needed. Any deviation should require full debate or have a very strict time limit.
Now is the time to do these things, while they are fresh in the mind. Get the epidemiologists to write up some options for different kinds of pathogens, airbourne, surface-spread and sensible restrictions in various levels. Get those voted on and put into a set of restrictions that can be triggered as needed, with a strict time limit before a vote is needed to maintain them. They should also be reviewed with each new government, perhaps. We were caught unprepared, which was understandable, but now is the time to ensure we are better prepared next time and to have the debate about what is and is not acceptable. The epidemiologists should inform that debate, so should the NHS leaders, but also advocacy groups for those who were worst hit by lockdown, those who live alone, who are elderly - or young - and isolated without going into work and socialising. When all that is done, we need the police and CPS to agree guidelines on enforcement and have thes reviewed, to stop the ridiculous harassment we saw of people doing lawful things this time round. Guidance, if issued, should be made clearly distinct from the law: "In addition to the things restricted by law, we also ask you to avoid the following, as much as you can, to reduce spread..."
Great post.
But I still prefer guidance, nudges, education, and appropriate compensation rather than laws. Once the lockdown genie is out of the bottle (too late, I appreciate) then that becomes a policy tool for any number of situations. Ask Walter Wolfgang.
Yep. One of the interesting questions is to what extent guidance, in the absent of laws, would have been effective. Sweden has some interesting data there (more than on relationship between laws and cases/deaths) as there was a big drop in travel etc even though there was little forbidden by law early on. Of course, Sweden is not UK, so there are limits to what can be inferred.
I think there was a need for laws for businesses, i.e. mandating closure of some. Otherwise it's much harder to provide needed support and prevent pressure on employees to come into the office anyway. But another thing to be reviewed. Later rules were less strict on homeworking. If they were still effective, then go with that, I guess.
In the UK, wave 1 of Covid had peaked before lockdown.
Those analyses are based on hospitalisations/deaths and are very limited if - as likely - there was a differential behaviour response between e.g. those of working age and those older (who had different options for reducing risk, depending on need or not to go into offices for work, and different baseline risk of hospitalisation and death). In short, those most likely to end up in hospital were likely more voluntarily locked down earlier than the general population.
It's hard to be absolutely certain, before the era of mass testing. However, the trends in cases and hospitalisations for the later peaks are informative on the relationship with lockdown. You need to have a good argument for why there should be a different relationship for the first wave.
The case for restrictions always seemed to me to revolve around the unspoken assumption that the "activity vs R" graph looked something like this:
If, in fact, it looked more like the below, and voluntary action goes past the first break point, then the case for laws rather than guidance is raher weak.
You've posted this before and I've agreed that the second graph is closer to reality than the first. Not sure what else you want me to say
I don't think anyone thought the first graph was correct. Although it does depend how you define 'activity'. If activity was some measure of time exposed (taking into account distances say) then you'd probably get a pretty smooth curve between the two, rather than a straight line.
The issue is the tweaking of the rules/laws/regulations as if they could fine tune R, which was impossible. hence going to the pub wearing a mask, sitting down, take it off, put it on to go to the loo, take it off again...
The perception given was that we could tweak R, when in reality it was much more complex.
I know someone who still does this.
At a regular monthly gathering of friends.
Which he comes by Eurostar from France to attend.
I still occasionally see people walking around train stations with masks under their chin.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
The average age people died of Covid-19 was 82. The average age people die in general is 82.
Hmm, we need an Actuary to pop up and pick this apart.
This will all be in the distribution. The median age of death is about 3 years higher, and the modal higher still.
There is also the measurement error in determining what people actually died of (rather than with), and the conversion to loss of QALYs.
According to Bart, old people die anyway, so what's the problem?
Let's be frank, people with dementia go into a Care Home to be comforted and looked after until they die, not to be treated, recover and go home. Indeed most admissions die within twelve months, of which my nan was within that number too.
So yes locking down the healthy to prevent the deaths of those being comforted until they die is not right or responsible.
Locking down those being comforted until they die so they can't see their loved ones in their final months isn't humane either.
My nan died in a Care Home being denied visitors and not seeing her loved ones in her final months. That was cruel, heartless and is the reality of your supposed "kindness" of lockdown.
Never again.
Old people's homes, care homes, nursing homes and hospices are not all the same thing. Your argument applies solely to the last, and perhaps the second and third depending on the medical condition.
Everything I said was true for the Care sector in general.
People have throughout made the BS argument that since the average life expectancy at 80 is 90, that the average death is ten years life lost. But it's utterly wrong, since people who die are not average and otherwise nobody would ever die. The average 80 year old does not live in a Care home, they live in their own home.
For the Care sector in general the median life expectancy is less than twelve months after admission. So locking down for a year or two, just denies most their final months with loved ones.
Death is sad and it hit me hard when my nan died, but death comes to us all and I think it would have been kinder to her if she'd been allowed to see her loved ones in her final months rather than be locked away left to die alone. Even if she'd died sooner, it would still be kinder.
I hate what happened to this country with a passion. It was cruel and unnecessary, unprincipled and wrong. Simply saying "yes but people died" does not make death wrong, or less inevitable, or locking people away from loved ones until they die a kindness.
On the otgher hand, anti-lockdown libertarians werew taking the completely opposite position on stats - using the total life expectancy in completely misleading ways.
Nevertheless, you're absolutely right in saying that those entering care homes are not statistically representative of the wider population. Even so, the care homes sector has a very wide range of inhabitants, even in the old folks homes. A friend's mum, for instance, was in one for about 12 years, because she had MS and ultimately died of it, while being bright as a button mentally all the time. That's the opposite of the very real dementia category.
Add to that the legal issues involved and the liability of care home operators.
This is the sort of thing that needs a proper and objective analysis in the future inquiry - and also to be considered in future pandemic planning. If it was not done in past planning, or was ignored, that was a serious omission.
Indeed it is complicated but on average your friends mum is the exception and not the norm.
Part of the problem is that people can be too precious about death and treat every death as a tragedy, but there are tragedies worse than death.
The media facilitates this. Soft sob stories interviewing "bereaved" families and "blaming" their deaths etc as if the deaths should have been prevented.
The amount of interviews of things like "my 98 year old father/grandfather etc caught COVID in a Care Home and died, he should have been protected". Sorry to be harsh, but death was coming for your 98 year old relative either way, if not now it wasn't much further away - what we should have been doing is allowing them to make the most of whatever precious time they had left, not denying them visitors so they died alone and cut off from loved ones.
It's similar to your point the other day about war. War is not always worse than unjust peace.
For all his faults, I think it's on balance, a good thing, that we had a PM who was lazy, and unenthusiastic about lockdowns. A PM who was zealous, and who imposed them efficiently, would have been a lot worse.
A “lazy” PM meant we locked down too late. Locking down late is what led to long lockdowns. With infectious disease and exponential growth, you have to act quickly.
I’ve repeatedly said the model we should look to is Japan. Japan has had far fewer deaths from COVID and it never imposed a national lockdown. But it got people to follow public health guidance early and well.
Libertarianism is not the right response to a pandemic. Early, effective intervention is. If you don’t like lockdowns, invest in public health and pandemic preparedness.
Does that mean the PM could simply at some point in the future become a French citizen because 'an article of the French civil code allows these people to regain French nationality by simple declaration, subject to justifying “manifest cultural, professional, economic or family ties” with France' because his Stanley is now a French citizen?
You can just see it happening, can't you? Shortly after the PM is dragged from No 10 he cheerfully, shamelessly, claims a French passport. Happily regaining all the rights he has stripped from me.
Of course he will.
It would depend on French law, but generally, these claims of citizenship are limited. Otherwise a single claim could be "chained" until an entire family, to the nth generation, gets citizenship.
For example, I had American citizenship, via family. My children couldn't claim US citizenship, directly.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Not too many people "of a certain age" at nightclubs and raves and, I believe, such people read the newspapers also.
So lock them down. Voluntarily. Compensate them.
But the principle is more important than the outcome. The country is now accustomed to what were hitherto unprecedented restrictions on liberty. When else might such laws be deployed. We don't know but it's a known unknown or an unknown unknown but it's out there.
To an extent I don't disagree with your analysis, however in the weeks of extremely restrictive lockdowns, the Government indulged in them for what they considered to be reasons of public safety as opposed to an opportunity to impose Soviet style authoritarian controls for the sake of subduing the great unwashed.
PB Libertarians are furiously rewriting history this morning.
Not at all. At some point you have to ask about the quid pro quo. They indulged in them because they worried that the NHS would be overwhelmed and that would not be a good look for any government. And even if they did it from the goodness of their hearts because of public safety I would still question whether such measures were appropriate in terms of the restrictions on liberty.
OK - March 2020 everyone was panicking (not those at Cheltenham or on the Central Line but I digress) and I get that with the pictures from Northern Italy the government went into panic mode also. It was the unknown and a national lockdown was an understandable circuit break. Which is where @Cyclefree's article comes in. Because it was introduced with such cavalier disregard for due process that actually there can be questions asked about its validity as a response given the huge sacrifices in liberty, process and executive power that it entailed.
Dare I say that X thousand deaths were worth the principle of liberty (trying not to over-dramatise)? Perhaps.
Perhaps the lack of due process, despite advance warning of the pandemic from Italy and elsewhere, is that the Prime Minister thinks he is above law and custom, and his chief of staff thought he should be.
Well I yield to no one in my position as foremost believer of Boris to be a useless solipsistic twat but thank the lord he and his evidently libertarian instincts and sheer arrogance were in charge. He still - I think unwillingly - yielded to the 5pm government by Chief Medical Officer but I can't help but thinking that with almost anyone else in charge (saving Steve Baker et al) we would have been in an even worse (ie fewer liberties) position than we were and for longer.
Totally agree mate, with PM Starmer we'd probably still have mask mandates and travel restrictions in place today like much of continental Europe. We'd never have had the July 2021 removal of domestic restrictions and we'd have vaccine passports in force for well over a year now.
Whatever else one thinks about Boris, he's the correct PM to have had. Dave and Blair would also have been tended towards freedom as well. PM Starmer, May and Brown would all have cracked down much harder and we'd have been unlikely to ever see the end of COVID measures once they were handed all that control over people's lives. Scottish people have lucked out that the Westminster government has constantly pushed on removing restrictions, otherwise Sturgeon would still have everything in place.
What I'd like to see now is the dismantling of the final COVID measures, I'd order Ofcom to start looking into the removal of social distancing and plastic screens on TV shows etc... Just bin all of the bullshit from COVID.
I agree with that post except for the comment about Continental Europe. You refer to restrictions still in existence today compared to us. I can only speak of a couple of countries and that is not correct. Looking at @Leon travel reports it also doesn't seem to be so for the places he has travelled to either. We have all moved on I think.
The TV is sclerotic. On BBC breakfast - no limits on people on the safa. Have I got news for you - screens between panelists. Madness.
Yes that is daft. I wonder if the screens in shops will stay. I haven't seen any removed. They only cause a little inconvenience, will cost money to remove and get rid of and provide a little protection against stuff other than COVID. I wonder if there is other stuff that will stay? One way pedestrian systems? Can't think of anything else.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
My issue with the modelling is that I believe what was being shown to government was cherry picked by someone (I don't know who) to make them take action. This was done with honest intentions as that person believed action needed to be taken and wouldn't have been if a more realistic set of models had been shown. But it was badly handled.
There was a fucking communist on SAGE who confessed she wanted to reorder society to fit her idiot Marxist theories. Ugh
Never again
She was also on diet sage.
I was going to setup Continuity Independent Sage.
All I need are a large number of people with loud opinions and no actual definable skills in the area.
Why @Malmesbury, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for £989 per hour plus VAT outside IR35, I'm your huckleberry.
In that case I’ll set up The Real Independent Sage !
One (not legal) restriction (I'm unsure if it was government advice or they all just decided to do it) which seemed counterproductive to me was that all the supermarkets cut their opening hours. The effect of this was surely to cram the same number of people who needed to do their shopping into fewer hours, therefore increasing the average number of people in the shops at any one time, and thus lengthening the queues.
Also, there was the nonsense of "a couple can't shop together".
Edit: and one-way systems which made people spend more time in the shop.
Yeah but COVID only travels one way, everyone knows that Applicant.
All of those systems were just performative bullshit. I remember when the pretence dropped towards the end and the government's own report suggested that "value" of mask mandates was no more than a reminder to people that COVID was still a problem, the masks themselves had little effect on the infection rate.
I still see some people go to the pub with a mask on then remove it when they sit down. There's going to be people who are scarred for a very long time because of the government messaging and it's on them and the scientists who pushed their zero COVID agenda all over the news and briefed against the government position from within the government's advisory bodies.
I'd like to see Nuremberg style trials for these scientists, or at least a very serious inquiry into how we got a situation where they were simply allowed to brief the media against the agreed government position and remain on these committees.
Any future guidance on pandemics should make clear that unelected people should never be allowed to have their hands on the levers of power again. It's extremely difficult to claw them away. Those few months of rule by technocrat and scientist were some of the most depressing this nation has seen post-war.
I’m mostly in favour of a ‘truth and reconcilliation’ enquiry, trying to learn lessons rather than blame people, and participants not turning up with their lawyers.
The one exception is the media and their portrayal of “Independent SAGE” - this was deliberately misleading and disingenuous, and those giving them airtime need to be held accountable for that decision.
Or, indeed, just an independent inquiry.
Max, you've lost it a little* with "Nuremberg style trials for these scientists"! How many scientists do you think will want to contribute to anything government related if that was to happen? I would certainly pull the plug on all my DHSC work ASAP.
*a lot, but I try to be part of the kinder, gentler PB
I think that's the point of them, Selebian. If we truly want a "never again" moment the scientists who advised the government so poorly, pushed their dodgy models that didn't stand up to scrutiny, the ones who briefed against the agreed position within minutes of Cabinet agreeing it, the ones who simply lied through their teeth on the secondary impacts of lockdown, they all need to go. The only way to achieve that is to eviscerate them publicly, on TV.
Any who knowingly lied or misrepresented should lose their academic positions. Complete break of scientific ethics and grounds for dismissal. If you have evidence, I suggest you contact their employers.
We'll presumably have Toby Young and co in these Nuremberg style trials, too? Plus that YouTube nurse pushing invermectin and dodgy stats?
I hope you'll spare any of us that may ever have been wrong on PB!
I absolutely would have those ivermectin idiots and anti-vaxxers in there too if they were in official advisory positions.
And that's the point of the trials, to establish who said what and which rules were broken by the scientists. How can we know what happened until we ask them under oath.
Special prize for Adam Finn who did his best to make it appear the vaccine was risky for kids.
This is tricky. He seems to have a genuine belief that covid was less of an issue for the child than the potential harm of the vaccine. He was also clearly against vaccinating children to protect others, which many would disagree with him on.
For what its worth a lot of the iSAGE crowd are obsessed with long covid. I am yet to be convinced that the problem is as big as they claim (basing rates on self reporting is problematic, and long covid is many things to many people). But their argument is that it is better for no-one to get covid, hence vaccinating kids who don't need it to fight the infection should be done.
Now thats quite nuanced, but I don't think Finn is guilty of anything other than weighing different risks in a different way to others.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The 'science' (not the nasty African science, the real Western obviously true science) sold the government an absolute pup. And the flight bans were just out and out actual, real world racism. Stop dangerous brown people even if there is no outbreak there. It was disgusting. And the vitriol against people looking at the hospital and death data in SA and saying 'hang on....' was just ugh That was the absolute last straw for me. 2 years of bullshit, lies and figure driven fear/control. No Strictly for you Van Tam, Whitty and Vallance
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
I seem to recall you were fully supportive of the restrictions at the time Big_G.
I generally agree with @Cyclefree on most of her headers but "Never Again" is too simplistic here.
For me the issue is not the principle but the practical application. Dependent on the virulence of any future pandemic I would support severe restrictions. However, we should learn from Covid and set up legislation now that can be quickly switched on, by agreement of Parliament, when required.
We need to recognise that there will be another pandemic at some point and it could well be more severe than Covid.
We already have such legislation. The Civil Contingencies Act. It was not used. I have explained why elsewhere.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Not too many people "of a certain age" at nightclubs and raves and, I believe, such people read the newspapers also.
So lock them down. Voluntarily. Compensate them.
But the principle is more important than the outcome. The country is now accustomed to what were hitherto unprecedented restrictions on liberty. When else might such laws be deployed. We don't know but it's a known unknown or an unknown unknown but it's out there.
To an extent I don't disagree with your analysis, however in the weeks of extremely restrictive lockdowns, the Government indulged in them for what they considered to be reasons of public safety as opposed to an opportunity to impose Soviet style authoritarian controls for the sake of subduing the great unwashed.
PB Libertarians are furiously rewriting history this morning.
Not at all. At some point you have to ask about the quid pro quo. They indulged in them because they worried that the NHS would be overwhelmed and that would not be a good look for any government. And even if they did it from the goodness of their hearts because of public safety I would still question whether such measures were appropriate in terms of the restrictions on liberty.
OK - March 2020 everyone was panicking (not those at Cheltenham or on the Central Line but I digress) and I get that with the pictures from Northern Italy the government went into panic mode also. It was the unknown and a national lockdown was an understandable circuit break. Which is where @Cyclefree's article comes in. Because it was introduced with such cavalier disregard for due process that actually there can be questions asked about its validity as a response given the huge sacrifices in liberty, process and executive power that it entailed.
Dare I say that X thousand deaths were worth the principle of liberty (trying not to over-dramatise)? Perhaps.
Perhaps the lack of due process, despite advance warning of the pandemic from Italy and elsewhere, is that the Prime Minister thinks he is above law and custom, and his chief of staff thought he should be.
Well I yield to no one in my position as foremost believer of Boris to be a useless solipsistic twat but thank the lord he and his evidently libertarian instincts and sheer arrogance were in charge. He still - I think unwillingly - yielded to the 5pm government by Chief Medical Officer but I can't help but thinking that with almost anyone else in charge (saving Steve Baker et al) we would have been in an even worse (ie fewer liberties) position than we were and for longer.
Totally agree mate, with PM Starmer we'd probably still have mask mandates and travel restrictions in place today like much of continental Europe. We'd never have had the July 2021 removal of domestic restrictions and we'd have vaccine passports in force for well over a year now.
Whatever else one thinks about Boris, he's the correct PM to have had. Dave and Blair would also have been tended towards freedom as well. PM Starmer, May and Brown would all have cracked down much harder and we'd have been unlikely to ever see the end of COVID measures once they were handed all that control over people's lives. Scottish people have lucked out that the Westminster government has constantly pushed on removing restrictions, otherwise Sturgeon would still have everything in place.
What I'd like to see now is the dismantling of the final COVID measures, I'd order Ofcom to start looking into the removal of social distancing and plastic screens on TV shows etc... Just bin all of the bullshit from COVID.
I agree with that post except for the comment about Continental Europe. You refer to restrictions still in existence today compared to us. I can only speak of a couple of countries and that is not correct. Looking at @Leon travel reports it also doesn't seem to be so for the places he has travelled to either. We have all moved on I think.
The TV is sclerotic. On BBC breakfast - no limits on people on the safa. Have I got news for you - screens between panelists. Madness.
Yes that is daft. I wonder if the screens in shops will stay. I haven't seen any removed. They only cause a little inconvenience, will cost money to remove and get rid of and provide a little protection against stuff other than COVID. I wonder if there is other stuff that will stay? One way pedestrian systems? Can't think of anything else.
There aren't any one-way pedestrian systems left are there?
What does need to be removed is all the bossy signs, which no longer apply but remain in view in various parts of the public realm.
Press starting to ramp up the monkeyspunkypox fear this morning. It's out there!
Yeah, what's going on with that? My understanding is that Monkeypox was a rare mostly tropical virus that didn't spread very easily at all?
Has it mutated to become more transmissible?
Very doubtful. I mean it's 40 odd cases in half a dozen countries which doesn't suggest easy community transmission, no clusters. It seems to spread via sex, close skin contact, touching infected clothing and they've tagged in some vague thing about 'droplets' and extended face to face contact
Is “extended face to face contact” what used to be called making out?
Gobbing in each other's mouths I think.
One of the strippers in the famous "Mighty Fine" pub in Pompey would do that to you for a tenner. It was a test of manhood for many a young jack. It was very weird because she used to work the weekend day shift and all this would be going on while there were punters eating their Sunday dinner at the next table.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
My issue with the modelling is that I believe what was being shown to government was cherry picked by someone (I don't know who) to make them take action. This was done with honest intentions as that person believed action needed to be taken and wouldn't have been if a more realistic set of models had been shown. But it was badly handled.
There was a fucking communist on SAGE who confessed she wanted to reorder society to fit her idiot Marxist theories. Ugh
Never again
She was also on diet sage.
I was going to setup Continuity Independent Sage.
All I need are a large number of people with loud opinions and no actual definable skills in the area.
Why @Malmesbury, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for £989 per hour plus VAT outside IR35, I'm your huckleberry.
In that case I’ll set up The Real Independent Sage !
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The 'science' (not the nasty African science, the real Western obviously true science) sold the government an absolute pup. And the flight bans were just out and out actual, real world racism. Stop dangerous brown people even if there is no outbreak there. It was disgusting. And the vitriol against people looking at the hospital and death data in SA and saying 'hang on....' was just ugh That was the absolute last straw for me. 2 years of bullshit, lies and figure driven fear/control. No Strictly for you Van Tam, Whitty and Vallance
Yes, it was the final straw for me too. I have a friend who is a publican. His bookings collapses following Whitty's comments – and he was typical of the sector.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
I seem to recall you were fully supportive of the restrictions at the time Big_G.
I generally agree with @Cyclefree on most of her headers but "Never Again" is too simplistic here.
For me the issue is not the principle but the practical application. Dependent on the virulence of any future pandemic I would support severe restrictions. However, we should learn from Covid and set up legislation now that can be quickly switched on, by agreement of Parliament, when required.
We need to recognise that there will be another pandemic at some point and it could well be more severe than Covid.
We already have such legislation. The Civil Contingencies Act. It was not used. I have explained why elsewhere.
Most lockdown stuff was done via the Public Health Act, not the Covid Act of course
One (not legal) restriction (I'm unsure if it was government advice or they all just decided to do it) which seemed counterproductive to me was that all the supermarkets cut their opening hours. The effect of this was surely to cram the same number of people who needed to do their shopping into fewer hours, therefore increasing the average number of people in the shops at any one time, and thus lengthening the queues.
Also, there was the nonsense of "a couple can't shop together".
Edit: and one-way systems which made people spend more time in the shop.
Yeah but COVID only travels one way, everyone knows that Applicant.
All of those systems were just performative bullshit. I remember when the pretence dropped towards the end and the government's own report suggested that "value" of mask mandates was no more than a reminder to people that COVID was still a problem, the masks themselves had little effect on the infection rate.
I still see some people go to the pub with a mask on then remove it when they sit down. There's going to be people who are scarred for a very long time because of the government messaging and it's on them and the scientists who pushed their zero COVID agenda all over the news and briefed against the government position from within the government's advisory bodies.
I'd like to see Nuremberg style trials for these scientists, or at least a very serious inquiry into how we got a situation where they were simply allowed to brief the media against the agreed government position and remain on these committees.
Any future guidance on pandemics should make clear that unelected people should never be allowed to have their hands on the levers of power again. It's extremely difficult to claw them away. Those few months of rule by technocrat and scientist were some of the most depressing this nation has seen post-war.
I’m mostly in favour of a ‘truth and reconcilliation’ enquiry, trying to learn lessons rather than blame people, and participants not turning up with their lawyers.
The one exception is the media and their portrayal of “Independent SAGE” - this was deliberately misleading and disingenuous, and those giving them airtime need to be held accountable for that decision.
Or, indeed, just an independent inquiry.
Max, you've lost it a little* with "Nuremberg style trials for these scientists"! How many scientists do you think will want to contribute to anything government related if that was to happen? I would certainly pull the plug on all my DHSC work ASAP.
*a lot, but I try to be part of the kinder, gentler PB
I think that's the point of them, Selebian. If we truly want a "never again" moment the scientists who advised the government so poorly, pushed their dodgy models that didn't stand up to scrutiny, the ones who briefed against the agreed position within minutes of Cabinet agreeing it, the ones who simply lied through their teeth on the secondary impacts of lockdown, they all need to go. The only way to achieve that is to eviscerate them publicly, on TV.
Any who knowingly lied or misrepresented should lose their academic positions. Complete break of scientific ethics and grounds for dismissal. If you have evidence, I suggest you contact their employers.
We'll presumably have Toby Young and co in these Nuremberg style trials, too? Plus that YouTube nurse pushing invermectin and dodgy stats?
I hope you'll spare any of us that may ever have been wrong on PB!
I absolutely would have those ivermectin idiots and anti-vaxxers in there too if they were in official advisory positions.
And that's the point of the trials, to establish who said what and which rules were broken by the scientists. How can we know what happened until we ask them under oath.
Special prize for Adam Finn who did his best to make it appear the vaccine was risky for kids.
This is tricky. He seems to have a genuine belief that covid was less of an issue for the child than the potential harm of the vaccine. He was also clearly against vaccinating children to protect others, which many would disagree with him on.
For what its worth a lot of the iSAGE crowd are obsessed with long covid. I am yet to be convinced that the problem is as big as they claim (basing rates on self reporting is problematic, and long covid is many things to many people). But their argument is that it is better for no-one to get covid, hence vaccinating kids who don't need it to fight the infection should be done.
Now thats quite nuanced, but I don't think Finn is guilty of anything other than weighing different risks in a different way to others.
If there were material risks with the vaccine, healthy young adults probably shouldn't have had it either.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Not too many people "of a certain age" at nightclubs and raves and, I believe, such people read the newspapers also.
So lock them down. Voluntarily. Compensate them.
But the principle is more important than the outcome. The country is now accustomed to what were hitherto unprecedented restrictions on liberty. When else might such laws be deployed. We don't know but it's a known unknown or an unknown unknown but it's out there.
To an extent I don't disagree with your analysis, however in the weeks of extremely restrictive lockdowns, the Government indulged in them for what they considered to be reasons of public safety as opposed to an opportunity to impose Soviet style authoritarian controls for the sake of subduing the great unwashed.
PB Libertarians are furiously rewriting history this morning.
Not at all. At some point you have to ask about the quid pro quo. They indulged in them because they worried that the NHS would be overwhelmed and that would not be a good look for any government. And even if they did it from the goodness of their hearts because of public safety I would still question whether such measures were appropriate in terms of the restrictions on liberty.
OK - March 2020 everyone was panicking (not those at Cheltenham or on the Central Line but I digress) and I get that with the pictures from Northern Italy the government went into panic mode also. It was the unknown and a national lockdown was an understandable circuit break. Which is where @Cyclefree's article comes in. Because it was introduced with such cavalier disregard for due process that actually there can be questions asked about its validity as a response given the huge sacrifices in liberty, process and executive power that it entailed.
Dare I say that X thousand deaths were worth the principle of liberty (trying not to over-dramatise)? Perhaps.
Perhaps the lack of due process, despite advance warning of the pandemic from Italy and elsewhere, is that the Prime Minister thinks he is above law and custom, and his chief of staff thought he should be.
Well I yield to no one in my position as foremost believer of Boris to be a useless solipsistic twat but thank the lord he and his evidently libertarian instincts and sheer arrogance were in charge. He still - I think unwillingly - yielded to the 5pm government by Chief Medical Officer but I can't help but thinking that with almost anyone else in charge (saving Steve Baker et al) we would have been in an even worse (ie fewer liberties) position than we were and for longer.
Totally agree mate, with PM Starmer we'd probably still have mask mandates and travel restrictions in place today like much of continental Europe. We'd never have had the July 2021 removal of domestic restrictions and we'd have vaccine passports in force for well over a year now.
Whatever else one thinks about Boris, he's the correct PM to have had. Dave and Blair would also have been tended towards freedom as well. PM Starmer, May and Brown would all have cracked down much harder and we'd have been unlikely to ever see the end of COVID measures once they were handed all that control over people's lives. Scottish people have lucked out that the Westminster government has constantly pushed on removing restrictions, otherwise Sturgeon would still have everything in place.
What I'd like to see now is the dismantling of the final COVID measures, I'd order Ofcom to start looking into the removal of social distancing and plastic screens on TV shows etc... Just bin all of the bullshit from COVID.
I agree with that post except for the comment about Continental Europe. You refer to restrictions still in existence today compared to us. I can only speak of a couple of countries and that is not correct. Looking at @Leon travel reports it also doesn't seem to be so for the places he has travelled to either. We have all moved on I think.
The TV is sclerotic. On BBC breakfast - no limits on people on the safa. Have I got news for you - screens between panelists. Madness.
Yes that is daft. I wonder if the screens in shops will stay. I haven't seen any removed. They only cause a little inconvenience, will cost money to remove and get rid of and provide a little protection against stuff other than COVID. I wonder if there is other stuff that will stay? One way pedestrian systems? Can't think of anything else.
There aren't any one-way pedestrian systems left are there?
What does need to be removed is all the bossy signs, which no longer apply but remain in view in various parts of the public realm.
Certainly is in our post office. Having said that although it came in because of COVID the isle is so narrow, because they have crammed a small area full of crap, it works anyway.
Press starting to ramp up the monkeyspunkypox fear this morning. It's out there!
Yeah, what's going on with that? My understanding is that Monkeypox was a rare mostly tropical virus that didn't spread very easily at all?
Has it mutated to become more transmissible?
Very doubtful. I mean it's 40 odd cases in half a dozen countries which doesn't suggest easy community transmission, no clusters. It seems to spread via sex, close skin contact, touching infected clothing and they've tagged in some vague thing about 'droplets' and extended face to face contact
Is “extended face to face contact” what used to be called making out?
Gobbing in each other's mouths I think.
One of the strippers in the famous "Mighty Fine" pub in Pompey would do that to you for a tenner. It was a test of manhood for many a young jack. It was very weird because she used to work the weekend day shift and all this would be going on while there were punters eating their Sunday dinner at the next table.
The sins of the flesh at a bargain price, Sodom reborn.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The 'science' (not the nasty African science, the real Western obviously true science) sold the government an absolute pup. And the flight bans were just out and out actual, real world racism. Stop dangerous brown people even if there is no outbreak there. It was disgusting. And the vitriol against people looking at the hospital and death data in SA and saying 'hang on....' was just ugh That was the absolute last straw for me. 2 years of bullshit, lies and figure driven fear/control. No Strictly for you Van Tam, Whitty and Vallance
Yes, it was the final straw for me too. I have a friend who is a publican. His bookings collapses following Whitty's comments – and he was typical of the sector.
Also showed Javid to be just another tag along with the bullshit nobody having come in bigging himself up as the restrictions buster.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Not too many people "of a certain age" at nightclubs and raves and, I believe, such people read the newspapers also.
So lock them down. Voluntarily. Compensate them.
But the principle is more important than the outcome. The country is now accustomed to what were hitherto unprecedented restrictions on liberty. When else might such laws be deployed. We don't know but it's a known unknown or an unknown unknown but it's out there.
To an extent I don't disagree with your analysis, however in the weeks of extremely restrictive lockdowns, the Government indulged in them for what they considered to be reasons of public safety as opposed to an opportunity to impose Soviet style authoritarian controls for the sake of subduing the great unwashed.
PB Libertarians are furiously rewriting history this morning.
Not at all. At some point you have to ask about the quid pro quo. They indulged in them because they worried that the NHS would be overwhelmed and that would not be a good look for any government. And even if they did it from the goodness of their hearts because of public safety I would still question whether such measures were appropriate in terms of the restrictions on liberty.
OK - March 2020 everyone was panicking (not those at Cheltenham or on the Central Line but I digress) and I get that with the pictures from Northern Italy the government went into panic mode also. It was the unknown and a national lockdown was an understandable circuit break. Which is where @Cyclefree's article comes in. Because it was introduced with such cavalier disregard for due process that actually there can be questions asked about its validity as a response given the huge sacrifices in liberty, process and executive power that it entailed.
Dare I say that X thousand deaths were worth the principle of liberty (trying not to over-dramatise)? Perhaps.
Perhaps the lack of due process, despite advance warning of the pandemic from Italy and elsewhere, is that the Prime Minister thinks he is above law and custom, and his chief of staff thought he should be.
Well I yield to no one in my position as foremost believer of Boris to be a useless solipsistic twat but thank the lord he and his evidently libertarian instincts and sheer arrogance were in charge. He still - I think unwillingly - yielded to the 5pm government by Chief Medical Officer but I can't help but thinking that with almost anyone else in charge (saving Steve Baker et al) we would have been in an even worse (ie fewer liberties) position than we were and for longer.
Totally agree mate, with PM Starmer we'd probably still have mask mandates and travel restrictions in place today like much of continental Europe. We'd never have had the July 2021 removal of domestic restrictions and we'd have vaccine passports in force for well over a year now.
Whatever else one thinks about Boris, he's the correct PM to have had. Dave and Blair would also have been tended towards freedom as well. PM Starmer, May and Brown would all have cracked down much harder and we'd have been unlikely to ever see the end of COVID measures once they were handed all that control over people's lives. Scottish people have lucked out that the Westminster government has constantly pushed on removing restrictions, otherwise Sturgeon would still have everything in place.
What I'd like to see now is the dismantling of the final COVID measures, I'd order Ofcom to start looking into the removal of social distancing and plastic screens on TV shows etc... Just bin all of the bullshit from COVID.
I agree with that post except for the comment about Continental Europe. You refer to restrictions still in existence today compared to us. I can only speak of a couple of countries and that is not correct. Looking at @Leon travel reports it also doesn't seem to be so for the places he has travelled to either. We have all moved on I think.
The TV is sclerotic. On BBC breakfast - no limits on people on the safa. Have I got news for you - screens between panelists. Madness.
Yes that is daft. I wonder if the screens in shops will stay. I haven't seen any removed. They only cause a little inconvenience, will cost money to remove and get rid of and provide a little protection against stuff other than COVID. I wonder if there is other stuff that will stay? One way pedestrian systems? Can't think of anything else.
There aren't any one-way pedestrian systems left are there?
What does need to be removed is all the bossy signs, which no longer apply but remain in view in various parts of the public realm.
Certainly is in our post office. Having said that although it came in because of COVID the isle is so narrow, because they have crammed a small area full of crap, it works anyway.
We have a gift shop in our village with a board outside telling people the pandemic isn't over, only 5 allowed in the shop, masks must be worn and make sure you use the band gel dispenser...
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
And they bought into the 'transmissable' and refused to acknowledge the 'less severe' and screwed over the hospitality industry and others yet again. The South Africans repeatedly said there wasn't this 'bad news' and that Omicron was significantly less severe. They were ignored. Because they are African I expect. Real racism in action rather than the usual Guardian style 'pot plants are white supremacists' bull
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
Yep. And when Whitty made the comment, which was more along the lines of 'we don't know much but what we do know is bad', we could be pretty confident about the greater spread of Omicron (we could see the rapid rise in cases) but the data on outcomes were more tentative because those data take longer. We hadn't seen a big jump in deaths, but we'd also had much less time for those to come through than the spike in cases. So we knew, to reasonable certainty, that spread was higher (which was bad). There was some evidence, to lower certainty, that it was milder.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The 'science' (not the nasty African science, the real Western obviously true science) sold the government an absolute pup. And the flight bans were just out and out actual, real world racism. Stop dangerous brown people even if there is no outbreak there. It was disgusting. And the vitriol against people looking at the hospital and death data in SA and saying 'hang on....' was just ugh That was the absolute last straw for me. 2 years of bullshit, lies and figure driven fear/control. No Strictly for you Van Tam, Whitty and Vallance
My favourite statement was that South Africans were a different type of human to us so Omicron may affect people in the UK differently.
One (not legal) restriction (I'm unsure if it was government advice or they all just decided to do it) which seemed counterproductive to me was that all the supermarkets cut their opening hours. The effect of this was surely to cram the same number of people who needed to do their shopping into fewer hours, therefore increasing the average number of people in the shops at any one time, and thus lengthening the queues.
Also, there was the nonsense of "a couple can't shop together".
Edit: and one-way systems which made people spend more time in the shop.
Yeah but COVID only travels one way, everyone knows that Applicant.
All of those systems were just performative bullshit. I remember when the pretence dropped towards the end and the government's own report suggested that "value" of mask mandates was no more than a reminder to people that COVID was still a problem, the masks themselves had little effect on the infection rate.
I still see some people go to the pub with a mask on then remove it when they sit down. There's going to be people who are scarred for a very long time because of the government messaging and it's on them and the scientists who pushed their zero COVID agenda all over the news and briefed against the government position from within the government's advisory bodies.
I'd like to see Nuremberg style trials for these scientists, or at least a very serious inquiry into how we got a situation where they were simply allowed to brief the media against the agreed government position and remain on these committees.
Any future guidance on pandemics should make clear that unelected people should never be allowed to have their hands on the levers of power again. It's extremely difficult to claw them away. Those few months of rule by technocrat and scientist were some of the most depressing this nation has seen post-war.
I’m mostly in favour of a ‘truth and reconcilliation’ enquiry, trying to learn lessons rather than blame people, and participants not turning up with their lawyers.
The one exception is the media and their portrayal of “Independent SAGE” - this was deliberately misleading and disingenuous, and those giving them airtime need to be held accountable for that decision.
Or, indeed, just an independent inquiry.
Max, you've lost it a little* with "Nuremberg style trials for these scientists"! How many scientists do you think will want to contribute to anything government related if that was to happen? I would certainly pull the plug on all my DHSC work ASAP.
*a lot, but I try to be part of the kinder, gentler PB
I think that's the point of them, Selebian. If we truly want a "never again" moment the scientists who advised the government so poorly, pushed their dodgy models that didn't stand up to scrutiny, the ones who briefed against the agreed position within minutes of Cabinet agreeing it, the ones who simply lied through their teeth on the secondary impacts of lockdown, they all need to go. The only way to achieve that is to eviscerate them publicly, on TV.
Any who knowingly lied or misrepresented should lose their academic positions. Complete break of scientific ethics and grounds for dismissal. If you have evidence, I suggest you contact their employers.
We'll presumably have Toby Young and co in these Nuremberg style trials, too? Plus that YouTube nurse pushing invermectin and dodgy stats?
I hope you'll spare any of us that may ever have been wrong on PB!
I absolutely would have those ivermectin idiots and anti-vaxxers in there too if they were in official advisory positions.
And that's the point of the trials, to establish who said what and which rules were broken by the scientists. How can we know what happened until we ask them under oath.
Special prize for Adam Finn who did his best to make it appear the vaccine was risky for kids.
This is tricky. He seems to have a genuine belief that covid was less of an issue for the child than the potential harm of the vaccine. He was also clearly against vaccinating children to protect others, which many would disagree with him on.
For what its worth a lot of the iSAGE crowd are obsessed with long covid. I am yet to be convinced that the problem is as big as they claim (basing rates on self reporting is problematic, and long covid is many things to many people). But their argument is that it is better for no-one to get covid, hence vaccinating kids who don't need it to fight the infection should be done.
Now thats quite nuanced, but I don't think Finn is guilty of anything other than weighing different risks in a different way to others.
The problem came when it became clear that the data said that the risk to various groups of children, from COVID, was higher than any risks of the vaccine. Both were small, but the numbers were distinct.
It became clear that some people were ideologically opposed - they wanted the vaccinations to be used overseas.
Despite the fact that production was ramping up, ever higher, world wide, and the number of vaccinations was a fart in a thunderstorm compared to that.
One (not legal) restriction (I'm unsure if it was government advice or they all just decided to do it) which seemed counterproductive to me was that all the supermarkets cut their opening hours. The effect of this was surely to cram the same number of people who needed to do their shopping into fewer hours, therefore increasing the average number of people in the shops at any one time, and thus lengthening the queues.
Also, there was the nonsense of "a couple can't shop together".
Edit: and one-way systems which made people spend more time in the shop.
Yeah but COVID only travels one way, everyone knows that Applicant.
All of those systems were just performative bullshit. I remember when the pretence dropped towards the end and the government's own report suggested that "value" of mask mandates was no more than a reminder to people that COVID was still a problem, the masks themselves had little effect on the infection rate.
I still see some people go to the pub with a mask on then remove it when they sit down. There's going to be people who are scarred for a very long time because of the government messaging and it's on them and the scientists who pushed their zero COVID agenda all over the news and briefed against the government position from within the government's advisory bodies.
I'd like to see Nuremberg style trials for these scientists, or at least a very serious inquiry into how we got a situation where they were simply allowed to brief the media against the agreed government position and remain on these committees.
Any future guidance on pandemics should make clear that unelected people should never be allowed to have their hands on the levers of power again. It's extremely difficult to claw them away. Those few months of rule by technocrat and scientist were some of the most depressing this nation has seen post-war.
I’m mostly in favour of a ‘truth and reconcilliation’ enquiry, trying to learn lessons rather than blame people, and participants not turning up with their lawyers.
The one exception is the media and their portrayal of “Independent SAGE” - this was deliberately misleading and disingenuous, and those giving them airtime need to be held accountable for that decision.
Or, indeed, just an independent inquiry.
Max, you've lost it a little* with "Nuremberg style trials for these scientists"! How many scientists do you think will want to contribute to anything government related if that was to happen? I would certainly pull the plug on all my DHSC work ASAP.
*a lot, but I try to be part of the kinder, gentler PB
I think that's the point of them, Selebian. If we truly want a "never again" moment the scientists who advised the government so poorly, pushed their dodgy models that didn't stand up to scrutiny, the ones who briefed against the agreed position within minutes of Cabinet agreeing it, the ones who simply lied through their teeth on the secondary impacts of lockdown, they all need to go. The only way to achieve that is to eviscerate them publicly, on TV.
Any who knowingly lied or misrepresented should lose their academic positions. Complete break of scientific ethics and grounds for dismissal. If you have evidence, I suggest you contact their employers.
We'll presumably have Toby Young and co in these Nuremberg style trials, too? Plus that YouTube nurse pushing invermectin and dodgy stats?
I hope you'll spare any of us that may ever have been wrong on PB!
You won't be spared from the witch hunt on here.
It's like fucking McCarthyism: "Are you, or have you ever been, a scientist?"
Fortunately for me, I have never been wrong on PB. My concern, of course, was for others.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Not too many people "of a certain age" at nightclubs and raves and, I believe, such people read the newspapers also.
So lock them down. Voluntarily. Compensate them.
But the principle is more important than the outcome. The country is now accustomed to what were hitherto unprecedented restrictions on liberty. When else might such laws be deployed. We don't know but it's a known unknown or an unknown unknown but it's out there.
To an extent I don't disagree with your analysis, however in the weeks of extremely restrictive lockdowns, the Government indulged in them for what they considered to be reasons of public safety as opposed to an opportunity to impose Soviet style authoritarian controls for the sake of subduing the great unwashed.
PB Libertarians are furiously rewriting history this morning.
Not at all. At some point you have to ask about the quid pro quo. They indulged in them because they worried that the NHS would be overwhelmed and that would not be a good look for any government. And even if they did it from the goodness of their hearts because of public safety I would still question whether such measures were appropriate in terms of the restrictions on liberty.
OK - March 2020 everyone was panicking (not those at Cheltenham or on the Central Line but I digress) and I get that with the pictures from Northern Italy the government went into panic mode also. It was the unknown and a national lockdown was an understandable circuit break. Which is where @Cyclefree's article comes in. Because it was introduced with such cavalier disregard for due process that actually there can be questions asked about its validity as a response given the huge sacrifices in liberty, process and executive power that it entailed.
Dare I say that X thousand deaths were worth the principle of liberty (trying not to over-dramatise)? Perhaps.
Perhaps the lack of due process, despite advance warning of the pandemic from Italy and elsewhere, is that the Prime Minister thinks he is above law and custom, and his chief of staff thought he should be.
Well I yield to no one in my position as foremost believer of Boris to be a useless solipsistic twat but thank the lord he and his evidently libertarian instincts and sheer arrogance were in charge. He still - I think unwillingly - yielded to the 5pm government by Chief Medical Officer but I can't help but thinking that with almost anyone else in charge (saving Steve Baker et al) we would have been in an even worse (ie fewer liberties) position than we were and for longer.
Totally agree mate, with PM Starmer we'd probably still have mask mandates and travel restrictions in place today like much of continental Europe. We'd never have had the July 2021 removal of domestic restrictions and we'd have vaccine passports in force for well over a year now.
Whatever else one thinks about Boris, he's the correct PM to have had. Dave and Blair would also have been tended towards freedom as well. PM Starmer, May and Brown would all have cracked down much harder and we'd have been unlikely to ever see the end of COVID measures once they were handed all that control over people's lives. Scottish people have lucked out that the Westminster government has constantly pushed on removing restrictions, otherwise Sturgeon would still have everything in place.
What I'd like to see now is the dismantling of the final COVID measures, I'd order Ofcom to start looking into the removal of social distancing and plastic screens on TV shows etc... Just bin all of the bullshit from COVID.
I agree with that post except for the comment about Continental Europe. You refer to restrictions still in existence today compared to us. I can only speak of a couple of countries and that is not correct. Looking at @Leon travel reports it also doesn't seem to be so for the places he has travelled to either. We have all moved on I think.
The TV is sclerotic. On BBC breakfast - no limits on people on the safa. Have I got news for you - screens between panelists. Madness.
Yes that is daft. I wonder if the screens in shops will stay. I haven't seen any removed. They only cause a little inconvenience, will cost money to remove and get rid of and provide a little protection against stuff other than COVID. I wonder if there is other stuff that will stay? One way pedestrian systems? Can't think of anything else.
There aren't any one-way pedestrian systems left are there?
What does need to be removed is all the bossy signs, which no longer apply but remain in view in various parts of the public realm.
Certainly is in our post office. Having said that although it came in because of COVID the isle is so narrow, because they have crammed a small area full of crap, it works anyway.
We have a gift shop in our village with a board outside telling people the pandemic isn't over, only 5 allowed in the shop, masks must be worn and make sure you use the band gel dispenser...
Suffice to say I take my custom elsewhere lol...
Lol. They'll be issuing monkey pox guidance soon. No shagging in the shop!
It's extraordinary to see what's going on in Sri Lanka at the moment. The president decided to switch the country to organic farming overnight, ignoring the scientists who said it would end in disaster.
Press starting to ramp up the monkeyspunkypox fear this morning. It's out there!
Yeah, what's going on with that? My understanding is that Monkeypox was a rare mostly tropical virus that didn't spread very easily at all?
Has it mutated to become more transmissible?
Very doubtful. I mean it's 40 odd cases in half a dozen countries which doesn't suggest easy community transmission, no clusters. It seems to spread via sex, close skin contact, touching infected clothing and they've tagged in some vague thing about 'droplets' and extended face to face contact
Is “extended face to face contact” what used to be called making out?
Gobbing in each other's mouths I think.
One of the strippers in the famous "Mighty Fine" pub in Pompey would do that to you for a tenner. It was a test of manhood for many a young jack. It was very weird because she used to work the weekend day shift and all this would be going on while there were punters eating their Sunday dinner at the next table.
The sins of the flesh at a bargain price, Sodom reborn.
I don't think there is anywhere in the UK that really plumbs the depths of depravity.
I did a run ashore in Lisbon on the way back from the Falklands. There was a strip club there (can't remember the name. Pink something...) where the talent would take you out the back and give you the full Elon (no purchase of a horse required) while leaning against a stack of Sagres crates. If one left it too late for the trip to the crates the tiled floor would be so slippy underfoot from the issue of previous punters it was actually hard to stay upright. That's depravity.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The 'science' (not the nasty African science, the real Western obviously true science) sold the government an absolute pup. And the flight bans were just out and out actual, real world racism. Stop dangerous brown people even if there is no outbreak there. It was disgusting. And the vitriol against people looking at the hospital and death data in SA and saying 'hang on....' was just ugh That was the absolute last straw for me. 2 years of bullshit, lies and figure driven fear/control. No Strictly for you Van Tam, Whitty and Vallance
My favourite statement was that South Africans were a different type of human to us so Omicron may affect people in the UK differently.
Yes. They have ummmm different infection exposure patterns and ummmm age differences and ummmmm brown people. Pitiful. The racism was on full display
One (not legal) restriction (I'm unsure if it was government advice or they all just decided to do it) which seemed counterproductive to me was that all the supermarkets cut their opening hours. The effect of this was surely to cram the same number of people who needed to do their shopping into fewer hours, therefore increasing the average number of people in the shops at any one time, and thus lengthening the queues.
Also, there was the nonsense of "a couple can't shop together".
Edit: and one-way systems which made people spend more time in the shop.
Yeah but COVID only travels one way, everyone knows that Applicant.
All of those systems were just performative bullshit. I remember when the pretence dropped towards the end and the government's own report suggested that "value" of mask mandates was no more than a reminder to people that COVID was still a problem, the masks themselves had little effect on the infection rate.
I still see some people go to the pub with a mask on then remove it when they sit down. There's going to be people who are scarred for a very long time because of the government messaging and it's on them and the scientists who pushed their zero COVID agenda all over the news and briefed against the government position from within the government's advisory bodies.
I'd like to see Nuremberg style trials for these scientists, or at least a very serious inquiry into how we got a situation where they were simply allowed to brief the media against the agreed government position and remain on these committees.
Any future guidance on pandemics should make clear that unelected people should never be allowed to have their hands on the levers of power again. It's extremely difficult to claw them away. Those few months of rule by technocrat and scientist were some of the most depressing this nation has seen post-war.
I’m mostly in favour of a ‘truth and reconcilliation’ enquiry, trying to learn lessons rather than blame people, and participants not turning up with their lawyers.
The one exception is the media and their portrayal of “Independent SAGE” - this was deliberately misleading and disingenuous, and those giving them airtime need to be held accountable for that decision.
Or, indeed, just an independent inquiry.
Max, you've lost it a little* with "Nuremberg style trials for these scientists"! How many scientists do you think will want to contribute to anything government related if that was to happen? I would certainly pull the plug on all my DHSC work ASAP.
*a lot, but I try to be part of the kinder, gentler PB
I think that's the point of them, Selebian. If we truly want a "never again" moment the scientists who advised the government so poorly, pushed their dodgy models that didn't stand up to scrutiny, the ones who briefed against the agreed position within minutes of Cabinet agreeing it, the ones who simply lied through their teeth on the secondary impacts of lockdown, they all need to go. The only way to achieve that is to eviscerate them publicly, on TV.
Any who knowingly lied or misrepresented should lose their academic positions. Complete break of scientific ethics and grounds for dismissal. If you have evidence, I suggest you contact their employers.
We'll presumably have Toby Young and co in these Nuremberg style trials, too? Plus that YouTube nurse pushing invermectin and dodgy stats?
I hope you'll spare any of us that may ever have been wrong on PB!
I absolutely would have those ivermectin idiots and anti-vaxxers in there too if they were in official advisory positions.
And that's the point of the trials, to establish who said what and which rules were broken by the scientists. How can we know what happened until we ask them under oath.
Special prize for Adam Finn who did his best to make it appear the vaccine was risky for kids.
This is tricky. He seems to have a genuine belief that covid was less of an issue for the child than the potential harm of the vaccine. He was also clearly against vaccinating children to protect others, which many would disagree with him on.
For what its worth a lot of the iSAGE crowd are obsessed with long covid. I am yet to be convinced that the problem is as big as they claim (basing rates on self reporting is problematic, and long covid is many things to many people). But their argument is that it is better for no-one to get covid, hence vaccinating kids who don't need it to fight the infection should be done.
Now thats quite nuanced, but I don't think Finn is guilty of anything other than weighing different risks in a different way to others.
If there were material risks with the vaccine, healthy young adults probably shouldn't have had it either.
Women under 40 didn't have the AZ one in the end - so its partly true. Its also difficult with 1 in a million side effects. Once you vaccinate 10 million you see them.
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
The average age people died of Covid-19 was 82. The average age people die in general is 82.
Hmm, we need an Actuary to pop up and pick this apart.
This will all be in the distribution. The median age of death is about 3 years higher, and the modal higher still.
There is also the measurement error in determining what people actually died of (rather than with), and the conversion to loss of QALYs.
According to Bart, old people die anyway, so what's the problem?
Let's be frank, people with dementia go into a Care Home to be comforted and looked after until they die, not to be treated, recover and go home. Indeed most admissions die within twelve months, of which my nan was within that number too.
So yes locking down the healthy to prevent the deaths of those being comforted until they die is not right or responsible.
Locking down those being comforted until they die so they can't see their loved ones in their final months isn't humane either.
My nan died in a Care Home being denied visitors and not seeing her loved ones in her final months. That was cruel, heartless and is the reality of your supposed "kindness" of lockdown.
Never again.
Old people's homes, care homes, nursing homes and hospices are not all the same thing. Your argument applies solely to the last, and perhaps the second and third depending on the medical condition.
Everything I said was true for the Care sector in general.
People have throughout made the BS argument that since the average life expectancy at 80 is 90, that the average death is ten years life lost. But it's utterly wrong, since people who die are not average and otherwise nobody would ever die. The average 80 year old does not live in a Care home, they live in their own home.
For the Care sector in general the median life expectancy is less than twelve months after admission. So locking down for a year or two, just denies most their final months with loved ones.
Death is sad and it hit me hard when my nan died, but death comes to us all and I think it would have been kinder to her if she'd been allowed to see her loved ones in her final months rather than be locked away left to die alone. Even if she'd died sooner, it would still be kinder.
I hate what happened to this country with a passion. It was cruel and unnecessary, unprincipled and wrong. Simply saying "yes but people died" does not make death wrong, or less inevitable, or locking people away from loved ones until they die a kindness.
On the otgher hand, anti-lockdown libertarians werew taking the completely opposite position on stats - using the total life expectancy in completely misleading ways.
Nevertheless, you're absolutely right in saying that those entering care homes are not statistically representative of the wider population. Even so, the care homes sector has a very wide range of inhabitants, even in the old folks homes. A friend's mum, for instance, was in one for about 12 years, because she had MS and ultimately died of it, while being bright as a button mentally all the time. That's the opposite of the very real dementia category.
Add to that the legal issues involved and the liability of care home operators.
This is the sort of thing that needs a proper and objective analysis in the future inquiry - and also to be considered in future pandemic planning. If it was not done in past planning, or was ignored, that was a serious omission.
Indeed it is complicated but on average your friends mum is the exception and not the norm.
Part of the problem is that people can be too precious about death and treat every death as a tragedy, but there are tragedies worse than death.
The media facilitates this. Soft sob stories interviewing "bereaved" families and "blaming" their deaths etc as if the deaths should have been prevented.
The amount of interviews of things like "my 98 year old father/grandfather etc caught COVID in a Care Home and died, he should have been protected". Sorry to be harsh, but death was coming for your 98 year old relative either way, if not now it wasn't much further away - what we should have been doing is allowing them to make the most of whatever precious time they had left, not denying them visitors so they died alone and cut off from loved ones.
It's similar to your point the other day about war. War is not always worse than unjust peace.
For all his faults, I think it's on balance, a good thing, that we had a PM who was lazy, and unenthusiastic about lockdowns. A PM who was zealous, and who imposed them efficiently, would have been a lot worse.
A “lazy” PM meant we locked down too late. Locking down late is what led to long lockdowns. With infectious disease and exponential growth, you have to act quickly.
I’ve repeatedly said the model we should look to is Japan. Japan has had far fewer deaths from COVID and it never imposed a national lockdown. But it got people to follow public health guidance early and well.
Libertarianism is not the right response to a pandemic. Early, effective intervention is. If you don’t like lockdowns, invest in public health and pandemic preparedness.
There was no such thing as too late.
We shouldn't have locked down at all, it is impossible to lock down too late. If you want to strip away people's liberties then the case to do so needs to be proven beyond doubt. It wasn't and it certainly wasn't before lockdown happened.
This isn't a balance of probabilities issue. When you are talking about removing people's liberties the onus lies solely on those who wish to do so and any doubt should go on the side of liberty.
This is why the "precautionary principle" is vile BS. It is no better than American cops shooting first and feigning remorse later.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
And they bought into the 'transmissable' and refused to acknowledge the 'less severe' and screwed over the hospitality industry and others yet again. The South Africans repeatedly said there wasn't this 'bad news' and that Omicron was significantly less severe. They were ignored. Because they are African I expect. Real racism in action rather than the usual Guardian style 'pot plants are white supremacists' bull
You’re just making things up now. There were multiple voices in South Africa saying various things. Everyone was saying there’s bad news, most were saying there’s uncertain news, some were saying there’s bad news but some good news within the bad news.
No one was saying Omicron wasn’t bad news, because a new, infectious variant was obviously bad news. There were different levels of “how bad”.
There is, shamefully, some tendency among some scientists and others to be dismissive of research coming from developing countries. I don’t feel that’s generally the case with infectious disease scientists, but it can happen. I think the West is more often guilty of ignoring warnings from the developing world. I’ve not looked into these cases in detail, but I think you can see that happening with Ebola, MERS, Zika etc.
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
Because he's using fake logic and flawed averages.
No death ever occurs on the mean average day of death for someone of that age, because it's impossible to do so, but death still happens every single day. Everyone's average age of death at any age would be years in the future because it's impossible to balance the tail, but some will still die today anyway.
One (not legal) restriction (I'm unsure if it was government advice or they all just decided to do it) which seemed counterproductive to me was that all the supermarkets cut their opening hours. The effect of this was surely to cram the same number of people who needed to do their shopping into fewer hours, therefore increasing the average number of people in the shops at any one time, and thus lengthening the queues.
Also, there was the nonsense of "a couple can't shop together".
Edit: and one-way systems which made people spend more time in the shop.
Yeah but COVID only travels one way, everyone knows that Applicant.
All of those systems were just performative bullshit. I remember when the pretence dropped towards the end and the government's own report suggested that "value" of mask mandates was no more than a reminder to people that COVID was still a problem, the masks themselves had little effect on the infection rate.
I still see some people go to the pub with a mask on then remove it when they sit down. There's going to be people who are scarred for a very long time because of the government messaging and it's on them and the scientists who pushed their zero COVID agenda all over the news and briefed against the government position from within the government's advisory bodies.
I'd like to see Nuremberg style trials for these scientists, or at least a very serious inquiry into how we got a situation where they were simply allowed to brief the media against the agreed government position and remain on these committees.
Any future guidance on pandemics should make clear that unelected people should never be allowed to have their hands on the levers of power again. It's extremely difficult to claw them away. Those few months of rule by technocrat and scientist were some of the most depressing this nation has seen post-war.
I’m mostly in favour of a ‘truth and reconcilliation’ enquiry, trying to learn lessons rather than blame people, and participants not turning up with their lawyers.
The one exception is the media and their portrayal of “Independent SAGE” - this was deliberately misleading and disingenuous, and those giving them airtime need to be held accountable for that decision.
Or, indeed, just an independent inquiry.
Max, you've lost it a little* with "Nuremberg style trials for these scientists"! How many scientists do you think will want to contribute to anything government related if that was to happen? I would certainly pull the plug on all my DHSC work ASAP.
*a lot, but I try to be part of the kinder, gentler PB
I think that's the point of them, Selebian. If we truly want a "never again" moment the scientists who advised the government so poorly, pushed their dodgy models that didn't stand up to scrutiny, the ones who briefed against the agreed position within minutes of Cabinet agreeing it, the ones who simply lied through their teeth on the secondary impacts of lockdown, they all need to go. The only way to achieve that is to eviscerate them publicly, on TV.
Any who knowingly lied or misrepresented should lose their academic positions. Complete break of scientific ethics and grounds for dismissal. If you have evidence, I suggest you contact their employers.
We'll presumably have Toby Young and co in these Nuremberg style trials, too? Plus that YouTube nurse pushing invermectin and dodgy stats?
I hope you'll spare any of us that may ever have been wrong on PB!
I absolutely would have those ivermectin idiots and anti-vaxxers in there too if they were in official advisory positions.
And that's the point of the trials, to establish who said what and which rules were broken by the scientists. How can we know what happened until we ask them under oath.
Special prize for Adam Finn who did his best to make it appear the vaccine was risky for kids.
This is tricky. He seems to have a genuine belief that covid was less of an issue for the child than the potential harm of the vaccine. He was also clearly against vaccinating children to protect others, which many would disagree with him on.
For what its worth a lot of the iSAGE crowd are obsessed with long covid. I am yet to be convinced that the problem is as big as they claim (basing rates on self reporting is problematic, and long covid is many things to many people). But their argument is that it is better for no-one to get covid, hence vaccinating kids who don't need it to fight the infection should be done.
Now thats quite nuanced, but I don't think Finn is guilty of anything other than weighing different risks in a different way to others.
The problem came when it became clear that the data said that the risk to various groups of children, from COVID, was higher than any risks of the vaccine. Both were small, but the numbers were distinct.
It became clear that some people were ideologically opposed - they wanted the vaccinations to be used overseas.
Despite the fact that production was ramping up, ever higher, world wide, and the number of vaccinations was a fart in a thunderstorm compared to that.
Quite right - I'd forgotten the use the vaccines overseas arguments.
Interesting summary. The difficulties with the NI protocol are a reflection of the fact that, even six years on, Brexit (and UK post-Brexit policy) are still shapeless and undefined. Because to give them shape, Brexiters must accept trade-offs they pretended did not exist. ~AA https://twitter.com/chrisgreybrexit/status/1527553406679891969
I wonder whether this, obliquely, means that actually only an administration of former Remainers can properly deliver Brexit, because it could resolve issues as they are, without having to defend the lies and policy decisions that created them to start with. ~AA @chrisgreybrexit
Business would say this, as it would give them softer, business shaped Brexit, have cake eat it brexit good for them.
At other end of scale, Lord Frost leader of the ERG and arguably only people who understand Brexit and can speak for Brexit, argue that Brexit was freedom to escape the bureaucratic European social model, but we haven’t taken that step, we are still messily shadowing the European social model and actually not done Brexit, hence our problems.
More excellent reasons why David Cameron should have insisted that the details of Brexit were nailed down before the referendum, and why, failing that, there should have been a "deal or no deal" referendum rather than Theresa May triggering Article 50 and hoping something would turn up.
That is a good point. For a long time we were in a Brexit means Brexit policy position, which was hard to explain. Even when May agreed what Brexit means with EU and put to parliament it was still so up in the air, the trickier thing proved agreeing what Brexit means with her own party.
There’s actually lots of different ways Cameron could have done it. A referendum wether or not to ask for a better deal, followed up by asking the country if we feel the negotiation deal is actually better or not my Dad always insists is far more democratic, it’s type of democracy we ask for in trade unions changing their deals - but Cameron chose a particular way to help him win using economic scare tactics, but the we can have our cake and eat it feeling won on the day - we are not just freeer but lot richer with our money back argument.
Labour did it different. They said Heaths deal was unacceptable but their renegotiation yielded very little, the vote was accept this renegotiation yes or no, not in or out, so if they lost they could have tried again. My Dad says Heath was a proper Conservative, very strong saying no to a referendum, and would have attacked Cameron for what he was doing.
But then, in my opinion, that was a different world altogether, the Europe thing in 1970s utterly different to what it was in the 20teens. Ironically, UK under the Conservatives and Lady Thatcher governments transformed it a lot to our way of thinking.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
And they bought into the 'transmissable' and refused to acknowledge the 'less severe' and screwed over the hospitality industry and others yet again. The South Africans repeatedly said there wasn't this 'bad news' and that Omicron was significantly less severe. They were ignored. Because they are African I expect. Real racism in action rather than the usual Guardian style 'pot plants are white supremacists' bull
You’re just making things up now. There were multiple voices in South Africa saying various things. Everyone was saying there’s bad news, most were saying there’s uncertain news, some were saying there’s bad news but some good news within the bad news.
No one was saying Omicron wasn’t bad news, because a new, infectious variant was obviously bad news. There were different levels of “how bad”.
There is, shamefully, some tendency among some scientists and others to be dismissive of research coming from developing countries. I don’t feel that’s generally the case with infectious disease scientists, but it can happen. I think the West is more often guilty of ignoring warnings from the developing world. I’ve not looked into these cases in detail, but I think you can see that happening with Ebola, MERS, Zika etc.
I was referring to the 'bad news' about mortality, IFR etc. The South Africans were consistent in that. Obviously everyone was confirming transmisability was way up And, actually, there were voices very early on saying Omicron was our route out of the pandemic to endemic status
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
I generally don’t bother trying to explain science reporting in newspapers. It can bear little resemblance to actual science.
If you want to read the science, some more useful papers here include:
Press starting to ramp up the monkeyspunkypox fear this morning. It's out there!
Yeah, what's going on with that? My understanding is that Monkeypox was a rare mostly tropical virus that didn't spread very easily at all?
Has it mutated to become more transmissible?
Very doubtful. I mean it's 40 odd cases in half a dozen countries which doesn't suggest easy community transmission, no clusters. It seems to spread via sex, close skin contact, touching infected clothing and they've tagged in some vague thing about 'droplets' and extended face to face contact
Is “extended face to face contact” what used to be called making out?
Gobbing in each other's mouths I think.
One of the strippers in the famous "Mighty Fine" pub in Pompey would do that to you for a tenner. It was a test of manhood for many a young jack. It was very weird because she used to work the weekend day shift and all this would be going on while there were punters eating their Sunday dinner at the next table.
The sins of the flesh at a bargain price, Sodom reborn.
I don't think there is anywhere in the UK that really plumbs the depths of depravity.
I did a run ashore in Lisbon on the way back from the Falklands. There was a strip club there (can't remember the name. Pink something...) where the talent would take you out the back and give you the full Elon (no purchase of a horse required) while leaning against a stack of Sagres crates. If one left it too late for the trip to the crates the tiled floor would be so slippy underfoot from the issue of previous punters it was actually hard to stay upright. That's depravity.
There used to be a bloke who was a regular in the boozer where I worked as a callow youth (dead now, overweight, big drinker, heavy smoker, massive heart attack) who offhandedly told me, as if it were quite commonplace, that when he was a young squaddie in Germany he would frequent the local brothels with his mates.
Once they’d all enjoyed the company of the ladies this guy I knew claimed he would go around the hookers in turn cleaning his fellow squaddies, erm, deposits from their nether regions with his tongue.
I’ve never forgotten how he sat there, fag in hand with a pint of John Smiths, telling me about this decidedly niche activity as if we were discussing the weather.
Not bad header. But at the time, the consensus in the country and on PB, save for a precious few people (and I 92% include myself in that latter group) were cheering on the restrictions. Even pre-vaccine, which seems to have been a watershed for some, very few and very few on PB spotted the dangers of lockdown as a principle, rather than the effect it might have on the virus.
Sure, the government saw how in northern Italy people were almost literally dying on the streets but there was always another route short of legal enforcement (with all the pitfalls that @Cyclefree correctly points out).
And then literally one by one on PB people realised that all along it was the principle that was the danger. And now everyone is applauding this article who were huge lockdown fans at the time.
And of course, when reviewing the largest restriction on liberty in living memory, someone is going to say seatbelts.
Is still support the principle of lockdowns, when needed (I think they were needed for periods of this pandemic, particularly pre-vaccine - as I think has been my expressed view throughout).
The laws were rushed, for obvious reasons. The guidelines were incoherent and often nonsensical. I remember going for a walk with my father in law and my son while my wife went for a walk with my mother in law and our daughter, along the same road, a few tens of yards apart because that was, I believe, the law at that point. Clearly that was no difference, from a disease spread point of view, to us all walking together.
I have a lot of sympathy with rushed laws and guidance at the start of the first lockdown. Arguably they should have been drafted and debated early in the year, but I don't think any of us really believed it would get so bad at that point. For the later lockdowns (partly with hindsight) there should have been proper debate and scrutiny in advance of a range of restriction options, from which the government could then choose as needed. Any deviation should require full debate or have a very strict time limit.
Now is the time to do these things, while they are fresh in the mind. Get the epidemiologists to write up some options for different kinds of pathogens, airbourne, surface-spread and sensible restrictions in various levels. Get those voted on and put into a set of restrictions that can be triggered as needed, with a strict time limit before a vote is needed to maintain them. They should also be reviewed with each new government, perhaps. We were caught unprepared, which was understandable, but now is the time to ensure we are better prepared next time and to have the debate about what is and is not acceptable. The epidemiologists should inform that debate, so should the NHS leaders, but also advocacy groups for those who were worst hit by lockdown, those who live alone, who are elderly - or young - and isolated without going into work and socialising. When all that is done, we need the police and CPS to agree guidelines on enforcement and have thes reviewed, to stop the ridiculous harassment we saw of people doing lawful things this time round. Guidance, if issued, should be made clearly distinct from the law: "In addition to the things restricted by law, we also ask you to avoid the following, as much as you can, to reduce spread..."
The problem with your suggestion here is that in early 2020 the government had a pandemic plan, and when the pandemic hit, the media stampeded them into a panic and the first thing they did was throw it in the bin.
They had an influenza pandemic plan, which they tried to follow at first, but it turned out that covid spread faster, differently, and with a pronounced pre-symptomatic period, so a plan for dealing with a different disease was binned.
What's particularly absurd is that there are some areas that *still* follow the influenza pandemic plan. Take the DoE where in the most recent COVID guidelines for schools published Feb-22 the number 1 thing under 'Hygiene' is 'Frequent and thorough hand cleaning should now be regular practice. You should continue to ensure that pupils clean their hands regularly. This can be done with soap and water or hand sanitiser.' (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1057106/220224_Schools_guidance.pdf) - This is well over 18 months since we confirmed that COVID spreads in the air and not on the surface, but on we go... I dread to think when, or if, that guidance will ever be removed.
Yes, they key mitigation measure for in door spaces is ventilation and filtering.
Neither features anywhere on Uk or Scot gov mitigation strategies. I stead discredited advice around droplet transmission (not aerosol) and surface hygiene.
The fact is, the Greens have a paramilitary wing going around at night torching peoples beloved cars in residential areas, they, the greens not the cars, should be going down, not up. We shouldn’t even be allowed to hear Green spokespeople speak on television, they should be voiced by actors.
The fact is, the Greens have a paramilitary wing going around at night torching peoples beloved cars in residential areas, they, the greens not the cars, should be going down, not up. We shouldn’t even be allowed to hear Green spokespeople speak on television, they should be voiced by actors.
I am the only member of the Greens who owns a Unimog. True fact.
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
I generally don’t bother trying to explain science reporting in newspapers. It can bear little resemblance to actual science.
If you want to read the science, some more useful papers here include:
So according to the introduction of your first link there were 28.1 million excess years of life lost to the pandemic across 31 countries.
Locking down 67 million for five months is 28 million years of life and liberty lost to lockdown and we had more than five months of lockdown across two years of restrictions.
So lockdown in the UK alone caused more loss of life to be lived than the pandemic did across the 31 nations studied.
Not bad header. But at the time, the consensus in the country and on PB, save for a precious few people (and I 92% include myself in that latter group) were cheering on the restrictions. Even pre-vaccine, which seems to have been a watershed for some, very few and very few on PB spotted the dangers of lockdown as a principle, rather than the effect it might have on the virus.
Sure, the government saw how in northern Italy people were almost literally dying on the streets but there was always another route short of legal enforcement (with all the pitfalls that @Cyclefree correctly points out).
And then literally one by one on PB people realised that all along it was the principle that was the danger. And now everyone is applauding this article who were huge lockdown fans at the time.
And of course, when reviewing the largest restriction on liberty in living memory, someone is going to say seatbelts.
Is still support the principle of lockdowns, when needed (I think they were needed for periods of this pandemic, particularly pre-vaccine - as I think has been my expressed view throughout).
The laws were rushed, for obvious reasons. The guidelines were incoherent and often nonsensical. I remember going for a walk with my father in law and my son while my wife went for a walk with my mother in law and our daughter, along the same road, a few tens of yards apart because that was, I believe, the law at that point. Clearly that was no difference, from a disease spread point of view, to us all walking together.
I have a lot of sympathy with rushed laws and guidance at the start of the first lockdown. Arguably they should have been drafted and debated early in the year, but I don't think any of us really believed it would get so bad at that point. For the later lockdowns (partly with hindsight) there should have been proper debate and scrutiny in advance of a range of restriction options, from which the government could then choose as needed. Any deviation should require full debate or have a very strict time limit.
Now is the time to do these things, while they are fresh in the mind. Get the epidemiologists to write up some options for different kinds of pathogens, airbourne, surface-spread and sensible restrictions in various levels. Get those voted on and put into a set of restrictions that can be triggered as needed, with a strict time limit before a vote is needed to maintain them. They should also be reviewed with each new government, perhaps. We were caught unprepared, which was understandable, but now is the time to ensure we are better prepared next time and to have the debate about what is and is not acceptable. The epidemiologists should inform that debate, so should the NHS leaders, but also advocacy groups for those who were worst hit by lockdown, those who live alone, who are elderly - or young - and isolated without going into work and socialising. When all that is done, we need the police and CPS to agree guidelines on enforcement and have thes reviewed, to stop the ridiculous harassment we saw of people doing lawful things this time round. Guidance, if issued, should be made clearly distinct from the law: "In addition to the things restricted by law, we also ask you to avoid the following, as much as you can, to reduce spread..."
The problem with your suggestion here is that in early 2020 the government had a pandemic plan, and when the pandemic hit, the media stampeded them into a panic and the first thing they did was throw it in the bin.
They had an influenza pandemic plan, which they tried to follow at first, but it turned out that covid spread faster, differently, and with a pronounced pre-symptomatic period, so a plan for dealing with a different disease was binned.
What's particularly absurd is that there are some areas that *still* follow the influenza pandemic plan. Take the DoE where in the most recent COVID guidelines for schools published Feb-22 the number 1 thing under 'Hygiene' is 'Frequent and thorough hand cleaning should now be regular practice. You should continue to ensure that pupils clean their hands regularly. This can be done with soap and water or hand sanitiser.' (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1057106/220224_Schools_guidance.pdf) - This is well over 18 months since we confirmed that COVID spreads in the air and not on the surface, but on we go... I dread to think when, or if, that guidance will ever be removed.
Yes, they key mitigation measure for in door spaces is ventilation and filtering.
Neither features anywhere on Uk or Scot gov mitigation strategies. I stead discredited advice around droplet transmission (not aerosol) and surface hygiene.
You'd think by now the government procurement of air filtration would be the number one priority. Every classroom, every ward should have one. But no. Following the science? My arse.
Not bad header. But at the time, the consensus in the country and on PB, save for a precious few people (and I 92% include myself in that latter group) were cheering on the restrictions. Even pre-vaccine, which seems to have been a watershed for some, very few and very few on PB spotted the dangers of lockdown as a principle, rather than the effect it might have on the virus.
Sure, the government saw how in northern Italy people were almost literally dying on the streets but there was always another route short of legal enforcement (with all the pitfalls that @Cyclefree correctly points out).
And then literally one by one on PB people realised that all along it was the principle that was the danger. And now everyone is applauding this article who were huge lockdown fans at the time.
And of course, when reviewing the largest restriction on liberty in living memory, someone is going to say seatbelts.
Is still support the principle of lockdowns, when needed (I think they were needed for periods of this pandemic, particularly pre-vaccine - as I think has been my expressed view throughout).
The laws were rushed, for obvious reasons. The guidelines were incoherent and often nonsensical. I remember going for a walk with my father in law and my son while my wife went for a walk with my mother in law and our daughter, along the same road, a few tens of yards apart because that was, I believe, the law at that point. Clearly that was no difference, from a disease spread point of view, to us all walking together.
I have a lot of sympathy with rushed laws and guidance at the start of the first lockdown. Arguably they should have been drafted and debated early in the year, but I don't think any of us really believed it would get so bad at that point. For the later lockdowns (partly with hindsight) there should have been proper debate and scrutiny in advance of a range of restriction options, from which the government could then choose as needed. Any deviation should require full debate or have a very strict time limit.
Now is the time to do these things, while they are fresh in the mind. Get the epidemiologists to write up some options for different kinds of pathogens, airbourne, surface-spread and sensible restrictions in various levels. Get those voted on and put into a set of restrictions that can be triggered as needed, with a strict time limit before a vote is needed to maintain them. They should also be reviewed with each new government, perhaps. We were caught unprepared, which was understandable, but now is the time to ensure we are better prepared next time and to have the debate about what is and is not acceptable. The epidemiologists should inform that debate, so should the NHS leaders, but also advocacy groups for those who were worst hit by lockdown, those who live alone, who are elderly - or young - and isolated without going into work and socialising. When all that is done, we need the police and CPS to agree guidelines on enforcement and have thes reviewed, to stop the ridiculous harassment we saw of people doing lawful things this time round. Guidance, if issued, should be made clearly distinct from the law: "In addition to the things restricted by law, we also ask you to avoid the following, as much as you can, to reduce spread..."
Great post.
But I still prefer guidance, nudges, education, and appropriate compensation rather than laws. Once the lockdown genie is out of the bottle (too late, I appreciate) then that becomes a policy tool for any number of situations. Ask Walter Wolfgang.
Yep. One of the interesting questions is to what extent guidance, in the absent of laws, would have been effective. Sweden has some interesting data there (more than on relationship between laws and cases/deaths) as there was a big drop in travel etc even though there was little forbidden by law early on. Of course, Sweden is not UK, so there are limits to what can be inferred.
I think there was a need for laws for businesses, i.e. mandating closure of some. Otherwise it's much harder to provide needed support and prevent pressure on employees to come into the office anyway. But another thing to be reviewed. Later rules were less strict on homeworking. If they were still effective, then go with that, I guess.
In the UK, wave 1 of Covid had peaked before lockdown.
Citation ( and a mountain of salt) required.
Peak deaths was the 8th April 2020, 3 weeks back from there is before lockdown
Which assumes an exact 3 weeks to death for every patient - citation for that one?
Your response is exactly the issue that led to the lockdown fanaticism, shouting down anyone who goes against the narrative, of course 3 weeks is not an exact figure for every death, its an average.
The thread header is very well written but it is naive. There isn't any circumstance that any Government in the UK could have avoided lockdown and the other restrictions. The press would have wound the public up to make the Government complete hate figures for causing the deaths of tens of thousands of people. I think the Government probably intorduced the least restrictions it could based on the poor scientific advice and the nightmare press that exists in this country. The most sickening being Kay Burley and Beth Rigby.
I was completely ridiculed on this site for even suggesting that maybe lockdowns wrere not effective in May/June 2020 and now with hindsight people have a different view, but to blame the Government for introducing the lock down when 95% of people and just about all "expert scientists" agreed with it is a bit rich.
It's also the mode figure for a distribution which is not only the combination of three distributions with different variables but has a skew.
You've got: infection to illness, plus illness to hospitalisation, plus hospitalisation to death. Each varies considerably and an average conceals much of the distribution.
Simon Nichols ran a more detailed analysis and got a different figure for mode to median and mean (which is not surprising) and he got a 15 day mode for a 19 day mean.
The seven day average of deaths on death certificates in England peaked for the first wave on the 10th of April (1,180) and the individual day record was the 8th of April (1,286). That would give a (loose) central estimate of incidence peaking around the 24th-26th of March.
And we don't have to take any calculation's word for it. We can look at the increases and decreases of incidence and later death from the ONS survey and death certificates.
Four separate peaks came in with delays of 9 days, 16 days, 23 days, and 13 days between incidence peaking and deaths peaking. An average of 15.25 days, but with a fairly wide variability - which is what we'd expect.
The difference between the black line (the mean, and what people mean when they say "average") and the fattest part of the distribution (the peak number seen) is very well illustrated.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
And they bought into the 'transmissable' and refused to acknowledge the 'less severe' and screwed over the hospitality industry and others yet again. The South Africans repeatedly said there wasn't this 'bad news' and that Omicron was significantly less severe. They were ignored. Because they are African I expect. Real racism in action rather than the usual Guardian style 'pot plants are white supremacists' bull
You’re just making things up now. There were multiple voices in South Africa saying various things. Everyone was saying there’s bad news, most were saying there’s uncertain news, some were saying there’s bad news but some good news within the bad news.
No one was saying Omicron wasn’t bad news, because a new, infectious variant was obviously bad news. There were different levels of “how bad”.
There is, shamefully, some tendency among some scientists and others to be dismissive of research coming from developing countries. I don’t feel that’s generally the case with infectious disease scientists, but it can happen. I think the West is more often guilty of ignoring warnings from the developing world. I’ve not looked into these cases in detail, but I think you can see that happening with Ebola, MERS, Zika etc.
Sorry but that is simply not correct, from the very start SA Doctors were saying that Omicron was significantly milder and all the evidence also pointed to that.
LOL the Adam Smith Institute is a "far right" think-tank?
Some people are absolutely cream crackers aren't they.
No source as to where the transparency "list" comes from either. Yet again, FBPE Twitter claims to be about open and honest politics while practising the same tactics they scorn their political enemies for using.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
Yep. And when Whitty made the comment, which was more along the lines of 'we don't know much but what we do know is bad', we could be pretty confident about the greater spread of Omicron (we could see the rapid rise in cases) but the data on outcomes were more tentative because those data take longer. We hadn't seen a big jump in deaths, but we'd also had much less time for those to come through than the spike in cases. So we knew, to reasonable certainty, that spread was higher (which was bad). There was some evidence, to lower certainty, that it was milder.
Omicron becoming the dominant variant may well have saved almost as many lives as vaccines, hence the massive reductions in death rates even where vaccination has been less common and not followed up by various boosters. If Covid was still as lethal as the original doses with the much higher infectivity we would have been in terrible trouble.
I have no problem with those, such as Whitty, who were concerned that the infectivity increase was a major problem that was potentially going to overwhelm the social distancing and other restrictions that we had in place. Even China, who seem to think nothing of locking people into their flats, have not been able to stop the spread of Omicron. But the failure to accept the evidence that this significant increase in cases was not leading to a significant increase in either hospitalisations or deaths was very odd and almost certainly was behind Boris's decision to remove our restrictions, something he was completely vindicated on.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The 'science' (not the nasty African science, the real Western obviously true science) sold the government an absolute pup. And the flight bans were just out and out actual, real world racism. Stop dangerous brown people even if there is no outbreak there. It was disgusting. And the vitriol against people looking at the hospital and death data in SA and saying 'hang on....' was just ugh That was the absolute last straw for me. 2 years of bullshit, lies and figure driven fear/control. No Strictly for you Van Tam, Whitty and Vallance
My favourite statement was that South Africans were a different type of human to us so Omicron may affect people in the UK differently.
Yes. They have ummmm different infection exposure patterns and ummmm age differences and ummmmm brown people. Pitiful. The racism was on full display
Err, no. Ethnicity and lifestyle are major factors in patterns of disease.
If anything is racist, it is the disease itself...
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
Thought experiment. New pandemic, massively transmissible, infects everyone in short order. Kills anyone infected aged 80 or over, spares everyone below.
The median age of death from $newpandemic is > 80 (well over 80, probably) The median age of death not from $newpandemic is < 80 (well under 80, probably)
But those people killed by $newpandemic have died earlier than they otherwise would, possibly losing years of life.
I don't see what point you think you're making. If something preferentially kills old people (e.g. Covid) then it is very likely that any average age of death from the something will be higher than an average age of death not from the something.
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
I generally don’t bother trying to explain science reporting in newspapers. It can bear little resemblance to actual science.
If you want to read the science, some more useful papers here include:
So according to the introduction of your first link there were 28.1 million excess years of life lost to the pandemic across 31 countries.
Locking down 67 million for five months is 28 million years of life and liberty lost to lockdown and we had more than five months of lockdown across two years of restrictions.
So lockdown in the UK alone caused more loss of life to be lived than the pandemic did across the 31 nations studied.
Lockdown was an unmitigated failure.
1 - That was the loss of life WITH lockdowns. Had it been allowed to spread freely prior to vaccines, obviously the loss of life would have been way way higher
Press starting to ramp up the monkeyspunkypox fear this morning. It's out there!
Yeah, what's going on with that? My understanding is that Monkeypox was a rare mostly tropical virus that didn't spread very easily at all?
Has it mutated to become more transmissible?
Very doubtful. I mean it's 40 odd cases in half a dozen countries which doesn't suggest easy community transmission, no clusters. It seems to spread via sex, close skin contact, touching infected clothing and they've tagged in some vague thing about 'droplets' and extended face to face contact
Is “extended face to face contact” what used to be called making out?
Gobbing in each other's mouths I think.
One of the strippers in the famous "Mighty Fine" pub in Pompey would do that to you for a tenner. It was a test of manhood for many a young jack. It was very weird because she used to work the weekend day shift and all this would be going on while there were punters eating their Sunday dinner at the next table.
The sins of the flesh at a bargain price, Sodom reborn.
I don't think there is anywhere in the UK that really plumbs the depths of depravity.
I did a run ashore in Lisbon on the way back from the Falklands. There was a strip club there (can't remember the name. Pink something...) where the talent would take you out the back and give you the full Elon (no purchase of a horse required) while leaning against a stack of Sagres crates. If one left it too late for the trip to the crates the tiled floor would be so slippy underfoot from the issue of previous punters it was actually hard to stay upright. That's depravity.
There used to be a bloke who was a regular in the boozer where I worked as a callow youth (dead now, overweight, big drinker, heavy smoker, massive heart attack) who offhandedly told me, as if it were quite commonplace, that when he was a young squaddie in Germany he would frequent the local brothels with his mates.
Once they’d all enjoyed the company of the ladies this guy I knew claimed he would go around the hookers in turn cleaning his fellow squaddies, erm, deposits from their nether regions with his tongue.
I’ve never forgotten how he sat there, fag in hand with a pint of John Smiths, telling me about this decidedly niche activity as if we were discussing the weather.
We used to have a top thriller writer and brothel historian on pb who, iirc, claimed this used to be a thing in 19th Century Paris, or something along those lines.
The fact is, the Greens have a paramilitary wing going around at night torching peoples beloved cars in residential areas, they, the greens not the cars, should be going down, not up. We shouldn’t even be allowed to hear Green spokespeople speak on television, they should be voiced by actors.
I am the only member of the Greens who owns a Unimog. True fact.
You can convert it to run on biomethane gas to transport canvassers to the next destination
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
He already has.
Life expectancy at birth is complex, and is not equivalent to the modal age of death, the median age of death, or the mean age of death at any given time, but an extrapolation of the median age of death for a given cohort assuming things remain unchanged.
Life expectancy at any given age is invariably longer than that at birth, because those who have died are no longer put into the calculation. Due to being dead.
The average life expected for those who died was another ten years. This was an average, and some would have lived decades more, others would have died within a couple of years.
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
Thought experiment. New pandemic, massively transmissible, infects everyone in short order. Kills anyone infected aged 80 or over, spares everyone below.
The median age of death from $newpandemic is > 80 (well over 80, probably) The median age of death not from $newpandemic is < 80 (well under 80, probably)
But those people killed by $newpandemic have died earlier than they otherwise would, possibly losing years of life.
I don't see what point you think you're making. If something preferentially kills old people (e.g. Covid) then it is very likely that any average age of death from the something will be higher than an average age of death not from the something.
Isn't it just more simple?
Average Life Expectancy at birth might be 81 years, but Average Life Expectency at age 81 is not zero, but more like 10 years.
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
I generally don’t bother trying to explain science reporting in newspapers. It can bear little resemblance to actual science.
If you want to read the science, some more useful papers here include:
So according to the introduction of your first link there were 28.1 million excess years of life lost to the pandemic across 31 countries.
Locking down 67 million for five months is 28 million years of life and liberty lost to lockdown and we had more than five months of lockdown across two years of restrictions.
So lockdown in the UK alone caused more loss of life to be lived than the pandemic did across the 31 nations studied.
Lockdown was an unmitigated failure.
1 - That was the loss of life WITH lockdowns. Had it been allowed to spread freely prior to vaccines, obviously the loss of life would have been way way higher
2 - Life in lockdown wasn't equivalent to death.
1 - But the life lost to lockdown would have been massively more lower.
2 - You're right. Life lost to lockdown is worse than death.
Even if we ignore the judgement that life lost to lockdown is worse than life lost to death, and even if we accept the absurd 10 years lost hypothesis, the only justification for a year of lockdown for 67 million people would be if it averted 6.7 million excess deaths. Otherwise lockdown costs more life than death does.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
Wrong. Whitty said the only news we have is bad. This was false. In fact, the entire SA medical profession was openly and repeatedly saying quite the opposite. They were ignored.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
I seem to recall you were fully supportive of the restrictions at the time Big_G.
I generally agree with @Cyclefree on most of her headers but "Never Again" is too simplistic here.
For me the issue is not the principle but the practical application. Dependent on the virulence of any future pandemic I would support severe restrictions. However, we should learn from Covid and set up legislation now that can be quickly switched on, by agreement of Parliament, when required.
We need to recognise that there will be another pandemic at some point and it could well be more severe than Covid.
We already have such legislation. The Civil Contingencies Act. It was not used. I have explained why elsewhere.
The next thing may or may not be a pandemic, but I keep wondering how we can still be here.
The risk register for the CCA 2004 needs, I imagine, to include these:
War and invasion Nuclear attack Mass famine Pandemic causing mass extinctions across species including ours Runaway warming/climate change and allied dangers New ice age A Permian style event - earthbound natural disaster A dinosaur extinction style event - a solar system disaster Digital and electronic wipeout - could be a solar disaster, other sources are available Extra terrestrials - a beyond solar system event A passing black hole style event - a multi galactic event Instantaneous change in the laws of nature - a universe event And of course unknown unknowns.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
My issue with the modelling is that I believe what was being shown to government was cherry picked by someone (I don't know who) to make them take action. This was done with honest intentions as that person believed action needed to be taken and wouldn't have been if a more realistic set of models had been shown. But it was badly handled.
There was a fucking communist on SAGE who confessed she wanted to reorder society to fit her idiot Marxist theories. Ugh
Just popped in over lunch. Has this blog been renamed PoliticalRevisionism.com?
I've written to Priti Patel demanding a pardon for Dr Harold Shipman on the grounds he only murdered old crumblies who were already past their life expectancy. /s
The fact is, the Greens have a paramilitary wing going around at night torching peoples beloved cars in residential areas, they, the greens not the cars, should be going down, not up. We shouldn’t even be allowed to hear Green spokespeople speak on television, they should be voiced by actors.
By "torching people's cars" I assume you mean letting the tyres down on SUVs in cities.
By "Green" I assume you mean an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion.
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
Thought experiment. New pandemic, massively transmissible, infects everyone in short order. Kills anyone infected aged 80 or over, spares everyone below.
The median age of death from $newpandemic is > 80 (well over 80, probably) The median age of death not from $newpandemic is < 80 (well under 80, probably)
But those people killed by $newpandemic have died earlier than they otherwise would, possibly losing years of life.
I don't see what point you think you're making. If something preferentially kills old people (e.g. Covid) then it is very likely that any average age of death from the something will be higher than an average age of death not from the something.
Isn't it just more simple?
Average Life Expectancy at birth might be 81 years, but Average Life Expectency at age 81 is not zero, but more like 10 years.
Just had a look at the ONS Life Expectancy calculator.
For males in the UK:
Life expectancy at 60 is 84 At 65 is 85 At 70 is 86 At 75 is 87 At 80 is 89 At 85 is 91 At 90 is 94 At 95 is 98
The polls do show a trend away from the conservatives but why anybody should be surprised I really do not know
Forget partygate and beergate , every day voters are seeing price rises they have never experienced before and are frightened
All we hear from Boris and Rishi is that help is coming at some ill defined later date and to be honest they are so utterly out of touch they have gifted the narrative to labour
Rishi appearing on the rich list just compounds opinion, though I do not think his wife's' wealth should be relevant
In years to come the last few months, Ukraine excepted, will be an example by those teaching politics how to do a right royal 'Ratner' on your brand
Indeed. I do not know many people outside the political bubble talking about who ate what cake or what curry during lockdown.
I do hear a lot of frightened noises about prices of the weekly shop going up, prices of petrol going up, not being able to afford heating when winter comes around.
By 2024 nobody will be talking about partygate. They will be talking about how much poorer everyone is, and how much more expensive everything is. The optics of a chancellor worth over 700 million at such a time are not good.
There is a "let them eat cake" joke in here somewhere but I am too tired to make it.
I have only read @Cyclefree comment piece and as so often she is spot on and I agree 100% that we must never again allow our country's law makers to pass such idiotic, even ludicrous, laws on us
Its a shame most posters on this site were in full agreement with the restictions when they were imposed, and most wanted them to go further.
In April 2020 we were locked into our homes for our own safety and the safety of others.
All those on here saying, "well I disagreed with this restrictive socialism from day one" seem to have forgotten that if one was over a certain age in April, May, June, or December 2020 and January, February and early March 2021 and one contracted the virus there was a very good chance it was good night Vienna.
The narrative in part has changed to protect Johnson. "It wasn't so bad in April 2020, which is why Big Dog could party like it was 1999". It really was so bad.
Whether with hindsight it could have been managed better is open to debate. At the time, we didn't have the benefit of hindsight.
Captain Hindsight did. He would have kept us locked up earlier, later, longer, tighter. Christmas 2021 would have been a very shitty affair, left to SKS.
He was of course being guided "by the science". Which was massively pessimistic, once the nation was getting vaxxed.
Not all the science. Many scientists were saying they were worried about omicron given the limited data, not that many calling for action outside of iSage. Some of the modelling was eye-watering, to be sure, but not all (there were also models that said we would be ok). SKS was wrong at the end of 2021 and (I think) I said so at the time. To me, it looked opportunistic (a stick to beat the government with if things did go bad) and lowered my opinion of him. Johnson et al got the response to the Omicron situation about right, perhaps they could have even done less than they did, but they resisted panic at least.
The episode over Christmas with omicron was unedifying.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
The only data we had was inconclusive. Early data can be wrong. The early data on swine flu was terrifying… but fortunately it turned out to very misleading and swine flu was a comparatively mild pandemic flu. The Chinese said the early data on COVID showed there was no human-to-human transmission!
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
And they bought into the 'transmissable' and refused to acknowledge the 'less severe' and screwed over the hospitality industry and others yet again. The South Africans repeatedly said there wasn't this 'bad news' and that Omicron was significantly less severe. They were ignored. Because they are African I expect. Real racism in action rather than the usual Guardian style 'pot plants are white supremacists' bull
You’re just making things up now. There were multiple voices in South Africa saying various things. Everyone was saying there’s bad news, most were saying there’s uncertain news, some were saying there’s bad news but some good news within the bad news.
No one was saying Omicron wasn’t bad news, because a new, infectious variant was obviously bad news. There were different levels of “how bad”.
There is, shamefully, some tendency among some scientists and others to be dismissive of research coming from developing countries. I don’t feel that’s generally the case with infectious disease scientists, but it can happen. I think the West is more often guilty of ignoring warnings from the developing world. I’ve not looked into these cases in detail, but I think you can see that happening with Ebola, MERS, Zika etc.
I was referring to the 'bad news' about mortality, IFR etc. The South Africans were consistent in that. Obviously everyone was confirming transmisability was way up And, actually, there were voices very early on saying Omicron was our route out of the pandemic to endemic status
Indeed so, which now looks as if that might actually have been the case. I'm rather irritated about the rewriting of history over Christmas. The UK scientists got it wrong. The SA scientists got it right. They told us – repeatedly and openly – at the time that omicron was milder than delta, having compared the impacts of both on the same (their own) population.
Comments
Hence the identify of the richest person in Venezuela. Or Cuba.
Funny (maybe true) story - during Soviet times, the KGB amassed a very considerable slush fund overseas. Invested in stock markets, rental property etc. When the coup against Gorbachev was attempted, they tried to use some of the funds. But the bank accounts were empty. Someone had stolen their stolen money. The story goes that some ex-CIA guys, kicked out over Iran-Contra, decided to improve their 401ks....
You've got: infection to illness, plus illness to hospitalisation, plus hospitalisation to death. Each varies considerably and an average conceals much of the distribution.
Simon Nichols ran a more detailed analysis and got a different figure for mode to median and mean (which is not surprising) and he got a 15 day mode for a 19 day mean.
The seven day average of deaths on death certificates in England peaked for the first wave on the 10th of April (1,180) and the individual day record was the 8th of April (1,286). That would give a (loose) central estimate of incidence peaking around the 24th-26th of March.
And we don't have to take any calculation's word for it. We can look at the increases and decreases of incidence and later death from the ONS survey and death certificates.
Four separate peaks came in with delays of 9 days, 16 days, 23 days, and 13 days between incidence peaking and deaths peaking. An average of 15.25 days, but with a fairly wide variability - which is what we'd expect.
WHO having a meeting about simian death spunk right now.
All I need are a large number of people with loud opinions and no actual definable skills in the area.
Why @Malmesbury, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for £989 per hour plus VAT outside IR35, I'm your huckleberry.
For all his faults, I think it's on balance, a good thing, that we had a PM who was lazy, and unenthusiastic about lockdowns. A PM who was zealous, and who imposed them efficiently, would have been a lot worse.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61519378
Didn't he want to lockdown during Christmas 2021 for example?
I do hear a lot of frightened noises about prices of the weekly shop going up, prices of petrol going up, not being able to afford heating when winter comes around.
By 2024 nobody will be talking about partygate. They will be talking about how much poorer everyone is, and how much more expensive everything is. The optics of a chancellor worth over 700 million at such a time are not good.
There is a "let them eat cake" joke in here somewhere but I am too tired to make it.
looks like some nice work.
For me, the money shot is -
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/20/pms-father-stanley-johnson-secures-french-citizenship
Does that mean the PM could simply at some point in the future become a French citizen because 'an article of the French civil code allows these people to regain French nationality by simple declaration, subject to justifying “manifest cultural, professional, economic or family ties” with France' because Stanley is now a French citizen?
You can just see it happening, can't you? Shortly after the PM is dragged from No 10 he cheerfully, shamelessly, claims a French passport. Happily regaining all the rights he has stripped from me.
The scientists wilfully ignored their colleagues in South Africa, treating evidence from there as though it was inapplicable to the UK. Whitty said: "Whatever news we do have, it's bad" or words to that effect.
But that wasn't true: the only data we did have came from the news in SA, which was good, not bad.
Say no more
I’ve repeatedly said the model we should look to is Japan. Japan has had far fewer deaths from COVID and it never imposed a national lockdown. But it got people to follow public health guidance early and well.
Libertarianism is not the right response to a pandemic. Early, effective intervention is. If you don’t like lockdowns, invest in public health and pandemic preparedness.
For example, I had American citizenship, via family. My children couldn't claim US citizenship, directly.
For what its worth a lot of the iSAGE crowd are obsessed with long covid. I am yet to be convinced that the problem is as big as they claim (basing rates on self reporting is problematic, and long covid is many things to many people). But their argument is that it is better for no-one to get covid, hence vaccinating kids who don't need it to fight the infection should be done.
Now thats quite nuanced, but I don't think Finn is guilty of anything other than weighing different risks in a different way to others.
It was disgusting. And the vitriol against people looking at the hospital and death data in SA and saying 'hang on....' was just ugh
That was the absolute last straw for me. 2 years of bullshit, lies and figure driven fear/control.
No Strictly for you Van Tam, Whitty and Vallance
What does need to be removed is all the bossy signs, which no longer apply but remain in view in various parts of the public realm.
So, it’s not that scientists wilfully ignored South African findings. It was that there was a lot of uncertainty about what could be concluded from the South African data. Certainly, there was very bad news in what was coming out of the country. It appeared as if there was a highly infectious new variant that would sweep around the world… and that was unfortunately true. There was also some data showing it produced less severe illness… and that was fortunately true.
https://twitter.com/ons/status/1527605399641374720
Suffice to say I take my custom elsewhere lol...
The South Africans repeatedly said there wasn't this 'bad news' and that Omicron was significantly less severe. They were ignored. Because they are African I expect. Real racism in action rather than the usual Guardian style 'pot plants are white supremacists' bull
It became clear that some people were ideologically opposed - they wanted the vaccinations to be used overseas.
Despite the fact that production was ramping up, ever higher, world wide, and the number of vaccinations was a fart in a thunderstorm compared to that.
No shagging in the shop!
I did a run ashore in Lisbon on the way back from the Falklands. There was a strip club there (can't remember the name. Pink something...) where the talent would take you out the back and give you the full Elon (no purchase of a horse required) while leaning against a stack of Sagres crates. If one left it too late for the trip to the crates the tiled floor would be so slippy underfoot from the issue of previous punters it was actually hard to stay upright. That's depravity.
The racism was on full display
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/average-age-of-coronavirus-fatalities-is-82-pcwqrzdzz
"The average age of those who have died from coronavirus in England and Wales since the start of the pandemic is 82.4 years old. Using data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), researchers at the University of Oxford found that the median age of a Covid-19 fatality was slightly higher than the median age of those who died of other causes over the same period, which was 81.5."
We shouldn't have locked down at all, it is impossible to lock down too late. If you want to strip away people's liberties then the case to do so needs to be proven beyond doubt. It wasn't and it certainly wasn't before lockdown happened.
This isn't a balance of probabilities issue. When you are talking about removing people's liberties the onus lies solely on those who wish to do so and any doubt should go on the side of liberty.
This is why the "precautionary principle" is vile BS. It is no better than American cops shooting first and feigning remorse later.
@BritainElects
·
11h
Ellel (Lancaster) council by-election result:
GRN: 39.7% (+19.5)
LAB: 30.4% (-1.2)
CON: 27.4% (-14.4)
LDEM: 2.5% (-4.0)
Votes cast: 1,377
Green GAIN from Conservative.
No one was saying Omicron wasn’t bad news, because a new, infectious variant was obviously bad news. There were different levels of “how bad”.
There is, shamefully, some tendency among some scientists and others to be dismissive of research coming from developing countries. I don’t feel that’s generally the case with infectious disease scientists, but it can happen. I think the West is more often guilty of ignoring warnings from the developing world. I’ve not looked into these cases in detail, but I think you can see that happening with Ebola, MERS, Zika etc.
No death ever occurs on the mean average day of death for someone of that age, because it's impossible to do so, but death still happens every single day. Everyone's average age of death at any age would be years in the future because it's impossible to balance the tail, but some will still die today anyway.
There’s actually lots of different ways Cameron could have done it. A referendum wether or not to ask for a better deal, followed up by asking the country if we feel the negotiation deal is actually better or not my Dad always insists is far more democratic, it’s type of democracy we ask for in trade unions changing their deals - but Cameron chose a particular way to help him win using economic scare tactics, but the we can have our cake and eat it feeling won on the day - we are not just freeer but lot richer with our money back argument.
Labour did it different. They said Heaths deal was unacceptable but their renegotiation yielded very little, the vote was accept this renegotiation yes or no, not in or out, so if they lost they could have tried again. My Dad says Heath was a proper Conservative, very strong saying no to a referendum, and would have attacked Cameron for what he was doing.
But then, in my opinion, that was a different world altogether, the Europe thing in 1970s utterly different to what it was in the 20teens. Ironically, UK under the Conservatives and Lady Thatcher governments transformed it a lot to our way of thinking.
Obviously everyone was confirming transmisability was way up
And, actually, there were voices very early on saying Omicron was our route out of the pandemic to endemic status
Some people are absolutely cream crackers aren't they.
If you want to read the science, some more useful papers here include:
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-066768
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-83040-3
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-021-12377-1
This paper then looks at the overall population impact of COVID-19:
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/51/1/63/6375510
Once they’d all enjoyed the company of the ladies this guy I knew claimed he would go around the hookers in turn cleaning his fellow squaddies, erm, deposits from their nether regions with his tongue.
I’ve never forgotten how he sat there, fag in hand with a pint of John Smiths, telling me about this decidedly niche activity as if we were discussing the weather.
Neither features anywhere on Uk or Scot gov mitigation strategies. I stead discredited advice around droplet transmission (not aerosol) and surface hygiene.
15 Labour, 11 Green, 10 Conservative, 10 Morecambe Bay Independents, 5 Independent Group, 4 Liberal Democrats, 4 Eco-Socialists, 1 vacancy
A motley crew.
Locking down 67 million for five months is 28 million years of life and liberty lost to lockdown and we had more than five months of lockdown across two years of restrictions.
So lockdown in the UK alone caused more loss of life to be lived than the pandemic did across the 31 nations studied.
Lockdown was an unmitigated failure.
Following the science? My arse.
The difference between the black line (the mean, and what people mean when they say "average") and the fattest part of the distribution (the peak number seen) is very well illustrated.
I have no problem with those, such as Whitty, who were concerned that the infectivity increase was a major problem that was potentially going to overwhelm the social distancing and other restrictions that we had in place. Even China, who seem to think nothing of locking people into their flats, have not been able to stop the spread of Omicron. But the failure to accept the evidence that this significant increase in cases was not leading to a significant increase in either hospitalisations or deaths was very odd and almost certainly was behind Boris's decision to remove our restrictions, something he was completely vindicated on.
If anything is racist, it is the disease itself...
The median age of death from $newpandemic is > 80 (well over 80, probably)
The median age of death not from $newpandemic is < 80 (well under 80, probably)
But those people killed by $newpandemic have died earlier than they otherwise would, possibly losing years of life.
I don't see what point you think you're making. If something preferentially kills old people (e.g. Covid) then it is very likely that any average age of death from the something will be higher than an average age of death not from the something.
2 - Life in lockdown wasn't equivalent to death.
What’s that smell?
The Greens have arrived 😆
https://www.mercedes-benz-trucks.com/en_GB/models/unimog-off-road.html
Life expectancy at birth is complex, and is not equivalent to the modal age of death, the median age of death, or the mean age of death at any given time, but an extrapolation of the median age of death for a given cohort assuming things remain unchanged.
Life expectancy at any given age is invariably longer than that at birth, because those who have died are no longer put into the calculation. Due to being dead.
The average life expected for those who died was another ten years. This was an average, and some would have lived decades more, others would have died within a couple of years.
If you genuinely want to understand it, have a read of a thread by a demographer here: https://twitter.com/ikashnitsky/status/1367856010476613632
Average Life Expectancy at birth might be 81 years, but Average Life Expectency at age 81 is not zero, but more like 10 years.
2 - You're right. Life lost to lockdown is worse than death.
Even if we ignore the judgement that life lost to lockdown is worse than life lost to death, and even if we accept the absurd 10 years lost hypothesis, the only justification for a year of lockdown for 67 million people would be if it averted 6.7 million excess deaths. Otherwise lockdown costs more life than death does.
The risk register for the CCA 2004 needs, I imagine, to include these:
War and invasion
Nuclear attack
Mass famine
Pandemic causing mass extinctions across species including ours
Runaway warming/climate change and allied dangers
New ice age
A Permian style event - earthbound natural disaster
A dinosaur extinction style event - a solar system disaster
Digital and electronic wipeout - could be a solar disaster, other sources are available
Extra terrestrials - a beyond solar system event
A passing black hole style event - a multi galactic event
Instantaneous change in the laws of nature - a universe event
And of course unknown unknowns.
I do hope the government has a plan for these.
Congratulation to Stanley Johnson on securing his French passport.
By "Green" I assume you mean an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion.
Otherwise, spot on.
For males in the UK:
Life expectancy at 60 is 84
At 65 is 85
At 70 is 86
At 75 is 87
At 80 is 89
At 85 is 91
At 90 is 94
At 95 is 98
But I also think that the group should have the right to exist, communicate etc and the principle behind their existence is completely sound.
The level of hindsight, indeed rewriting history, on here today far exceeds anything SKS managed.
Have we apologised to them yet?