"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
Which is an average and if you extrapolate from that as you're mistakenly doing then no 80 year olds will die today, but that isn't true.
However an 80 year old cancer-ridden and dementia-afflicted individual in a care home, versus a spritely 80 year old living in their own home, do not have the same life expectancy. And COVID sought the former far more than the latter.
Median life expectancy upon entering a care home is months, not decades.
Hence the actuarial and scientific papers adjusted for these factors.
Indeed and across 31 nations even if we take their word for it, the pandemic only cost 28 million years of living freely.
Lockdown and restrictions in the UK alone cost about 100 million years of living freely lost. So lockdown was quantitatively worse for the UK alone than the pandemic was across the 31 nations studied.
Nonsense. Lockdowns were not total, and not all freedoms were lost. I worked face to face throughout, and while there were inconveniences to social life, it was hardly a life without pleasure. Indeed like many others, I rediscovered the pleasures of garden, family, my local community, cooking, reading etc.
Lockdown was 60 million different experiences though. I'm married with no kids, but with some pets, including a dog who loves a walk. I live on the edge of a forest with fields and Salisbury plain all around. I have a decent house and a garden.
Very much different to living in a cramped flat with large family in a city. Or living on your own in a flat.
And don't forget in a sense you were lucky to be working face to face - many would have loved to be able to do that.
I was living in my own in a small flat during lockdown. I had a near complete nervous breakdown in the end, prescribed diazepam amongst other things, which did very little, ended up punching holes in the wall and breaking all my furniture in desperation. Signed off sick from work, eventually left my job to work part time to recover, still suffer from anxiety and on medication now.
As you say, lockdown was 60 million different experiences. Mine was extremely bad, and I have no doubt that lockdown damaged my health far more than catching covid at my age and with my BMI/level of physical fitness ever would.
Really sorry to hear this. Just awful.
Thank you.
I've spoken about it on here a couple of times in the past, and essentially now it's been a year and a half since it all happened I am a lot better. But I still have days where my anxiety is too much to do fairly ordinary stuff, like drive or go to the shops.
From a less selfish perspective, the amount of time I spent off work and now with working part time only means I will be contributing a lot less to the exchequer this year.
I know other people who had a similar experience (also living alone in one bedroom flats - don't know if that is significant) so I do wonder if there is a mental health epidemic going unchecked out there.
A friend who is living in a small one bedroom flat, on his own, had a bit of a crisis.
Signed off sick - he got to the doctors early enough, thank {insert deity here}
I do wonder about the human interaction vs remote working. We know, from some quite horrible history with solitary confinement, that humans without regular interaction with others do not do well.
Does remote working replace human interaction? Or is it worthless? Or in between?
One comment I've heard from people who are remote working 100% - that small comments and imagined attitudes in others seem to increase in size/importance. They end up brooding over a managers joke at the online stand up all day - he is really saying they are shit, etc?
Lockdown will have affected each individually - inevitably many of the most deprived had the poorest housing:
Main findings One in five households live in flats, most commonly in blocks of three storeys or less. A relatively small number of households live in high rise flats. - In 2017-18, most households lived in houses (80% or 18.4 million). Households living in flats (20% or 4.7 million) most commonly lived in blocks of three storeys or less (14% or 3.3 million). The proportion of all households living in flats in blocks of four to five, six to nine or 10 or more storeys was comparatively small: 4% (908,000), 1% (250,000) and 1% (193,000) respectively.
Certain groups are more likely to live in high rise flats than others, e.g. renters more so than owners, younger people more so than older people, black, Asian and minority ethnic households more so than white households, and those who live in the most deprived areas. - 1% of owner occupiers lived in a high rise flat, compared with 3% of private renters and 4% of social renters.
-5%ofthoseaged16to24and4%ofthoseaged25to34livedinahighriseflat compared with 1% each of those aged 65 to 74 and 75+.
In general, households with a black, Asian or minority ethnic household reference person (HRP1) were more likely to live in a high rise flat, e.g. 3% of households with an Asian HRP and 7% with a black HRP lived in a high rise flat compared with 1% of households with a white HRP.
Map's wrong anyway. Frisia and Batavia didn't look like that when old Julius was around. Or even Hadrian.
I was wondering, was Hadrian actually called Adrian, but was retrospectively changed by adding an aitch by people who pronounce "aitch" "haitch"?
I really don't know. His original Sunday name, however, began Publius Aelius Hadrianus so there is a H difference there, and the Romans definitely spelt it Hadrianus as a quick peek in RIB shows
"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
Which is an average and if you extrapolate from that as you're mistakenly doing then no 80 year olds will die today, but that isn't true.
However an 80 year old cancer-ridden and dementia-afflicted individual in a care home, versus a spritely 80 year old living in their own home, do not have the same life expectancy. And COVID sought the former far more than the latter.
Median life expectancy upon entering a care home is months, not decades.
Hence the actuarial and scientific papers adjusted for these factors.
Indeed and across 31 nations even if we take their word for it, the pandemic only cost 28 million years of living freely.
Lockdown and restrictions in the UK alone cost about 100 million years of living freely lost. So lockdown was quantitatively worse for the UK alone than the pandemic was across the 31 nations studied.
Nonsense. Lockdowns were not total, and not all freedoms were lost. I worked face to face throughout, and while there were inconveniences to social life, it was hardly a life without pleasure. Indeed like many others, I rediscovered the pleasures of garden, family, my local community, cooking, reading etc.
Lockdown was 60 million different experiences though. I'm married with no kids, but with some pets, including a dog who loves a walk. I live on the edge of a forest with fields and Salisbury plain all around. I have a decent house and a garden.
Very much different to living in a cramped flat with large family in a city. Or living on your own in a flat.
And don't forget in a sense you were lucky to be working face to face - many would have loved to be able to do that.
I was living in my own in a small flat during lockdown. I had a near complete nervous breakdown in the end, prescribed diazepam amongst other things, which did very little, ended up punching holes in the wall and breaking all my furniture in desperation. Signed off sick from work, eventually left my job to work part time to recover, still suffer from anxiety and on medication now.
As you say, lockdown was 60 million different experiences. Mine was extremely bad, and I have no doubt that lockdown damaged my health far more than catching covid at my age and with my BMI/level of physical fitness ever would.
Really sorry to hear this. Just awful.
Thank you.
I've spoken about it on here a couple of times in the past, and essentially now it's been a year and a half since it all happened I am a lot better. But I still have days where my anxiety is too much to do fairly ordinary stuff, like drive or go to the shops.
From a less selfish perspective, the amount of time I spent off work and now with working part time only means I will be contributing a lot less to the exchequer this year.
I know other people who had a similar experience (also living alone in one bedroom flats - don't know if that is significant) so I do wonder if there is a mental health epidemic going unchecked out there.
My sympathies for what you've been through and I hope it improves for you.
I was contacted by the wife of a friend of mine from my university days during lockdown who let me know he'd died suddenly. Fit and healthy 30-something, we'd last spoken online a few weeks earlier about his outside hopes West Ham would make the Champions League spots. I expressed my condolences to her but didn't pry as to how he'd died, but I have my suspicions that it was possibly due to the mental health stress of lockdown. Utterly tragic if so.
Pretty worrying that as many people as 26% of our population are so completely devoid of judgement that they could describe Boris Johnson as "a capable leader" : WTF?
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
What percentage of parents voluntarily kept their children at home, do you think?
At the school Thing 1 and Thing 2 were at, attendance fell from 95% to 50% in that week before lockdown.
"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
Which is an average and if you extrapolate from that as you're mistakenly doing then no 80 year olds will die today, but that isn't true.
However an 80 year old cancer-ridden and dementia-afflicted individual in a care home, versus a spritely 80 year old living in their own home, do not have the same life expectancy. And COVID sought the former far more than the latter.
Median life expectancy upon entering a care home is months, not decades.
Hence the actuarial and scientific papers adjusted for these factors.
Indeed and across 31 nations even if we take their word for it, the pandemic only cost 28 million years of living freely.
Lockdown and restrictions in the UK alone cost about 100 million years of living freely lost. So lockdown was quantitatively worse for the UK alone than the pandemic was across the 31 nations studied.
Nonsense. Lockdowns were not total, and not all freedoms were lost. I worked face to face throughout, and while there were inconveniences to social life, it was hardly a life without pleasure. Indeed like many others, I rediscovered the pleasures of garden, family, my local community, cooking, reading etc.
You had a garden.
This was also a (non-rewritten) recurrent theme on PB. I don't know what all the fuss is about with these lockdowns I simply get up from my study and go for a walk around the paddocks perhaps through the orchard and come back refreshed.
Old well-off white blokes living in large houses with land can't see what the problem is.
Largely old well-off white blokes living in large houses with land making the decisions about lockdown, too.
The 'white' and 'bloke' are fairly irrelevant, though, I'd have thought - key things for good lockdown experience would be wealth, so not so concerned about job security, and having a house with space and ideally outside space. And family around, but perhaps not children of an age that would require intensive home-schooling!
Yep "white" and "bloke" you think irrelevant but, certainly when it comes to PB and also as you say the lawmakers, nevertheless a fact.
Relevant however when you see the disparity in outcomes for Covid/vaccinations/etc between different ethnic groups.
I remember speaking to an MP mate of mine who, slightly shocked, noted that amongst many other things, Covid was to a large extent a BAME crisis.
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
Duly corrected and accepted - but then you have to accept that is a balance, as people cannot legitimately decide totally for themselves, for obvious reasons (ignorance, selfishness, etc.) So free market libertarianism in the sense in wwhich you earlier applied the term is out, unless you accept those problems. And on that point we come to the same general issuye as most of the thread and I will leave it!
@Cyclefree writes eloquently and passionately. The only difference between this piece and one written by a professional journalist is structure. Most pieces of this type use the inverted pyramid format, start with an attention grabbing headline, first part outlines the headline in slightly greater depth, second part outlines it in even more depth, and so on. Headline: Mis-cake-n Identity - the real culprit in party-gate is our rotten Covid laws First line: Instead of condeming Boris for his regulation breaking, we should condemining his Government for the rotten Covid regulations that they introduced. Etc.
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
Dunno, but maybe a bit of thinking this is a difficult time for Labour with the uncertainties (perceived, anyway) over SKS so they might well not win, plus they might as well get some brownie points with the LDs for next time. It may be a calculation about likely shifts in voting. The Labour vote might be relatively solid but restricted, and local Tories much more likely to shift to LD than Labour. And you need a lot of Tories to shift for the Tories to lose, which means if anyone wins it's LD. So might as well keep out of 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.
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.
Considering one of the major failures of the first wave was the failure to stop international travel and spread, it was an enirely reasonable policy to restrict (actually just quarantine) international travel until more certain data emerges.
Just because someone gets away with something doesn't make it the right decision. If I drive home from the pub after 10 pints and arrive intact without injuring anything a long the way, it doesn't mean that I was right to do so.
Daft analogy. Whitty said the only news we have is bad.
Do you accept that that was a falsehood, and that we knew it was a falsehood at the time?
No. See post above.
I have to say my perception was that there were indications from SA that Omicron was going to be generally milder, but that the authorities in the UK did not want to (a) give them credence without more information (b) allow a narrative to develop about it being milder. This goes back to the modelling question. I think it was done for the right reasons, but it was to an extent a misrepresentation of the information emerging from SA.
Yep, I think that's pretty fair. People involved in this that I spoke to at the time were privately optimistic, but very clear that - given we were going to have a lot of cases in a short time and if it did turn out bad then it would be very bad due to the number of cases - that it was important to say that we didn't know it was milder. We didn't. We hoped. The views on the ground were that it was milder. They were right, but they could have been wrong. You only need to look at early news from other diseases (and indeed some of the early ward studies on Covid) to see that observations from small, non-representative samples can be misleading.
I think you'll find the government scientist quotes about mildness were of 'not knowing that' or 'no evidence' not saying that it was not less mild. The distinction may well have been lost on some of the public.
But there was evidence that it was milder – and that evidence had been provided to them at the time.
Not evidence - anecdote. Evidence in this case would me a proper study on patients and outcomes.
That there was no time for this to have been done is true but also irrelevant. If pressed at the inquiry Whitty will say exactly this.
Comparing like for like outcomes on one strain versus another among the same national cohort is surely a form of evidence. It might not be a medical grade peer-reviewed study (as you say, no time...) but it is nevertheless empirical evidence that is worthy of consideration.
I don't disagree with you really, more just pointing out what Whitty would say (and why he did say what he did).
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
People who are that worried can stay at home. There isn't ever going to be zero risk of disease out in the real world.
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
People who are that worried can stay at home. There isn't ever going to be zero risk of disease out in the real world.
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.
Considering one of the major failures of the first wave was the failure to stop international travel and spread, it was an enirely reasonable policy to restrict (actually just quarantine) international travel until more certain data emerges.
Just because someone gets away with something doesn't make it the right decision. If I drive home from the pub after 10 pints and arrive intact without injuring anything a long the way, it doesn't mean that I was right to do so.
Daft analogy. Whitty said the only news we have is bad.
Do you accept that that was a falsehood, and that we knew it was a falsehood at the time?
No. See post above.
I have to say my perception was that there were indications from SA that Omicron was going to be generally milder, but that the authorities in the UK did not want to (a) give them credence without more information (b) allow a narrative to develop about it being milder. This goes back to the modelling question. I think it was done for the right reasons, but it was to an extent a misrepresentation of the information emerging from SA.
Yep, I think that's pretty fair. People involved in this that I spoke to at the time were privately optimistic, but very clear that - given we were going to have a lot of cases in a short time and if it did turn out bad then it would be very bad due to the number of cases - that it was important to say that we didn't know it was milder. We didn't. We hoped. The views on the ground were that it was milder. They were right, but they could have been wrong. You only need to look at early news from other diseases (and indeed some of the early ward studies on Covid) to see that observations from small, non-representative samples can be misleading.
I think you'll find the government scientist quotes about mildness were of 'not knowing that' or 'no evidence' not saying that it was not less mild. The distinction may well have been lost on some of the public.
But there was evidence that it was milder – and that evidence had been provided to them at the time.
Not evidence - anecdote. Evidence in this case would me a proper study on patients and outcomes.
That there was no time for this to have been done is true but also irrelevant. If pressed at the inquiry Whitty will say exactly this.
Comparing like for like outcomes on one strain versus another among the same national cohort is surely a form of evidence. It might not be a medical grade peer-reviewed study (as you say, no time...) but it is nevertheless empirical evidence that is worthy of consideration.
It is and absolutely fine for a peer-reviewed study.
But like for like is the kicker. Were they? How many of those treated for omicron had already had Covid and had some protection? Or were vaccinated and had some protection. How did that compare to those treated earlier for Delta? Were the demographics (age, ethnic group, genreal health, socioeconomic status) similar in the groups compared. So were they really like for like? Was the differential between some form of protection (previous infection/vaccination and the mix between the two because maybe previous Delta infection is more/less protective than vaccination) between infected in the Delta and Omicron waves in South Africa similar to that in the UK, enabling the SA experience on Omicron versus Delta to be confidently translated to UK?
It would (from what I've seen and remember seeing) have been irresponsible to have advised the government that Omicron was nothing to worry about, given the data available at the time. It would, in fact, have been a lie. The correct advice was "we don't yet know" (possibly adding, we're tentatively hopeful, which may well have been what was said). It wouldn't have been irresponsible for the government to lock down, do what it did or do nothing - in the absence of hard evidence they had to make a judgement call. For purely Covid precaution, you'd lock down for a few weeks until the evidence had emerged. But that causes all kinds of other harms, so doing nothing/just a little was a pretty sensible approach while waiting for the evidence, imho.
iSage caused serious issues for my place as staff would be quoting their advice/comments as SAGE advise and then wouldn't back down.
But I also think that the group should have the right to exist, communicate etc and the principle behind their existence is completely sound.
Groups should have a right to exist.
That doesn’t extend to a right to be on the TV, using a name deliberately designed to be misleading and cause confusion with the group of scientists actually advising the government.
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
People need to adjust their risk based upon other people's behaviour yes but unless exceptionally egregious that doesn't justify taking away other people's freedom.
We can look at this qualitatively or quantitatively but either way lockdown caused more harm than the pandemic.
Qualitatively imprisoning the old and vulnerable to die locked away from their loved ones who legally couldn't visit is worse than them dying surrounded by loved ones.
Qualitatively disrupting the education of the young is far worse than some of the old having less time to spend imprisoned in their own home without access to their loved ones.
Quantitatively the lockdown multiplied by the amount of people it affected cost an order of magnitude more days of life to be lived freely than the death toll even multiplied by ten years per person which I am skeptical about.
Quantitatively a year of lockdown multiplied by 67 million people is equivalent to 6.7 million excess deaths, based on ten years per death. We had more than a year of lockdown, and were never going to have 6.7 million excess deaths.
iSage caused serious issues for my place as staff would be quoting their advice/comments as SAGE advise and then wouldn't back down.
But I also think that the group should have the right to exist, communicate etc and the principle behind their existence is completely sound.
Groups should have a right to exist.
That doesn’t extend to a right to be on the TV, using a name deliberately designed to be misleading and cause confusion with the group of scientists actually advising the government.
That would mean most so-called think tanks should be banned.
Every journo is going to be asking: "Mr Foord, have you ever watched porn?"
He's certainly got a good excuse for being filmed by the DM buying Tractor Monthly in WH Smith.
It is odd that in the world of politics, the only people who seem worthy of praise are the "hardworking...etc, etc." "hardworking parents/families/doctorsannurses".
Why not let us all stand up for the lazy and feckless? Who speaks for them? Oh, sorry I forgot about Boris!
"Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance? We can't have all Brandeises, Frankfurters and Cardozos." - US Sen. Roman Hruska (R-Nebraska) in 1970 on the nomination of nomination of G Harold Carswell to SCOTUS; the nomination failed NOT being helped by Sen. Hruska's observation.
iSage caused serious issues for my place as staff would be quoting their advice/comments as SAGE advise and then wouldn't back down.
But I also think that the group should have the right to exist, communicate etc and the principle behind their existence is completely sound.
Groups should have a right to exist.
That doesn’t extend to a right to be on the TV, using a name deliberately designed to be misleading and cause confusion with the group of scientists actually advising the government.
That would mean most so-called think tanks should be banned.
The sensible thing would have been to have not called the government advisory group "Sage". It is a name that is used by probably thousands of organisations and companies.
I think it should have been called Government Executive of Science Specialities, or GESS for short. Their reports could have been called GESS work.
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
People need to adjust their risk based upon other people's behaviour yes but unless exceptionally egregious that doesn't justify taking away other people's freedom.
We can look at this qualitatively or quantitatively but either way lockdown caused more harm than the pandemic.
Qualitatively imprisoning the old and vulnerable to die locked away from their loved ones who legally couldn't visit is worse than them dying surrounded by loved ones.
Qualitatively disrupting the education of the young is far worse than some of the old having less time to spend imprisoned in their own home without access to their loved ones.
Quantitatively the lockdown multiplied by the amount of people it affected cost an order of magnitude more days of life to be lived freely than the death toll even multiplied by ten years per person which I am skeptical about.
Quantitatively a year of lockdown multiplied by 67 million people is equivalent to 6.7 million excess deaths, based on ten years per death. We had more than a year of lockdown, and were never going to have 6.7 million excess deaths.
How you do go on, Barty
The dying peacefully surrounded by loved ones thing has never ever happened to anyone I have known about, and I am 60 and have lost all gparents one parent and a parent in law. The average is more like this
a US physician who says that "this is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed."
So less of the Ladybird Book of Loveliness spin in your qualitative judgments, pls. Tks.
iSage caused serious issues for my place as staff would be quoting their advice/comments as SAGE advise and then wouldn't back down.
But I also think that the group should have the right to exist, communicate etc and the principle behind their existence is completely sound.
Groups should have a right to exist.
That doesn’t extend to a right to be on the TV, using a name deliberately designed to be misleading and cause confusion with the group of scientists actually advising the government.
You mean a deliberately misleading & confusinging as in "Conservative and Unionist Party"?
Seeing as how curernt "Leader" has zero use for Conservatism (big or small c) or the Union, except as handholds on his greasy pole.
Lockdown will have affected each individually - inevitably many of the most deprived had the poorest housing:
Main findings One in five households live in flats, most commonly in blocks of three storeys or less. A relatively small number of households live in high rise flats. - In 2017-18, most households lived in houses (80% or 18.4 million). Households living in flats (20% or 4.7 million) most commonly lived in blocks of three storeys or less (14% or 3.3 million). The proportion of all households living in flats in blocks of four to five, six to nine or 10 or more storeys was comparatively small: 4% (908,000), 1% (250,000) and 1% (193,000) respectively.
Certain groups are more likely to live in high rise flats than others, e.g. renters more so than owners, younger people more so than older people, black, Asian and minority ethnic households more so than white households, and those who live in the most deprived areas. - 1% of owner occupiers lived in a high rise flat, compared with 3% of private renters and 4% of social renters.
-5%ofthoseaged16to24and4%ofthoseaged25to34livedinahighriseflat compared with 1% each of those aged 65 to 74 and 75+.
In general, households with a black, Asian or minority ethnic household reference person (HRP1) were more likely to live in a high rise flat, e.g. 3% of households with an Asian HRP and 7% with a black HRP lived in a high rise flat compared with 1% of households with a white HRP.
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
People need to adjust their risk based upon other people's behaviour yes but unless exceptionally egregious that doesn't justify taking away other people's freedom.
We can look at this qualitatively or quantitatively but either way lockdown caused more harm than the pandemic.
Qualitatively imprisoning the old and vulnerable to die locked away from their loved ones who legally couldn't visit is worse than them dying surrounded by loved ones.
Qualitatively disrupting the education of the young is far worse than some of the old having less time to spend imprisoned in their own home without access to their loved ones.
Quantitatively the lockdown multiplied by the amount of people it affected cost an order of magnitude more days of life to be lived freely than the death toll even multiplied by ten years per person which I am skeptical about.
Quantitatively a year of lockdown multiplied by 67 million people is equivalent to 6.7 million excess deaths, based on ten years per death. We had more than a year of lockdown, and were never going to have 6.7 million excess deaths.
How you do go on, Barty
The dying peacefully surrounded by loved ones thing has never ever happened to anyone I have known about, and I am 60 and have lost all gparents one parent and a parent in law. The average is more like this
a US physician who says that "this is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed."
So less of the Ladybird Book of Loveliness spin in your qualitative judgments, pls. Tks.
Are you sure that he wasn't describing how PB posters live?
"Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented"
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
People need to adjust their risk based upon other people's behaviour yes but unless exceptionally egregious that doesn't justify taking away other people's freedom.
We can look at this qualitatively or quantitatively but either way lockdown caused more harm than the pandemic.
Qualitatively imprisoning the old and vulnerable to die locked away from their loved ones who legally couldn't visit is worse than them dying surrounded by loved ones.
Qualitatively disrupting the education of the young is far worse than some of the old having less time to spend imprisoned in their own home without access to their loved ones.
Quantitatively the lockdown multiplied by the amount of people it affected cost an order of magnitude more days of life to be lived freely than the death toll even multiplied by ten years per person which I am skeptical about.
Quantitatively a year of lockdown multiplied by 67 million people is equivalent to 6.7 million excess deaths, based on ten years per death. We had more than a year of lockdown, and were never going to have 6.7 million excess deaths.
How you do go on, Barty
The dying peacefully surrounded by loved ones thing has never ever happened to anyone I have known about, and I am 60 and have lost all gparents one parent and a parent in law. The average is more like this
a US physician who says that "this is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed."
So less of the Ladybird Book of Loveliness spin in your qualitative judgments, pls. Tks.
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
People need to adjust their risk based upon other people's behaviour yes but unless exceptionally egregious that doesn't justify taking away other people's freedom.
We can look at this qualitatively or quantitatively but either way lockdown caused more harm than the pandemic.
Qualitatively imprisoning the old and vulnerable to die locked away from their loved ones who legally couldn't visit is worse than them dying surrounded by loved ones.
Qualitatively disrupting the education of the young is far worse than some of the old having less time to spend imprisoned in their own home without access to their loved ones.
Quantitatively the lockdown multiplied by the amount of people it affected cost an order of magnitude more days of life to be lived freely than the death toll even multiplied by ten years per person which I am skeptical about.
Quantitatively a year of lockdown multiplied by 67 million people is equivalent to 6.7 million excess deaths, based on ten years per death. We had more than a year of lockdown, and were never going to have 6.7 million excess deaths.
How you do go on, Barty
The dying peacefully surrounded by loved ones thing has never ever happened to anyone I have known about, and I am 60 and have lost all gparents one parent and a parent in law. The average is more like this
a US physician who says that "this is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed."
So less of the Ladybird Book of Loveliness spin in your qualitative judgments, pls. Tks.
Are you sure that he wasn't describing how PB posters live?
"Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented"
Explains why some of us didn't notice ill effects of lockdown....
Clad in black and representing a Nationalist party speaking of fascism.
Interesting
Hmm yes perhaps the wardrobe wasn't the best choice. Good speech though, worth a watch, whether it makes you foam with rage or nod sagely in agreement.
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.
They deflated all the tyres on Ainger Road, Primrose Hill, last night!
Clad in black and representing a Nationalist party speaking of fascism.
Interesting
Hmm yes perhaps the wardrobe wasn't the best choice. Good speech though, worth a watch, whether it makes you foam with rage or nod sagely in agreement.
Clad in black and representing a Nationalist party speaking of fascism.
Interesting
Hmm yes perhaps the wardrobe wasn't the best choice. Good speech though, worth a watch, whether it makes you foam with rage or nod sagely in agreement.
Dunno, but maybe a bit of thinking this is a difficult time for Labour with the uncertainties (perceived, anyway) over SKS so they might well not win, plus they might as well get some brownie points with the LDs for next time. It may be a calculation about likely shifts in voting. The Labour vote might be relatively solid but restricted, and local Tories much more likely to shift to LD than Labour. And you need a lot of Tories to shift for the Tories to lose, which means if anyone wins it's LD. So might as well keep out of it?
Perhaps it has something to do with the number of councillors for each party on the two district councils that are in play? And therefore with the relative local organisations' strength and engagement with the community?
She can’t even spell “Mary” correctly so why should we take her seriously?
Heh, but different pronunciation.
We did consider it for our second daughter (though 'Màiri', IIRC) but figured that down here it would just be pronounced 'Mary' by everyone and she'd always be having to spell it for people. Didn't go with 'Mary' either as we didn't particularly like that (different names, to us).
I have a lot of sympathy with the fact that governments - at the start - didn't know very much. And the fact that massive hospitals were being built in Wuhan and people were being welded inside their homes will have really weighed on politicians minds. (The bodies piling up in Milan and New York will have played a role too.)
But we did learn some things pretty quickly, that should have allowed a return to (somewhat) normal life.
The most obvious of which was that Covid didn't spread very easily outside. Sunlight and ventilation rapidly reduced concentrations to levels where infection was extremely unlikely.
Now, I get that stadiums might still have a concentration of people where it would have been a problem, but really - from very early on - we should have been allowing (even encouraging) people to get together and spend time outside.
Here in LA (and yes, I know the weather is better here) there were maybe six weeks through the pandemic when you couldn't go and sit outside at a restaurant or coffee shop with your friends. That made it massively less isolating, and probably had bugger all effect on spread.
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.
I don’t know this “brothel historian” to whom you refer, but I can confirm that, the great historical brothels of France, les maisons tolerees, this was a highly popular kink. These guys were known as “juicers”, and they would hide in the wardrobe until the regular punter was done then rush in and etc etc
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.
They deflated all the tyres on Ainger Road, Primrose Hill, last night!
Not only will it fail to persuade a single person who doesn't already despise the Tories, it will put off swing voters from listening to whatever else the "progressive alliance" has to say.
Dunno, but maybe a bit of thinking this is a difficult time for Labour with the uncertainties (perceived, anyway) over SKS so they might well not win, plus they might as well get some brownie points with the LDs for next time. It may be a calculation about likely shifts in voting. The Labour vote might be relatively solid but restricted, and local Tories much more likely to shift to LD than Labour. And you need a lot of Tories to shift for the Tories to lose, which means if anyone wins it's LD. So might as well keep out of it?
Perhaps it has something to do with the number of councillors for each party on the two district councils that are in play? And therefore with the relative local organisations' strength and engagement with the community?
There's rightly been a correction re Lab having a dog, only it's not really getting into the fight. But the logic will be the same.
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.
I don’t know this “brothel historian” to whom you refer, but I can confirm that, the great historical brothels of France, les maisons tolerees, this was a highly popular kink. These guys were known as “juicers”, and they would hide in the wardrobe until the regular punter was done then rush in and etc etc
Did you engage in this as part of research for a new novel?
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.
I don’t know this “brothel historian” to whom you refer, but I can confirm that, the great historical brothels of France, les maisons tolerees, this was a highly popular kink. These guys were known as “juicers”, and they would hide in the wardrobe until the regular punter was done then rush in and etc etc
I’m going to be a bit more circumspect about which juice bars I buy from thanks to your post.
Clad in black and representing a Nationalist party speaking of fascism.
Interesting
Hmm yes perhaps the wardrobe wasn't the best choice. Good speech though, worth a watch, whether it makes you foam with rage or nod sagely in agreement.
This would be the Mhairi Black who is utterly indifferent to the concerns of women in Scotland worried that their rights will be diminished or extinguished by the GRA reforms she supports, yes? That Mhairi Black - now making a speech about the abolition of rights.
Hmm - well, yes, she has a point but she might do well to engage - and get her party to engage - with the very real concerns expressed by women in Scotland rather than simply ignore and dismiss them, as she is accusing the British government of doing.
Clad in black and representing a Nationalist party speaking of fascism.
Interesting
Hmm yes perhaps the wardrobe wasn't the best choice. Good speech though, worth a watch, whether it makes you foam with rage or nod sagely in agreement.
It doesn't make me foam with rage, it just makes me disappointed that Mhairi has become the latest stooge so desperate to get one over on the Tories that they had to devalue the word "fascism".
Vladimir Putin + friends are what I would describe as modern day fascists, and it's embarrassing that Mhairi would apply the same term to a democratically elected party purely because it's politically to the right of her.
I say all this as someone who doesn't even vote Conservative, but I'm not willing to stoop to that level to score points.
Clad in black and representing a Nationalist party speaking of fascism.
Interesting
Bit unfair. Any colour of shirt could be used and you'd be referring to it as a sign of fascism. There was a shirt for every variety, blue I think in Ireland (slightly surprisingly but maybe there was a special offer or something).
I am pissing myself at the idea of the bossy Greens being at the libertarian end of the continuum. I think there may have been a little bit of unconscious bias in whoever wrote that somewhat arguable analysis.
"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
Which is an average and if you extrapolate from that as you're mistakenly doing then no 80 year olds will die today, but that isn't true.
However an 80 year old cancer-ridden and dementia-afflicted individual in a care home, versus a spritely 80 year old living in their own home, do not have the same life expectancy. And COVID sought the former far more than the latter.
Median life expectancy upon entering a care home is months, not decades.
Hence the actuarial and scientific papers adjusted for these factors.
Indeed and across 31 nations even if we take their word for it, the pandemic only cost 28 million years of living freely.
Lockdown and restrictions in the UK alone cost about 100 million years of living freely lost. So lockdown was quantitatively worse for the UK alone than the pandemic was across the 31 nations studied.
Nonsense. Lockdowns were not total, and not all freedoms were lost. I worked face to face throughout, and while there were inconveniences to social life, it was hardly a life without pleasure. Indeed like many others, I rediscovered the pleasures of garden, family, my local community, cooking, reading etc.
Lockdown was 60 million different experiences though. I'm married with no kids, but with some pets, including a dog who loves a walk. I live on the edge of a forest with fields and Salisbury plain all around. I have a decent house and a garden.
Very much different to living in a cramped flat with large family in a city. Or living on your own in a flat.
And don't forget in a sense you were lucky to be working face to face - many would have loved to be able to do that.
Those of us who live and work at home, alone, with no garden - and rely on an open society for our interactions and human life - were basically condemned to a particularly nasty, tormenting form of prison
I have a lot of sympathy with the fact that governments - at the start - didn't know very much. And the fact that massive hospitals were being built in Wuhan and people were being welded inside their homes will have really weighed on politicians minds. (The bodies piling up in Milan and New York will have played a role too.)
But we did learn some things pretty quickly, that should have allowed a return to (somewhat) normal life.
The most obvious of which was that Covid didn't spread very easily outside. Sunlight and ventilation rapidly reduced concentrations to levels where infection was extremely unlikely.
Now, I get that stadiums might still have a concentration of people where it would have been a problem, but really - from very early on - we should have been allowing (even encouraging) people to get together and spend time outside.
Here in LA (and yes, I know the weather is better here) there were maybe six weeks through the pandemic when you couldn't go and sit outside at a restaurant or coffee shop with your friends. That made it massively less isolating, and probably had bugger all effect on spread.
Indeed. Cricket was only allowed in late summer and we were forced to endure ridiculous things such as sanitizing hands every 6 overs and the ball. I speculated that gathering to sanitize hands was probably more dangerous for an aerosol transmission than not coming together.
It was all madness. No evidence behind interventions, just shit dreamed up by people out of their depth wit science.
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
Why don't we talk about the fact that a lot of children have had their education ruined by the lockdowns.
What we don't know is whether that educational disturbance would have been worse with an uncontrolled pandemic.
There is plenty of scope to extensively review what happened in the pandemic to see what worked and what was ineffective, for future reference. Worth noting that the next pandemic may be rather different, so different measures needed.
We would never have had an uncontrolled pandemic. A significant number of the public were taking cautious, voluntary measures before the lockdowns came in.
Well, exactly. Even before schools closed, a lot of parents were keeping children at home, similarly pubs and restaraunts were emptying.
That's reasonable if it's their choice. Not if it isn't.
Freedom means letting people decide.
That sort of freedom also means letting other people do the disease controlling for you. Freeloading, in other words.
No it doesn't, it means determining your own risk levels and operating accordingly.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Eat your heart out, Edward Jenner ...
Disease still exists post Jenner.
We can all take steps to help, but we can't elimated risk. Risk is a part of living.
You said we shouldn't even try to control disease.
You need to improve your reading comprehension as I didn't use the word try. I said it can't "all" be controlled.
Disease is part of life, it is hubristic arrogance to say it can or must all be "controlled".
Voluntarily taking actions to mitigate risk is trying. I endorsed that.
That works as long as your actions only affect your risk.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
People need to adjust their risk based upon other people's behaviour yes but unless exceptionally egregious that doesn't justify taking away other people's freedom.
We can look at this qualitatively or quantitatively but either way lockdown caused more harm than the pandemic.
Qualitatively imprisoning the old and vulnerable to die locked away from their loved ones who legally couldn't visit is worse than them dying surrounded by loved ones.
Qualitatively disrupting the education of the young is far worse than some of the old having less time to spend imprisoned in their own home without access to their loved ones.
Quantitatively the lockdown multiplied by the amount of people it affected cost an order of magnitude more days of life to be lived freely than the death toll even multiplied by ten years per person which I am skeptical about.
Quantitatively a year of lockdown multiplied by 67 million people is equivalent to 6.7 million excess deaths, based on ten years per death. We had more than a year of lockdown, and were never going to have 6.7 million excess deaths.
If you're going to make a judgement in such a utilitarian and numerical way then you have to do it right and not with baseless assumptions.
My wife was one of your 67 million people, but she actually preferred life under lockdown. Before lockdown she was quite isolated at home with mobility problems, unable to participate fully in society, while I was travelling away from home frequently for work.
During lockdown I was working from home at her parents house and she had more social contact then she'd had for ages.
That's quite apart from the fact that you really need to compare the effect of imposing legal restrictions on top of the voluntary behavioural changes. A lot of people will have voluntarily cut down social contact without it being illegal, so their days of liberty were lost to the pandemic, not to the legal restrictions.
And then, comparing to the number of lives lost with restrictions doesn't tell you anything about how many more might have died if infections had been higher and the health service had been under more pressure.
I really don't think that your black and white way of arguing about this is at all helpful.
She can’t even spell “Mary” correctly so why should we take her seriously?
Why should we take you seriously if you can't even accept there is more than one linguistic way to spell Mary in the UK?
Clearly I was being a supercilious knob and so you are correct - do not ever take me seriously.
I thought it was a casual attempt at humour. @Carnyx clearly does have a sense of humour, but it suddenly becomes switched off if anyone criticises a Scottish nationalist .
Clad in black and representing a Nationalist party speaking of fascism.
Interesting
A moving but truly terrible, left-populist, opportunist speech, speaking of a creeping fascism when her speech won't land her in any sort of trouble with the state. What sort of creeping fascism allows its leaders to be civilly despatched to the back benches when the voters freely decide it is time for a change (which, BTW, it is). But if Labour went down the same track as Ms Black, the change is not going to happen. The government is bad. But a government of people who thought that this constitutionalist democratic government is a fascist one would be much more dangerous.
She can’t even spell “Mary” correctly so why should we take her seriously?
Why should we take you seriously if you can't even accept there is more than one linguistic way to spell Mary in the UK?
Clearly I was being a supercilious knob and so you are correct - do not ever take me seriously.
I thought it was a casual attempt at humour. @Carnyx clearly does have a sense of humour, but it suddenly becomes switched off if anyone criticises a Scottish nationalist .
Not the Scottish nationalist stuff. More a reaction to perceived cultural bias. Okay, it may be a joke. But would it be made about an Italian or an Irishwoman called Maria?
"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
Which is an average and if you extrapolate from that as you're mistakenly doing then no 80 year olds will die today, but that isn't true.
However an 80 year old cancer-ridden and dementia-afflicted individual in a care home, versus a spritely 80 year old living in their own home, do not have the same life expectancy. And COVID sought the former far more than the latter.
Median life expectancy upon entering a care home is months, not decades.
Hence the actuarial and scientific papers adjusted for these factors.
Indeed and across 31 nations even if we take their word for it, the pandemic only cost 28 million years of living freely.
Lockdown and restrictions in the UK alone cost about 100 million years of living freely lost. So lockdown was quantitatively worse for the UK alone than the pandemic was across the 31 nations studied.
Nonsense. Lockdowns were not total, and not all freedoms were lost. I worked face to face throughout, and while there were inconveniences to social life, it was hardly a life without pleasure. Indeed like many others, I rediscovered the pleasures of garden, family, my local community, cooking, reading etc.
Lockdown was 60 million different experiences though. I'm married with no kids, but with some pets, including a dog who loves a walk. I live on the edge of a forest with fields and Salisbury plain all around. I have a decent house and a garden.
Very much different to living in a cramped flat with large family in a city. Or living on your own in a flat.
And don't forget in a sense you were lucky to be working face to face - many would have loved to be able to do that.
Those of us who live and work at home, alone, with no garden - and rely on an open society for our interactions and human life - were basically condemned to a particularly nasty, tormenting form of prison
I appreciate the point you're making but just in terms of accuracy I'm not sure that being in your own home with the ability to go outside for exercise or buy essentials could be described as a particularly nasty form of prison. It sounds more like a Ford Open Prison white collar crime kind of experience than a don't drop the soap, pool ball in a sock, sharing a cell with a psycho called Big Jimmy kind of vibe.
She can’t even spell “Mary” correctly so why should we take her seriously?
Why should we take you seriously if you can't even accept there is more than one linguistic way to spell Mary in the UK?
My understanding is that the original/correct pronunciation of her name would have been ~"Vari", as the "mh" in Scots Gaelic is pronounced with a "v" sound. Similar to Niamh.
Indeed, my daughter knew a Vari who had been born abroad, so had her name spelt with a "v" to make life easier among those unaware of Gaelic spelling rules.
Of course, Mhairi Black is free to spell and pronounce her name however she wishes. Names often evolve due to these sorts of mistakes and misunderstandings, and life's tapestry is the richer for it.
She can’t even spell “Mary” correctly so why should we take her seriously?
Why should we take you seriously if you can't even accept there is more than one linguistic way to spell Mary in the UK?
Clearly I was being a supercilious knob and so you are correct - do not ever take me seriously.
I thought it was a casual attempt at humour. @Carnyx clearly does have a sense of humour, but it suddenly becomes switched off if anyone criticises a Scottish nationalist .
Not the Scottish nationalist stuff. More a reaction to perceived cultural bias. Okay, it may be a joke. But would it be made about an Italian or an Irishwoman called Maria?
Apologies if offence caused - I just couldn’t help being an arse.
She can’t even spell “Mary” correctly so why should we take her seriously?
Why should we take you seriously if you can't even accept there is more than one linguistic way to spell Mary in the UK?
Clearly I was being a supercilious knob and so you are correct - do not ever take me seriously.
I thought it was a casual attempt at humour. @Carnyx clearly does have a sense of humour, but it suddenly becomes switched off if anyone criticises a Scottish nationalist .
Not the Scottish nationalist stuff. More a reaction to perceived cultural bias. Okay, it may be a joke. But would it be made about an Italian or an Irishwoman called Maria?
You have a fair point. It would be pleasant to see you take exception next time you see clear anti-English cultural bias displayed by a couple of well-known supporters of Scottish nationalism who frequent these part perhaps?
She can’t even spell “Mary” correctly so why should we take her seriously?
Why should we take you seriously if you can't even accept there is more than one linguistic way to spell Mary in the UK?
Clearly I was being a supercilious knob and so you are correct - do not ever take me seriously.
I thought it was a casual attempt at humour. @Carnyx clearly does have a sense of humour, but it suddenly becomes switched off if anyone criticises a Scottish nationalist .
Not the Scottish nationalist stuff. More a reaction to perceived cultural bias. Okay, it may be a joke. But would it be made about an Italian or an Irishwoman called Maria?
Apologies if offence caused - I just couldn’t help being an arse.
Comments
Signed off sick - he got to the doctors early enough, thank {insert deity here}
I do wonder about the human interaction vs remote working. We know, from some quite horrible history with solitary confinement, that humans without regular interaction with others do not do well.
Does remote working replace human interaction? Or is it worthless? Or in between?
One comment I've heard from people who are remote working 100% - that small comments and imagined attitudes in others seem to increase in size/importance. They end up brooding over a managers joke at the online stand up all day - he is really saying they are shit, etc?
https://romaninscriptionsofbritain.org/inscriptions/288
I was contacted by the wife of a friend of mine from my university days during lockdown who let me know he'd died suddenly. Fit and healthy 30-something, we'd last spoken online a few weeks earlier about his outside hopes West Ham would make the Champions League spots. I expressed my condolences to her but didn't pry as to how he'd died, but I have my suspicions that it was possibly due to the mental health stress of lockdown. Utterly tragic if so.
Relevant however when you see the disparity in outcomes for Covid/vaccinations/etc between different ethnic groups.
I remember speaking to an MP mate of mine who, slightly shocked, noted that amongst many other things, Covid was to a large extent a BAME crisis.
An extra year and another £3bn. I wonder whether any EPR will ever reliably generate power.
Why have Labour stood down, when they had 1/3 more votes than the LDs last time? Is it pure quid pro quo, perceived ceiling etc?
(19.5% vs 14.8%)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Tiverton_and_Honiton_by-election
Headline: Mis-cake-n Identity - the real culprit in party-gate is our rotten Covid laws
First line: Instead of condeming Boris for his regulation breaking, we should condemining his Government for the rotten Covid regulations that they introduced.
Etc.
The thing that made (and makes!) Covid such a medical and ethical challenge is that my actions affect other people's risk too. It was clear from really early on that a lot of the spread was from people who were symptomless. It also because clear fairly early on that low-grade face coverings, fine enough to catch droplets, had a decent effect on stopping other people getting infected. In that sort of situation, pretending that people can manage their individual risks is a cruel trick.
Libertarian thinking struggles with this sort of scenario. We can't parcel risks and benefits out at an individual level, and adapting the famous slogan to "my freedom stops at your nostril" doesn't work either.
No.man is an island, even on a pirate ship.
But like for like is the kicker. Were they? How many of those treated for omicron had already had Covid and had some protection? Or were vaccinated and had some protection. How did that compare to those treated earlier for Delta? Were the demographics (age, ethnic group, genreal health, socioeconomic status) similar in the groups compared. So were they really like for like? Was the differential between some form of protection (previous infection/vaccination and the mix between the two because maybe previous Delta infection is more/less protective than vaccination) between infected in the Delta and Omicron waves in South Africa similar to that in the UK, enabling the SA experience on Omicron versus Delta to be confidently translated to UK?
It would (from what I've seen and remember seeing) have been irresponsible to have advised the government that Omicron was nothing to worry about, given the data available at the time. It would, in fact, have been a lie. The correct advice was "we don't yet know" (possibly adding, we're tentatively hopeful, which may well have been what was said). It wouldn't have been irresponsible for the government to lock down, do what it did or do nothing - in the absence of hard evidence they had to make a judgement call. For purely Covid precaution, you'd lock down for a few weeks until the evidence had emerged. But that causes all kinds of other harms, so doing nothing/just a little was a pretty sensible approach while waiting for the evidence, imho.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sue-gray-report-on-downing-street-lockdown-parties-frustrated-by-police-secrecy-sxrllvrgd
That doesn’t extend to a right to be on the TV, using a name deliberately designed to be misleading and cause confusion with the group of scientists actually advising the government.
We can look at this qualitatively or quantitatively but either way lockdown caused more harm than the pandemic.
Qualitatively imprisoning the old and vulnerable to die locked away from their loved ones who legally couldn't visit is worse than them dying surrounded by loved ones.
Qualitatively disrupting the education of the young is far worse than some of the old having less time to spend imprisoned in their own home without access to their loved ones.
Quantitatively the lockdown multiplied by the amount of people it affected cost an order of magnitude more days of life to be lived freely than the death toll even multiplied by ten years per person which I am skeptical about.
Quantitatively a year of lockdown multiplied by 67 million people is equivalent to 6.7 million excess deaths, based on ten years per death. We had more than a year of lockdown, and were never going to have 6.7 million excess deaths.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/lifestyle/relationships/woman-says-her-alien-lover-is-better-in-bed-than-earthmen/ar-AAXtt8F?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=e5ddefee7687407fa8584014445318b8
67 million people losing their liberty for one day is 67 million days of liberty lost.
So if we value one day of liberty as the same as one day of life, each day of lockdown must prevent 18,372 excess deaths to be worthwhile.
Even at the peak of the pandemic we never got close to 18,372 excess daily deaths as far as I'm aware.
If you choose to value liberty, education, time with family etc as worth more or less than life is a value judgement not a numeric one.
I think it should have been called Government Executive of Science Specialities, or GESS for short. Their reports could have been called GESS work.
The dying peacefully surrounded by loved ones thing has never ever happened to anyone I have known about, and I am 60 and have lost all gparents one parent and a parent in law. The average is more like this
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
a US physician who says that "this is the way many of my patients die. Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented, in a sterile hospital room with someone from a volunteer program who just met them sitting by their bed."
So less of the Ladybird Book of Loveliness spin in your qualitative judgments, pls. Tks.
You mean a deliberately misleading & confusinging as in "Conservative and Unionist Party"?
Seeing as how curernt "Leader" has zero use for Conservatism (big or small c) or the Union, except as handholds on his greasy pole.
Having checked the definition, I am an HRP.
"Old, limbless, bedridden, ulcerated, in a puddle of waste, gasping for breath, loopy on morphine, hopelessly demented"
https://www.amazon.co.uk/If-Goes-Down-John-Steve-Bell/dp/0749311444
https://twitter.com/mhairiblack/status/1526999103615401984?s=21&t=U5ld9G4eQO2Gbl6iaoKvww
Utter hyperbole.
Wearside, on the other hand...
Interesting
Twats
The dogs did a good job keeping the sheep away from my garden. They'd have stripped it bare in minutes, the greedy so and so's.
We did consider it for our second daughter (though 'Màiri', IIRC) but figured that down here it would just be pronounced 'Mary' by everyone and she'd always be having to spell it for people. Didn't go with 'Mary' either as we didn't particularly like that (different names, to us).
I have a lot of sympathy with the fact that governments - at the start - didn't know very much. And the fact that massive hospitals were being built in Wuhan and people were being welded inside their homes will have really weighed on politicians minds. (The bodies piling up in Milan and New York will have played a role too.)
But we did learn some things pretty quickly, that should have allowed a return to (somewhat) normal life.
The most obvious of which was that Covid didn't spread very easily outside. Sunlight and ventilation rapidly reduced concentrations to levels where infection was extremely unlikely.
Now, I get that stadiums might still have a concentration of people where it would have been a problem, but really - from very early on - we should have been allowing (even encouraging) people to get together and spend time outside.
Here in LA (and yes, I know the weather is better here) there were maybe six weeks through the pandemic when you couldn't go and sit outside at a restaurant or coffee shop with your friends. That made it massively less isolating, and probably had bugger all effect on spread.
https://www.politicalcompass.org/scotland2021
Labour 39%
Conservatives 31%
LDs 12%
https://twitter.com/BritainElects/status/1527648947090620417?s=20&t=03WwqJt4W_53JlssLxeXxQ
Hmm - well, yes, she has a point but she might do well to engage - and get her party to engage - with the very real concerns expressed by women in Scotland rather than simply ignore and dismiss them, as she is accusing the British government of doing.
Vladimir Putin + friends are what I would describe as modern day fascists, and it's embarrassing that Mhairi would apply the same term to a democratically elected party purely because it's politically to the right of her.
I say all this as someone who doesn't even vote Conservative, but I'm not willing to stoop to that level to score points.
Those of us who live and work at home, alone, with no garden - and rely on an open society for our interactions and human life - were basically condemned to a particularly nasty, tormenting form of prison
It was all madness. No evidence behind interventions, just shit dreamed up by people out of their depth wit science.
My wife was one of your 67 million people, but she actually preferred life under lockdown. Before lockdown she was quite isolated at home with mobility problems, unable to participate fully in society, while I was travelling away from home frequently for work.
During lockdown I was working from home at her parents house and she had more social contact then she'd had for ages.
That's quite apart from the fact that you really need to compare the effect of imposing legal restrictions on top of the voluntary behavioural changes. A lot of people will have voluntarily cut down social contact without it being illegal, so their days of liberty were lost to the pandemic, not to the legal restrictions.
And then, comparing to the number of lives lost with restrictions doesn't tell you anything about how many more might have died if infections had been higher and the health service had been under more pressure.
I really don't think that your black and white way of arguing about this is at all helpful.
Indeed, my daughter knew a Vari who had been born abroad, so had her name spelt with a "v" to make life easier among those unaware of Gaelic spelling rules.
Of course, Mhairi Black is free to spell and pronounce her name however she wishes. Names often evolve due to these sorts of mistakes and misunderstandings, and life's tapestry is the richer for it.