I do not recall a time when a government has gone AWOL and entered it's own civil war, while the populace are frankly scared and angry at what is happening
Truss is either saying that which she believes the membership want to hear to gain office, or she is the single most inept politician as she leads a kamikaze charge
I have said and maintained the position that I just do not know the truth on this and September will either see a package that does address the concerns of the public or Truss will be the most unpopular new leader to take office
While I remain a conservative supporter, I fully accept that at present Starmer is looking good for the next GE, though my only caution is a week is a long time in politics and I would add it would be wise for labour supporters to keep their feet on the ground as a lot can happen in 2 years
I'm still CON in principle but I'm not voting for this shower of shyte at any foreseeable time!
GRRRR 😡
If you list all the slices of the Conservative family that have wandered off, stormed out in disgust or been shown the door for being insufficiently loyal to Boris/Brexit, who's left?
It can't just be pensioner homeowners on the edges of the green belt, can it?
Bart still seems to be onside. I sense HYUFD is wavering though …
I quit supporting the Tories.
If Truss wins, I like her, but I will wait to see if she honours her promises before rejoining the tent.
If Sunak wins, I'll love my bet coming in (or what's left of it that hasn't been laid off already) but will start voting for the Liberal Democrats.
If it happened Keir Starmer's strategy would be vindicated and he would be the best Labour performer in many years, particularly in one election cycle. To come from 200 seats to a majority is very rare indeed
As with Johnson, it would, though, be more about who he’d been facing.
Keir Starmer can never have credit because he is rubbish.
He’s not rubbish. Expunging the Trots and antisemites has allowed him to capitalise on the unprecedented incompetence of the incumbents. But he’s never going to stir the soul with his inspirational rhetoric.
I think he is following the Cameron approach to the letter.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
Of course we would have trashed the NHS. Even more so than actually happened. Unless you are suggesting that, as part of your policy, we should simply refuse to treat anyone who had covid and let them die in the streets then not locking down would have increased hospital admissions massively.
You really are ridiculous on this subject.
We should have triaged and treated everyone with Covid as well as we could.
The concept of triage is not new or ridiculous.
Given that is what happened and it still took all the NHS capacity, not locking down would have made it magnitudes worse.
Simply using words like triage doesn't mean you actually understand them or what is involved with them. Letting people die just because they are old and have no value in your eyes is not the way to run a health service or a country, no matter how much you personally might advocate it.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
The soaring waits in A&E etc are due to lockdown though. Had we not locked down then some of those demanding A&E and ambulances now would be dead, so less demand now, and the long waits in A&E and ambulances now are caused in no small part due to the cancellation of everything else to keep primarily the terminally sick alive for longer rather than dying to Covid so now the demands that should have been seen sooner are presenting themselves and the NHS is stretched to breaking point because it put too much effort into keeping Covid patients alive and not enough effort into everything else.
Had the NHS been more tolerant of people dying from Covid, rather than bankrupting itself to deal with just that, then the ambulances etc would be coping better now.
Bolded bit is bollocks, it's been pointed out it's bollocks repeatedly and you keep ignoring that it's bollocks.
The immediate problem is there is not enough gas, causing prices to skyrocket as countries outbid each other.
Thinking outside the box, should we be trying to come to an international agreement around gas/energy rationing (particularly in Europe)? Curtailing usage would reduce the size of price increases over winter and all the negative effects that will have.
I do not recall a time when a government has gone AWOL and entered it's own civil war, while the populace are frankly scared and angry at what is happening
Truss is either saying that which she believes the membership want to hear to gain office, or she is the single most inept politician as she leads a kamikaze charge
I have said and maintained the position that I just do not know the truth on this and September will either see a package that does address the concerns of the public or Truss will be the most unpopular new leader to take office
While I remain a conservative supporter, I fully accept that at present Starmer is looking good for the next GE, though my only caution is a week is a long time in politics and I would add it would be wise for labour supporters to keep their feet on the ground as a lot can happen in 2 years
Very wise words. Any Labour supporter who thinks the next election is in the bag, or even close to it, is certifiably insane. If the last three years have taught us anything it is that things can change and very quickly. What I think it is much safer to say is that the UK which emerges from the current crisis will be a very different country to the one that went into it. Whether that is for better or worse, though, remains to be seen.
I do not recall a time when a government has gone AWOL and entered it's own civil war, while the populace are frankly scared and angry at what is happening
Truss is either saying that which she believes the membership want to hear to gain office, or she is the single most inept politician as she leads a kamikaze charge
I have said and maintained the position that I just do not know the truth on this and September will either see a package that does address the concerns of the public or Truss will be the most unpopular new leader to take office
While I remain a conservative supporter, I fully accept that at present Starmer is looking good for the next GE, though my only caution is a week is a long time in politics and I would add it would be wise for labour supporters to keep their feet on the ground as a lot can happen in 2 years
I'm still CON in principle but I'm not voting for this shower of shyte at any foreseeable time!
GRRRR 😡
If you list all the slices of the Conservative family that have wandered off, stormed out in disgust or been shown the door for being insufficiently loyal to Boris/Brexit, who's left?
It can't just be pensioner homeowners on the edges of the green belt, can it?
Bart still seems to be onside. I sense HYUFD is wavering though …
I quit supporting the Tories.
If Truss wins, I like her, but I will wait to see if she honours her promises before rejoining the tent.
If Sunak wins, I'll love my bet coming in (or what's left of it that hasn't been laid off already) but will start voting for the Liberal Democrats.
If it happened Keir Starmer's strategy would be vindicated and he would be the best Labour performer in many years, particularly in one election cycle. To come from 200 seats to a majority is very rare indeed
As with Johnson, it would, though, be more about who he’d been facing.
Keir Starmer can never have credit because he is rubbish.
He’s not rubbish. Expunging the Trots and antisemites has allowed him to capitalise on the unprecedented incompetence of the incumbents. But he’s never going to stir the soul with his inspirational rhetoric.
Or his policies.
It isn't hard to identify that we are circling the drain, but much like the government, he doesn't seem to be able to find a suitable plug.
A universal price cap is not it.
I hope he starts to show some signs of life soon, as he's going to be prime minister.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
If we have a cold winter with a significant number of pensioners not putting on their heating then the NHS will collapse.
Another way to cut waiting lists. /cynic
Allowing Covid to take its course naturally would have been kinder than having people freeze because theres's no money left as it was all spunked on stopping Covid.
The energy inflation is caused by the Russia sanctions and war on Ukraine, not covid.
The simplest way to solve it is to end the sanctions, which effectively means abandoning Ukraine.
I am impressed that no one politically significant is advocating that.
The energy inflation is caused by the Russia sanctions, I totally agree with that, and I agree with you that no one politically significant advocating ending the sanctions is a good and impressive thing.
However just as Gordon Brown was to blame for the poor state of the fiscal situation before the GFC even hit, which meant we were utterly exposed when the GFC hit, so too the catastrophic f**k up to the Covid response meant the NHS etc were already on their knees before Russia invaded Ukraine. The roof was ripped off in the response to the prior storm and there was no time to fix it before this storm happened.
Had Covid been allowed to take its course, Sweden style, then we'd have gone into the energy/Putin/inflation crisis with much less debt, much less Quantitative Easing, and much smaller waiting lists in the NHS.
No, that would not have been the case. Whitty explains here:
The waiting lists grew as elective activity was diverted to surge capacity. The expansion of ICU was by converting operating theatres and staff into overflow ICU. The surgical wards became respiratory wards etc.
Surge capacity in the NHS comes from reduced elective capacity as there is no slack in the system. Redundancy and resilience is sacrificed in the name of efficiency in the NHS, as it is in so many British institutions, making them very fragile when a storm hits.
Yes and that was the response of lockdown. Two years of nothing much but surge capacity while surgical wards were cancelled.
Had we not had lockdown, then the surge capacity would have been exceeded, leading to more deaths, which by itself takes people off waiting lists (dead people don't appear on waiting lists) and then the pandemic would have been over sooner, so less need for surge capacity, so operations would have been able to be resumed, so again shorter waiting lists.
That's nonsensical.
If you hadn't had lockdown/voluntary adherence to public health advice with similar effect then more people would have caught Covid, more people would have required hospital treatment for Covid, and the hospitals would have been full of Covid patients for longer, leading to less other operations or treatments being performed.
So the waiting list situation would have been worse, even without considering the people with long-term health effects from Covid requiring ongoing treatment, due to lung scarring or heart damage.
Now, it's not unreasonable to argue that freedom from the tyranny of laws regulating who can visit your house is worth the consequent extra deaths and extra people on NHS waiting lists. Principles are worth fighting for, and I support the choice of Ukraine's people to fight for the principles of their independence, despite the suffering of the war.
But you lose all credibility by trying to argue that there wouldn't have been a price to pay for your principles in this instance.
I fully acknowledge there would be a price to pay and the price to pay is extra Covid deaths.
The problem is that preventing the extra Covid deaths had a price too. Too many people like to act as if preventing the extra Covid deaths was a "no-brainer" with no downsides and no price to pay.
Yes more people would have presented to the NHS with Covid, but many of those more people would have been told there was nothing the NHS could do for them and they would either live or die depending upon if they recovered or not. If they didn't recover, they'd have died, and that's a sad price for them to pay and their families but that wouldn't then have entailed cancelling society for two years leading to the problems we see today.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
The soaring waits in A&E etc are due to lockdown though. Had we not locked down then some of those demanding A&E and ambulances now would be dead, so less demand now, and the long waits in A&E and ambulances now are caused in no small part due to the cancellation of everything else to keep primarily the terminally sick alive for longer rather than dying to Covid so now the demands that should have been seen sooner are presenting themselves and the NHS is stretched to breaking point because it put too much effort into keeping Covid patients alive and not enough effort into everything else.
Had the NHS been more tolerant of people dying from Covid, rather than bankrupting itself to deal with just that, then the ambulances etc would be coping better now.
Bolded bit is bollocks, it's been pointed out it's bollocks repeatedly and you keep ignoring that it's bollocks.
Its not bollocks. That some people were younger doesn't mean they primarily were. Deaths were primarily those who were terminally sick and had more deaths happened that would be sad but death is entirely natural. People are dying now too because we threw the baby out with the bathwater to prevent those deaths then and those sick people are still sick and dying and still presenting demands to the NHS along with demands that should have been seen but weren't in order to keep them alive then only to be dying now.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
Of course we would have trashed the NHS. Even more so than actually happened. Unless you are suggesting that, as part of your policy, we should simply refuse to treat anyone who had covid and let them die in the streets then not locking down would have increased hospital admissions massively.
You really are ridiculous on this subject.
We should have triaged and treated everyone with Covid as well as we could.
The concept of triage is not new or ridiculous.
Given that is what happened and it still took all the NHS capacity, not locking down would have made it magnitudes worse.
Simply using words like triage doesn't mean you actually understand them or what is involved with them. Letting people die just because they are old and have no value in your eyes is not the way to run a health service or a country, no matter how much you personally might advocate it.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
It had a silly pie chart of the energy sources, all in shades of blue, with several of the sources coloured in almost identical shades. It was pretty much impossible to read.
I emailed their complaints/corrections team, and they’ve redone it as a bar chart.
Yup. I’ve officially become that kind of middle aged man who complains to the BBC!
And get results. 👍🏻
What are you going to ping off and sort next then? Can you get that Einstein Doomsday Clock thing ticking towards midnight back a couple of hours? And a slushy daiquiri please.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
Of course we would have trashed the NHS. Even more so than actually happened. Unless you are suggesting that, as part of your policy, we should simply refuse to treat anyone who had covid and let them die in the streets then not locking down would have increased hospital admissions massively.
You really are ridiculous on this subject.
We should have triaged and treated everyone with Covid as well as we could.
The concept of triage is not new or ridiculous.
Given that is what happened and it still took all the NHS capacity, not locking down would have made it magnitudes worse.
Simply using words like triage doesn't mean you actually understand them or what is involved with them. Letting people die just because they are old and have no value in your eyes is not the way to run a health service or a country, no matter how much you personally might advocate it.
"Letting people die" happens every single day in this country, always has done, always will do. If money were no object things like QALY would not be necessary, things like NICE wouldn't be necessary and more people would be able to get treatment.
Rationing treatment based upon what's available to whoever needs it, is how the NHS has always operated. You act as if I'm presenting some unthinkable atrocity in suggesting the price was not worth paying to keep those people alive, but that is literally how the NHS always has and always will operate.
I'd love to see some decent QALY figures showing what lockdown cost, including both monetary values and monetary equivalents for the loss of education, civil liberties etc - versus the years of lives "saved" and see how that compares to non-pandemic NICE style QALY figures at the best of times.
That you think "letting people die" is unthinkable just shows you're running with emotions and divorced from reality.
Very Good thanks. Busy as hell but keeping my head above water for now. Despairing at the lack of humanity of some of our contributors here though.
Some of it is callousness, but a lot of it is just lack of imagination and not understanding exponential growth.
Put that first lockdown back three days, you double the problem. Put it back a week, you quadruple it. Delay it a fortnight, the problem becomes sixteen times bigger and at some point you don't even have the capacity to triage.
There's no point stamping one's feet that you don't want things to work that way, or writing an elegant polemic about how it shouldn't be that way. Maths does what it does whether you vote for it or not.
And the trauma to socieity in that situation is one that would scar everyone who lived through it and kill the Conservative party forever.
Very Good thanks. Busy as hell but keeping my head above water for now. Despairing at the lack of humanity of some of our contributors here though.
Some of it is callousness, but a lot of it is just lack of imagination and not understanding exponential growth.
Put that first lockdown back three days, you double the problem. Put it back a week, you quadruple it. Delay it a fortnight, the problem becomes sixteen times bigger and at some point you don't even have the capacity to triage.
There's no point stamping one's feet that you don't want things to work that way, or writing an elegant polemic about how it shouldn't be that way. Maths does what it does whether you vote for it or not.
And the trauma to socieity in that situation is one that would scar everyone who lived through it and kill the Conservative party forever.
No, exponential growth only works that way if the cause for the exponential growth is eliminated once lockdown is lifted.
Bring in your lockdown three days sooner and you haven't halved the problem, as if you just come out of lockdown sooner then the virus is still there waiting to start exponentially growing all over again.
Running out of capacity would have been better than the alternative. Allow people to die or recover, mourn those who die, those who recover haven't had the entire country mortgaged to the hilt to keep them alive storing up future deaths waiting to happen.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
The soaring waits in A&E etc are due to lockdown though. Had we not locked down then some of those demanding A&E and ambulances now would be dead, so less demand now, and the long waits in A&E and ambulances now are caused in no small part due to the cancellation of everything else to keep primarily the terminally sick alive for longer rather than dying to Covid so now the demands that should have been seen sooner are presenting themselves and the NHS is stretched to breaking point because it put too much effort into keeping Covid patients alive and not enough effort into everything else.
Had the NHS been more tolerant of people dying from Covid, rather than bankrupting itself to deal with just that, then the ambulances etc would be coping better now.
Bolded bit is bollocks, it's been pointed out it's bollocks repeatedly and you keep ignoring that it's bollocks.
Its not bollocks. That some people were younger doesn't mean they primarily were. Deaths were primarily those who were terminally sick and had more deaths happened that would be sad but death is entirely natural. People are dying now too because we threw the baby out with the bathwater to prevent those deaths then and those sick people are still sick and dying and still presenting demands to the NHS along with demands that should have been seen but weren't in order to keep them alive then only to be dying now.
Skipping over the fact that the increased death rate happened across the spectrum (if you have something which doubles your chances of dying at any age, then the young, who die less, anyway, will be a smaller fraction):
... We're talking about the people in the healthcare system. Who skewed younger, particularly those in ICU. Half of those in ICU were under 60. A quarter weren't even fifty yet. 90%+ did not have severe pre-existing conditions.
Hell, a sixth of the women in ICU last summer were pregnant.
Those are the ones you would condemn to death, and say "well, at least they're not on the waiting lists now."
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
Of course we would have trashed the NHS. Even more so than actually happened. Unless you are suggesting that, as part of your policy, we should simply refuse to treat anyone who had covid and let them die in the streets then not locking down would have increased hospital admissions massively.
You really are ridiculous on this subject.
We should have triaged and treated everyone with Covid as well as we could.
The concept of triage is not new or ridiculous.
Given that is what happened and it still took all the NHS capacity, not locking down would have made it magnitudes worse.
Simply using words like triage doesn't mean you actually understand them or what is involved with them. Letting people die just because they are old and have no value in your eyes is not the way to run a health service or a country, no matter how much you personally might advocate it.
"Letting people die" happens every single day in this country, always has done, always will do. If money were no object things like QALY would not be necessary, things like NICE wouldn't be necessary and more people would be able to get treatment.
Rationing treatment based upon what's available to whoever needs it, is how the NHS has always operated. You act as if I'm presenting some unthinkable atrocity in suggesting the price was not worth paying to keep those people alive, but that is literally how the NHS always has and always will operate.
I'd love to see some decent QALY figures showing what lockdown cost, including both monetary values and monetary equivalents for the loss of education, civil liberties etc - versus the years of lives "saved" and see how that compares to non-pandemic NICE style QALY figures at the best of times.
That you think "letting people die" is unthinkable just shows you're running with emotions and divorced from reality.
There's also the impact on NHS staff levels to consider, of course. No lockdowns -> higher general prevalence -> more likelihood of NHS staff picking up Covid infections outwith hospitals, with associated additional time off (and some deaths, of course) reducing capacity.
By the way up thread people were saying covid hasn’t caused the energy crisis. Well it has had a major impact on crude refining capacity, which is primarily what led to spikes in diesel, jet and gasoline this year. But China’s continued covid lockdowns have conversely tempered crude prices in 2022.
Very Good thanks. Busy as hell but keeping my head above water for now. Despairing at the lack of humanity of some of our contributors here though.
Some of it is callousness, but a lot of it is just lack of imagination and not understanding exponential growth.
Put that first lockdown back three days, you double the problem. Put it back a week, you quadruple it. Delay it a fortnight, the problem becomes sixteen times bigger and at some point you don't even have the capacity to triage.
There's no point stamping one's feet that you don't want things to work that way, or writing an elegant polemic about how it shouldn't be that way. Maths does what it does whether you vote for it or not.
And the trauma to socieity in that situation is one that would scar everyone who lived through it and kill the Conservative party forever.
Exponential growth doesn't happen indefinitely, though. And the first wave probably peaked before lockdown anyway.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
If we have a cold winter with a significant number of pensioners not putting on their heating then the NHS will collapse.
Another way to cut waiting lists. /cynic
Allowing Covid to take its course naturally would have been kinder than having people freeze because theres's no money left as it was all spunked on stopping Covid.
The energy inflation is caused by the Russia sanctions and war on Ukraine, not covid.
The simplest way to solve it is to end the sanctions, which effectively means abandoning Ukraine.
I am impressed that no one politically significant is advocating that.
The energy inflation is caused by the Russia sanctions, I totally agree with that, and I agree with you that no one politically significant advocating ending the sanctions is a good and impressive thing.
However just as Gordon Brown was to blame for the poor state of the fiscal situation before the GFC even hit, which meant we were utterly exposed when the GFC hit, so too the catastrophic f**k up to the Covid response meant the NHS etc were already on their knees before Russia invaded Ukraine. The roof was ripped off in the response to the prior storm and there was no time to fix it before this storm happened.
Had Covid been allowed to take its course, Sweden style, then we'd have gone into the energy/Putin/inflation crisis with much less debt, much less Quantitative Easing, and much smaller waiting lists in the NHS.
No, that would not have been the case. Whitty explains here:
The waiting lists grew as elective activity was diverted to surge capacity. The expansion of ICU was by converting operating theatres and staff into overflow ICU. The surgical wards became respiratory wards etc.
Surge capacity in the NHS comes from reduced elective capacity as there is no slack in the system. Redundancy and resilience is sacrificed in the name of efficiency in the NHS, as it is in so many British institutions, making them very fragile when a storm hits.
Yes and that was the response of lockdown. Two years of nothing much but surge capacity while surgical wards were cancelled.
Had we not had lockdown, then the surge capacity would have been exceeded, leading to more deaths, which by itself takes people off waiting lists (dead people don't appear on waiting lists) and then the pandemic would have been over sooner, so less need for surge capacity, so operations would have been able to be resumed, so again shorter waiting lists.
That's nonsensical.
If you hadn't had lockdown/voluntary adherence to public health advice with similar effect then more people would have caught Covid, more people would have required hospital treatment for Covid, and the hospitals would have been full of Covid patients for longer, leading to less other operations or treatments being performed.
So the waiting list situation would have been worse, even without considering the people with long-term health effects from Covid requiring ongoing treatment, due to lung scarring or heart damage.
Now, it's not unreasonable to argue that freedom from the tyranny of laws regulating who can visit your house is worth the consequent extra deaths and extra people on NHS waiting lists. Principles are worth fighting for, and I support the choice of Ukraine's people to fight for the principles of their independence, despite the suffering of the war.
But you lose all credibility by trying to argue that there wouldn't have been a price to pay for your principles in this instance.
I fully acknowledge there would be a price to pay and the price to pay is extra Covid deaths.
The problem is that preventing the extra Covid deaths had a price too. Too many people like to act as if preventing the extra Covid deaths was a "no-brainer" with no downsides and no price to pay.
Yes more people would have presented to the NHS with Covid, but many of those more people would have been told there was nothing the NHS could do for them and they would either live or die depending upon if they recovered or not. If they didn't recover, they'd have died, and that's a sad price for them to pay and their families but that wouldn't then have entailed cancelling society for two years leading to the problems we see today.
So your approach, in the case of a major railway crash or terrorist attack, is to in no circumstances cancel the days scheduled hip replacement surgeries in order to provide treatment to the surge in acute patients, but to triage the emergency patients because nothing must stand in the way of dealing with the waiting lists?
That would often prioritise the routine treatment of elderly people over the emergency treatment of the young. You're all over the place.
The real failing here is that we are two years, seven months and three and a bit weeks on from Covid being declared a global emergency, and yet the government have done next to nothing to expand our training of medical staff to deal with the resulting increased demand on the health service.
Blaming lockdown (whether someone thinks we locked down too much, or not enough) is just a way to let them off the hook.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
If we have a cold winter with a significant number of pensioners not putting on their heating then the NHS will collapse.
Another way to cut waiting lists. /cynic
Allowing Covid to take its course naturally would have been kinder than having people freeze because theres's no money left as it was all spunked on stopping Covid.
The energy inflation is caused by the Russia sanctions and war on Ukraine, not covid.
The simplest way to solve it is to end the sanctions, which effectively means abandoning Ukraine.
I am impressed that no one politically significant is advocating that.
The energy inflation is caused by the Russia sanctions, I totally agree with that, and I agree with you that no one politically significant advocating ending the sanctions is a good and impressive thing.
However just as Gordon Brown was to blame for the poor state of the fiscal situation before the GFC even hit, which meant we were utterly exposed when the GFC hit, so too the catastrophic f**k up to the Covid response meant the NHS etc were already on their knees before Russia invaded Ukraine. The roof was ripped off in the response to the prior storm and there was no time to fix it before this storm happened.
Had Covid been allowed to take its course, Sweden style, then we'd have gone into the energy/Putin/inflation crisis with much less debt, much less Quantitative Easing, and much smaller waiting lists in the NHS.
No, that would not have been the case. Whitty explains here:
The waiting lists grew as elective activity was diverted to surge capacity. The expansion of ICU was by converting operating theatres and staff into overflow ICU. The surgical wards became respiratory wards etc.
Surge capacity in the NHS comes from reduced elective capacity as there is no slack in the system. Redundancy and resilience is sacrificed in the name of efficiency in the NHS, as it is in so many British institutions, making them very fragile when a storm hits.
Yes and that was the response of lockdown. Two years of nothing much but surge capacity while surgical wards were cancelled.
Had we not had lockdown, then the surge capacity would have been exceeded, leading to more deaths, which by itself takes people off waiting lists (dead people don't appear on waiting lists) and then the pandemic would have been over sooner, so less need for surge capacity, so operations would have been able to be resumed, so again shorter waiting lists.
That's nonsensical.
If you hadn't had lockdown/voluntary adherence to public health advice with similar effect then more people would have caught Covid, more people would have required hospital treatment for Covid, and the hospitals would have been full of Covid patients for longer, leading to less other operations or treatments being performed.
So the waiting list situation would have been worse, even without considering the people with long-term health effects from Covid requiring ongoing treatment, due to lung scarring or heart damage.
Now, it's not unreasonable to argue that freedom from the tyranny of laws regulating who can visit your house is worth the consequent extra deaths and extra people on NHS waiting lists. Principles are worth fighting for, and I support the choice of Ukraine's people to fight for the principles of their independence, despite the suffering of the war.
But you lose all credibility by trying to argue that there wouldn't have been a price to pay for your principles in this instance.
I fully acknowledge there would be a price to pay and the price to pay is extra Covid deaths.
The problem is that preventing the extra Covid deaths had a price too. Too many people like to act as if preventing the extra Covid deaths was a "no-brainer" with no downsides and no price to pay.
Yes more people would have presented to the NHS with Covid, but many of those more people would have been told there was nothing the NHS could do for them and they would either live or die depending upon if they recovered or not. If they didn't recover, they'd have died, and that's a sad price for them to pay and their families but that wouldn't then have entailed cancelling society for two years leading to the problems we see today.
So your approach, in the case of a major railway crash or terrorist attack, is to in no circumstances cancel the days scheduled hip replacement surgeries in order to provide treatment to the surge in acute patients, but to triage the emergency patients because nothing must stand in the way of dealing with the waiting lists?
I'm not sure why you're trying to draw an equivalence between something that lasts a few days, and something that we had to suffer for nearly 18 months.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
The soaring waits in A&E etc are due to lockdown though. Had we not locked down then some of those demanding A&E and ambulances now would be dead, so less demand now, and the long waits in A&E and ambulances now are caused in no small part due to the cancellation of everything else to keep primarily the terminally sick alive for longer rather than dying to Covid so now the demands that should have been seen sooner are presenting themselves and the NHS is stretched to breaking point because it put too much effort into keeping Covid patients alive and not enough effort into everything else.
Had the NHS been more tolerant of people dying from Covid, rather than bankrupting itself to deal with just that, then the ambulances etc would be coping better now.
The NHS might have been more tolerant of people dying from Covid but I doubt the general public would've been. And newspapers like the Mail would've had a field day!
And that is the point: the decision to lock down was *in the end* a profoundly democratic one to Protect Our NHS and Our Grandpas And Nanas. There wasn't a vote but there didn't have to be, just as if I had a loaded gun I don't need to shoot you to get my way.
Who would have thought that the cynical weaponisation of the nation's drooling worship of the NHS in 2016 would have adverse consequences of any kind?
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
The soaring waits in A&E etc are due to lockdown though. Had we not locked down then some of those demanding A&E and ambulances now would be dead, so less demand now, and the long waits in A&E and ambulances now are caused in no small part due to the cancellation of everything else to keep primarily the terminally sick alive for longer rather than dying to Covid so now the demands that should have been seen sooner are presenting themselves and the NHS is stretched to breaking point because it put too much effort into keeping Covid patients alive and not enough effort into everything else.
Had the NHS been more tolerant of people dying from Covid, rather than bankrupting itself to deal with just that, then the ambulances etc would be coping better now.
Bolded bit is bollocks, it's been pointed out it's bollocks repeatedly and you keep ignoring that it's bollocks.
Its not bollocks. That some people were younger doesn't mean they primarily were. Deaths were primarily those who were terminally sick and had more deaths happened that would be sad but death is entirely natural. People are dying now too because we threw the baby out with the bathwater to prevent those deaths then and those sick people are still sick and dying and still presenting demands to the NHS along with demands that should have been seen but weren't in order to keep them alive then only to be dying now.
Skipping over the fact that the increased death rate happened across the spectrum (if you have something which doubles your chances of dying at any age, then the young, who die less, anyway, will be a smaller fraction):
... We're talking about the people in the healthcare system. Who skewed younger, particularly those in ICU. Half of those in ICU were under 60. A quarter weren't even fifty yet. 90%+ did not have severe pre-existing conditions.
Hell, a sixth of the women in ICU last summer were pregnant.
Those are the ones you would condemn to death, and say "well, at least they're not on the waiting lists now."
That's a fallacy because not everyone who goes to ICU survives anyway, and not everyone who couldn't go to ICU would have died anyway either. Plus if there'd been a stricter triage your half may have been 60% or more instead.
The deaths are the people who died. There may have been some incremental deaths from people who might have survived had they gone to ICU but couldn't, but they wouldn't be the entirety of the deaths and you are using false statistics to claim otherwise.
Surprised to see there are still defenders of lockdown on here. Quite a retro viewpoint.
you keep doing this, vainly promoting a "They laughed then/they're not laughing now" narrative. Fail. Lockdown was inevitable, which renders defence of it moot. as I pointed out to that arse @contrarian at the time and I am pointing out to you now.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
If we have a cold winter with a significant number of pensioners not putting on their heating then the NHS will collapse.
Another way to cut waiting lists. /cynic
Allowing Covid to take its course naturally would have been kinder than having people freeze because theres's no money left as it was all spunked on stopping Covid.
The energy inflation is caused by the Russia sanctions and war on Ukraine, not covid.
The simplest way to solve it is to end the sanctions, which effectively means abandoning Ukraine.
I am impressed that no one politically significant is advocating that.
The energy inflation is caused by the Russia sanctions, I totally agree with that, and I agree with you that no one politically significant advocating ending the sanctions is a good and impressive thing.
However just as Gordon Brown was to blame for the poor state of the fiscal situation before the GFC even hit, which meant we were utterly exposed when the GFC hit, so too the catastrophic f**k up to the Covid response meant the NHS etc were already on their knees before Russia invaded Ukraine. The roof was ripped off in the response to the prior storm and there was no time to fix it before this storm happened.
Had Covid been allowed to take its course, Sweden style, then we'd have gone into the energy/Putin/inflation crisis with much less debt, much less Quantitative Easing, and much smaller waiting lists in the NHS.
No, that would not have been the case. Whitty explains here:
The waiting lists grew as elective activity was diverted to surge capacity. The expansion of ICU was by converting operating theatres and staff into overflow ICU. The surgical wards became respiratory wards etc.
Surge capacity in the NHS comes from reduced elective capacity as there is no slack in the system. Redundancy and resilience is sacrificed in the name of efficiency in the NHS, as it is in so many British institutions, making them very fragile when a storm hits.
Yes and that was the response of lockdown. Two years of nothing much but surge capacity while surgical wards were cancelled.
Had we not had lockdown, then the surge capacity would have been exceeded, leading to more deaths, which by itself takes people off waiting lists (dead people don't appear on waiting lists) and then the pandemic would have been over sooner, so less need for surge capacity, so operations would have been able to be resumed, so again shorter waiting lists.
That's nonsensical.
If you hadn't had lockdown/voluntary adherence to public health advice with similar effect then more people would have caught Covid, more people would have required hospital treatment for Covid, and the hospitals would have been full of Covid patients for longer, leading to less other operations or treatments being performed.
So the waiting list situation would have been worse, even without considering the people with long-term health effects from Covid requiring ongoing treatment, due to lung scarring or heart damage.
Now, it's not unreasonable to argue that freedom from the tyranny of laws regulating who can visit your house is worth the consequent extra deaths and extra people on NHS waiting lists. Principles are worth fighting for, and I support the choice of Ukraine's people to fight for the principles of their independence, despite the suffering of the war.
But you lose all credibility by trying to argue that there wouldn't have been a price to pay for your principles in this instance.
I fully acknowledge there would be a price to pay and the price to pay is extra Covid deaths.
The problem is that preventing the extra Covid deaths had a price too. Too many people like to act as if preventing the extra Covid deaths was a "no-brainer" with no downsides and no price to pay.
Yes more people would have presented to the NHS with Covid, but many of those more people would have been told there was nothing the NHS could do for them and they would either live or die depending upon if they recovered or not. If they didn't recover, they'd have died, and that's a sad price for them to pay and their families but that wouldn't then have entailed cancelling society for two years leading to the problems we see today.
So your approach, in the case of a major railway crash or terrorist attack, is to in no circumstances cancel the days scheduled hip replacement surgeries in order to provide treatment to the surge in acute patients, but to triage the emergency patients because nothing must stand in the way of dealing with the waiting lists?
That would often prioritise the routine treatment of elderly people over the emergency treatment of the young. You're all over the place.
The real failing here is that we are two years, seven months and three and a bit weeks on from Covid being declared a global emergency, and yet the government have done next to nothing to expand our training of medical staff to deal with the resulting increased demand on the health service.
Blaming lockdown (whether someone thinks we locked down too much, or not enough) is just a way to let them off the hook.
No, my approach in extreme circumstances is to use triage to prioritise those who need the most support (and tragically if needed de-prioritise those who need too much support but who are less likely to be able to survive anyway even with the support).
The problem with Covid is that approach went out the window and instead we dedicated the entire country for two years to just Covid, rather than saying in more circumstances "if you want to avoid Covid, you need to take more responsibility for that yourself" or "if you catch Covid and get sick, we may not be able to treat you".
How long do you think it takes to expand training of medical staff? This is like the pregnancy critical pathway problem, you can have 9 times as many women but you still can't get a birth in just one month. Medical training takes years.
Besides, we give too much money to the NHS already. Its the one department that's never faced proper austerity and ratchetting up spending on the NHS is a self-fulfilling prophecy to just have more NHS demands in the future. The NHS needs to have a budget then cope as well as it can, within its budget. If that means telling more people than we do today "we can't help you" then that might be the price, but its a price the NHS has always paid.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Surprised to see there are still defenders of lockdown on here. Quite a retro viewpoint.
you keep doing this, vainly promoting a "They laughed then/they're not laughing now" narrative. Fail. Lockdown was inevitable, which renders defence of it moot. as I pointed out to that arse @contrarian at the time and I am pointing out to you now.
Lockdown may have been inevitable. Failing to lift it as soon as it had been shown to be counterproductive shouldn't have been.
I would still be willing to bet on a modest Truss lead.
I refuse to believe that she wants to enter office and by December/January be the most unpopular PM of all time.
She has never held a view or political position for any longer than once it ceases to be politically advantageous to her.
There will be action on energy bills because simply put there has to be unless Truss wants to be irrecoverably holed below the waterline in a matter of weeks. Top tip: she doesn’t.
Very Good thanks. Busy as hell but keeping my head above water for now. Despairing at the lack of humanity of some of our contributors here though.
Indeed!
This post below sums up the poster's grasp of reality and humanity (or rather, lack thereof). What is even more remarkable is that it got a like from @state_go_away .
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
Of course we would have trashed the NHS. Even more so than actually happened. Unless you are suggesting that, as part of your policy, we should simply refuse to treat anyone who had covid and let them die in the streets then not locking down would have increased hospital admissions massively.
You really are ridiculous on this subject.
We should have triaged and treated everyone with Covid as well as we could.
The concept of triage is not new or ridiculous.
Given that is what happened and it still took all the NHS capacity, not locking down would have made it magnitudes worse.
Simply using words like triage doesn't mean you actually understand them or what is involved with them. Letting people die just because they are old and have no value in your eyes is not the way to run a health service or a country, no matter how much you personally might advocate it.
"Letting people die" happens every single day in this country, always has done, always will do. If money were no object things like QALY would not be necessary, things like NICE wouldn't be necessary and more people would be able to get treatment.
Rationing treatment based upon what's available to whoever needs it, is how the NHS has always operated. You act as if I'm presenting some unthinkable atrocity in suggesting the price was not worth paying to keep those people alive, but that is literally how the NHS always has and always will operate.
I'd love to see some decent QALY figures showing what lockdown cost, including both monetary values and monetary equivalents for the loss of education, civil liberties etc - versus the years of lives "saved" and see how that compares to non-pandemic NICE style QALY figures at the best of times.
That you think "letting people die" is unthinkable just shows you're running with emotions and divorced from reality.
In fact, the only thing worse than lockdown would have been letting the virus continue to spread freely.
And the catpoo on top of the fairy cake is that those who complained loudest about lockdown also complained about the lighter restrictions that might have avoided, or massively reduced, the need for lockdown 2 and 3.
And Team Rishi: "Liz is now walking back from her commitment to hold an emergency budget - something she confirmed she would do more than seven times during the campaign. 1/2 https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1562025172814675969
"The question now is whether she will come good on her promise to deliver £50bn worth of immediate tax cuts or whether she now agrees with Rishi that the priority must first be to grip inflation and help people with the cost of living."
In fact, the only thing worse than lockdown would have been letting the virus continue to spread freely.
And the catpoo on top of the fairy cake is that those who complained loudest about lockdown also complained about the lighter restrictions that might have avoided, or massively reduced, the need for lockdown 2 and 3.
Lockdown was neither necessary (other countries survived without it) nor successful on our priorities.
I backed it. I apologise, I was completely wrong. I'll never back another one again.
It was the overwhelming Will of the People, barty, whether you like it or not. Cast your mind back to polling on the subject where the general public was invariably to the lockdowner side of SKS, whether you like it or not. ask yourself whether the system would have lasted 24 hours without the overwhelming consent of the governed. I don't say that justifies anything, but then I am also no fan of putting complex constitutional questions to the lumpenproletariat and enacting their hilariously wrong answers. You ostensibly are.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
If you have a capacity of c. 100,000 and existing utilisation of 75,000, how many people do you fit in on top of that? Note as well that the closer you get to capacity, the harder it is, and in many hospitals you'll already be over capacity (above 90% and you're in serious trouble) As it was, we added a bit under 20,000 in the first wave. They called the second lockdown when they could see they were heading over 15,000 additions (in winter, when the existing utilisation is closer to 85,000+) In the third one, they added nearly 35,000, and yes, heavy triaging was going on and we'll be feeling the effects of that for a long time.
With your airy "Oh, it would have been more swamped" - we'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of extra beds needed.
If people need intensive care to stay alive, then removing that intensive care is pretty sure to result in them being dead. To a slightly lesser extent, hospitalisation itself. It's rare that people go to hospital for fun.
And the ones who most benefited from ICU and hospitalisation were the younger ones and those without serious conditions. Unsurprisingly.
In fact, the only thing worse than lockdown would have been letting the virus continue to spread freely.
And the catpoo on top of the fairy cake is that those who complained loudest about lockdown also complained about the lighter restrictions that might have avoided, or massively reduced, the need for lockdown 2 and 3.
Lighter restrictions might have made the need for lockdown 2 and 3 be less than zero? Interesting concept.
And Team Rishi: "Liz is now walking back from her commitment to hold an emergency budget - something she confirmed she would do more than seven times during the campaign. 1/2 https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1562025172814675969
"The question now is whether she will come good on her promise to deliver £50bn worth of immediate tax cuts or whether she now agrees with Rishi that the priority must first be to grip inflation and help people with the cost of living."
Why does nobody question Sunak on the glaring economic illiteracy of this statement? Cancelling tax cuts - yes, that would be a deflationary measure (of course it would help more if the inflation were actually demand led). Giving people money to pay their power bills - that is directly the opposite. It's an inflationary measure. Either Sunak is profoundly stupid or he thinks everyone else is.
Very Good thanks. Busy as hell but keeping my head above water for now. Despairing at the lack of humanity of some of our contributors here though.
Some of it is callousness, but a lot of it is just lack of imagination and not understanding exponential growth.
Put that first lockdown back three days, you double the problem. Put it back a week, you quadruple it. Delay it a fortnight, the problem becomes sixteen times bigger and at some point you don't even have the capacity to triage.
There's no point stamping one's feet that you don't want things to work that way, or writing an elegant polemic about how it shouldn't be that way. Maths does what it does whether you vote for it or not.
And the trauma to socieity in that situation is one that would scar everyone who lived through it and kill the Conservative party forever.
Exponential growth doesn't happen indefinitely, though. And the first wave probably peaked before lockdown anyway.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
If you have a capacity of c. 100,000 and existing utilisation of 75,000, how many people do you fit in on top of that? Note as well that the closer you get to capacity, the harder it is, and in many hospitals you'll already be over capacity (above 90% and you're in serious trouble) As it was, we added a bit under 20,000 in the first wave. They called the second lockdown when they could see they were heading over 15,000 additions (in winter, when the existing utilisation is closer to 85,000+) In the third one, they added nearly 35,000, and yes, heavy triaging was going on and we'll be feeling the effects of that for a long time.
With your airy "Oh, it would have been more swamped" - we'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of extra beds needed.
If people need intensive care to stay alive, then removing that intensive care is pretty sure to result in them being dead. To a slightly lesser extent, hospitalisation itself. It's rare that people go to hospital for fun.
And the ones who most benefited from ICU and hospitalisation were the younger ones and those without serious conditions. Unsurprisingly.
Fair points, but why didn't Sweden's health system collapse as you outline?
The comparison is November 1990. Thatcha brought down by the ludicrous poll tax and her own sneering arrogance to her colleagues. Millions of punters with unpayable and unfair bills.
Major got a bounce because he said "no more Poll Tax". What Truss is doing would have been like Major coming in having repeatedly and condescendingly said he doesn't believe in handouts and then refusing to intervene, telling people that they should get a better job or work harder to pay the bill.
Kinnock would have been "awight" had that happened. As Starmer will be.
Your posting on this issue is becoming a waste of your time and ours. You've predicted that Truss will do nothing on COL. Others have predicted that she'll do a range of things. We have no fresh information either way, so until we do, there's really no point in continuing to churn out your endlessly negative drivel.
Lockdown was neither necessary (other countries survived without it) nor successful on our priorities.
I backed it. I apologise, I was completely wrong. I'll never back another one again.
It was the overwhelming Will of the People, barty, whether you like it or not. Cast your mind back to polling on the subject where the general public was invariably to the lockdowner side of SKS, whether you like it or not. ask yourself whether the system would have lasted 24 hours without the overwhelming consent of the governed. I don't say that justifies anything, but then I am also no fan of putting complex constitutional questions to the lumpenproletariat and enacting their hilariously wrong answers. You ostensibly are.
Your elitism is showing.
If people wanted to stay at home to hide from the virus, they could have done that without government legislation.
Many did, that's why the first wave probably peaked before lockdown.
In fact, the only thing worse than lockdown would have been letting the virus continue to spread freely.
And the catpoo on top of the fairy cake is that those who complained loudest about lockdown also complained about the lighter restrictions that might have avoided, or massively reduced, the need for lockdown 2 and 3.
YES!
I was, at the time of Lockdowns 2 and 3, certain that we could have avoided them if we'd gone hard on Tier 3. But the moment any restrictions were imposed, you had the "skeptics" whining that "It's false positives," or "But look at Sweden," or "But if we cherry pick out this small part of this area, cases are going down."
Where I was, we were in Tier 2 and all the Councils were asking for us to go to Tier 3 (across the political spectrum). But the local Tory MPs were complaining to the Government that we needed to decrease to Tier 1.
Three weeks later, we were in lockdown.
I banged on and on until I was blue in the face about "finding the low hanging fruit" and properly analysing the effects of each separate intervention, but every possible intervention was dismissed as useless. Leaving us with nothing but lockdown.
Lockdown is the result of a failure of public health policy. It is hugely damaging. And it is used when not locking down is worse.
I think lockdown was probably necessary to reduce excess deaths. Exceptionally tricky to get the balance right though, and that equilibrium will be different for each and every one of us depending on our politics and personal circumstance.
Some elements were blatantly silly - banning parkrun while obesity was a major comorbidity. Madness.
And the fact young people, particularly in education, were not recompensed in some way is a disgrace.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
"We should have just let it rip crowd" refuse to acknowledge that only a tiny proportion of the country had got Covid by December 2020.
They cling to the fantasy of "everyone secretly got it." peddled by charlatans like Gupta.
And Team Rishi: "Liz is now walking back from her commitment to hold an emergency budget - something she confirmed she would do more than seven times during the campaign. 1/2 https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1562025172814675969
"The question now is whether she will come good on her promise to deliver £50bn worth of immediate tax cuts or whether she now agrees with Rishi that the priority must first be to grip inflation and help people with the cost of living."
Why does nobody question Sunak on the glaring economic illiteracy of this statement? Cancelling tax cuts - yes, that would be a deflationary measure (of course it would help more if the inflation were actually demand led). Giving people money to pay their power bills - that is directly the opposite. It's an inflationary measure. Either Sunak is profoundly stupid or he thinks everyone else is.
This is a man who lit a huge fire under an already well-heated housing market with his stamp duty cut so I’m not giving him any recommendations for being any more economically literate than team Truss TBH.
I think lockdown was probably necessary to reduce excess deaths. Exceptionally tricky to get the balance right though, and that equilibrium will be different for each and every one of us depending on our politics and personal circumstance.
Some elements were blatantly silly - banning parkrun while obesity was a major comorbidity. Madness.
And the fact young people, particularly in education, were not recompensed in some way is a disgrace.
If immediate deaths is the only thing that matters, then possibly lockdown could have been justified at the beginning, until it had been shown to have been unnecessary (certainly by the six week review, probably by the three week review).
But they refused to do a cost/benefit analysis, for a reason which should be obvious to any government watcher.
Lockdown was neither necessary (other countries survived without it) nor successful on our priorities.
I backed it. I apologise, I was completely wrong. I'll never back another one again.
It was the overwhelming Will of the People, barty, whether you like it or not. Cast your mind back to polling on the subject where the general public was invariably to the lockdowner side of SKS, whether you like it or not. ask yourself whether the system would have lasted 24 hours without the overwhelming consent of the governed. I don't say that justifies anything, but then I am also no fan of putting complex constitutional questions to the lumpenproletariat and enacting their hilariously wrong answers. You ostensibly are.
Your elitism is showing.
If people wanted to stay at home to hide from the virus, they could have done that without government legislation.
Many did, that's why the first wave probably peaked before lockdown.
They didn't *just* want that, they overwhelmingly wanted compulsory lockdown.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
Of course we would have trashed the NHS. Even more so than actually happened. Unless you are suggesting that, as part of your policy, we should simply refuse to treat anyone who had covid and let them die in the streets then not locking down would have increased hospital admissions massively.
You really are ridiculous on this subject.
We should have triaged and treated everyone with Covid as well as we could.
The concept of triage is not new or ridiculous.
PS yes that would mean some people might be triaged and then told "I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do for you" but I hate to break this to you but that is exactly what did happen anyway during the pandemic, for Covid and for other stuff. So if you think everyone always gets treated for everything under every circumstances no matter what then you're the one being ridiculous.
There is a difference between something happening as a matter of necessity and as a matter of policy. Enforced euthanasia of the type you continually advocate on here is generally, and quite reasonably, considered to be bad form in polite society.
In fact, the only thing worse than lockdown would have been letting the virus continue to spread freely.
And the catpoo on top of the fairy cake is that those who complained loudest about lockdown also complained about the lighter restrictions that might have avoided, or massively reduced, the need for lockdown 2 and 3.
The link between restrictions and virus spread was shown time and again to be far more complex than the 'thermostat' connection propounded by some on here.
And of course, lockoown proponents never look at the other side of the ledger, the devastating impact on mental health, on exercise regimes, on kids' education, on cancer outcomes, the public purse, the list just goes on and gets longer with each passing month.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
"We should have just let it rip crowd" refuse to acknowledge that only a tiny proportion of the country had got Covid by December 2020.
They cling to the fantasy of "everyone secretly got it." peddled by charlatans like Gupta.
False dichotomy. "Letting it rip" is not the only alternative to lockdown.
In fact, the only thing worse than lockdown would have been letting the virus continue to spread freely.
And the catpoo on top of the fairy cake is that those who complained loudest about lockdown also complained about the lighter restrictions that might have avoided, or massively reduced, the need for lockdown 2 and 3.
Lighter restrictions might have made the need for lockdown 2 and 3 be less than zero? Interesting concept.
Oh don't be a t***! Lockdowns worked, infact Johnson's failure to act (lockdown) in September 2020 made the death rate in the Winter of 2020/2021 even worse than was necessary.
Let's give Johnson and the Conservatives all the credit for inventing the vaccines. However, until they had invented the vaccines they needed a blunt object to reduce Covid deaths, lockdown was that blunt object. It was unpleasant, but at least I'm still here to carp on about it...oh, and so are you...and Barty...and Moonshine...and Misty.
The comparison is November 1990. Thatcha brought down by the ludicrous poll tax and her own sneering arrogance to her colleagues. Millions of punters with unpayable and unfair bills.
Major got a bounce because he said "no more Poll Tax". What Truss is doing would have been like Major coming in having repeatedly and condescendingly said he doesn't believe in handouts and then refusing to intervene, telling people that they should get a better job or work harder to pay the bill.
Kinnock would have been "awight" had that happened. As Starmer will be.
Your posting on this issue is becoming a waste of your time and ours. You've predicted that Truss will do nothing on COL. Others have predicted that she'll do a range of things. We have no fresh information either way, so until we do, there's really no point in continuing to churn out your endlessly negative drivel.
Lockdown was neither necessary (other countries survived without it) nor successful on our priorities.
I backed it. I apologise, I was completely wrong. I'll never back another one again.
It was the overwhelming Will of the People, barty, whether you like it or not. Cast your mind back to polling on the subject where the general public was invariably to the lockdowner side of SKS, whether you like it or not. ask yourself whether the system would have lasted 24 hours without the overwhelming consent of the governed. I don't say that justifies anything, but then I am also no fan of putting complex constitutional questions to the lumpenproletariat and enacting their hilariously wrong answers. You ostensibly are.
Your elitism is showing.
If people wanted to stay at home to hide from the virus, they could have done that without government legislation.
Many did, that's why the first wave probably peaked before lockdown.
They didn't *just* want that, they overwhelmingly wanted compulsory lockdown.
So what? They overwhelmingly wanted nightclubs closed permanently, and they didn't get that.
Edit: And, of course, the reason that the support for lockdown was overwhelming is that most people believed all the doom they were getting from the TV news and politicians, because any alternative viewpoint was marginalised (at best). Had the government and TV news been more nuanced, the public would have reacted in a more nuanced manner.
Genuinely, Boris's most valuable legacy is the permanent discreditation of any form of lockdown by Partygate. It's just not gonna happen again. Which is excellent but has no bearing on the inevitability of it in 2020.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
"We should have just let it rip crowd" refuse to acknowledge that only a tiny proportion of the country had got Covid by December 2020.
They cling to the fantasy of "everyone secretly got it." peddled by charlatans like Gupta.
The let it rip argument assumes that restrictions acted like some kind of 'thermostat' control on the virus.
That assumption is not correct. The relationship was far more complex, if it existed at all.
I must say I was pretty much convinced that lockdown was an absolutely necessary evil, but now seeing the calibre of the arguments that wish to revise that history..
..I'm still pretty much convinced that lockdown was an absolutely necessary evil.
The immediate problem is there is not enough gas, causing prices to skyrocket as countries outbid each other.
Thinking outside the box, should we be trying to come to an international agreement around gas/energy rationing (particularly in Europe)? Curtailing usage would reduce the size of price increases over winter and all the negative effects that will have.
This is being attempted for the EU. The Germans are pushing the proposal for a 15% cut IIRC
Lockdown was neither necessary (other countries survived without it) nor successful on our priorities.
I backed it. I apologise, I was completely wrong. I'll never back another one again.
It was the overwhelming Will of the People, barty, whether you like it or not. Cast your mind back to polling on the subject where the general public was invariably to the lockdowner side of SKS, whether you like it or not. ask yourself whether the system would have lasted 24 hours without the overwhelming consent of the governed. I don't say that justifies anything, but then I am also no fan of putting complex constitutional questions to the lumpenproletariat and enacting their hilariously wrong answers. You ostensibly are.
Your elitism is showing.
If people wanted to stay at home to hide from the virus, they could have done that without government legislation.
Many did, that's why the first wave probably peaked before lockdown.
They didn't *just* want that, they overwhelmingly wanted compulsory lockdown.
So what? They overwhelmingly wanted nightclubs closed permanently, and they didn't get that.
No, but staying at home is a different undertaking from getting up at 2 am to picket a nightclub.
Lockdown was neither necessary (other countries survived without it) nor successful on our priorities.
I backed it. I apologise, I was completely wrong. I'll never back another one again.
It was the overwhelming Will of the People, barty, whether you like it or not. Cast your mind back to polling on the subject where the general public was invariably to the lockdowner side of SKS, whether you like it or not. ask yourself whether the system would have lasted 24 hours without the overwhelming consent of the governed. I don't say that justifies anything, but then I am also no fan of putting complex constitutional questions to the lumpenproletariat and enacting their hilariously wrong answers. You ostensibly are.
Your elitism is showing.
If people wanted to stay at home to hide from the virus, they could have done that without government legislation.
Many did, that's why the first wave probably peaked before lockdown.
So without legislation teachers could have chosen to stay at home to hide from the virus, and parents could have chosen to not let their kids go to school. Have I got that right? If so, schools would have ended up being shut anyway.
Anyway, the idea that schools could have stayed open to all (remember, they stayed open for the vulnerable and key workers) when a virus that makes people ill is rampaging through the population is for the birds.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
Of course we would have trashed the NHS. Even more so than actually happened. Unless you are suggesting that, as part of your policy, we should simply refuse to treat anyone who had covid and let them die in the streets then not locking down would have increased hospital admissions massively.
You really are ridiculous on this subject.
We should have triaged and treated everyone with Covid as well as we could.
The concept of triage is not new or ridiculous.
PS yes that would mean some people might be triaged and then told "I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do for you" but I hate to break this to you but that is exactly what did happen anyway during the pandemic, for Covid and for other stuff. So if you think everyone always gets treated for everything under every circumstances no matter what then you're the one being ridiculous.
There is a difference between something happening as a matter of necessity and as a matter of policy. Enforced euthanasia of the type you continually advocate on here is generally, and quite reasonably, considered to be bad form in polite society.
We should go full Logan's Run. Live like @Leon until a set age, then be euthanised. Solves pensions, NHS, and the housing problem all at a stroke.
Incidentally I have always found it mildly amusing in that context that Michael York's stepson is called Rick McCallam.
I would still be willing to bet on a modest Truss lead.
I refuse to believe that she wants to enter office and by December/January be the most unpopular PM of all time.
She has never held a view or political position for any longer than once it ceases to be politically advantageous to her.
There will be action on energy bills because simply put there has to be unless Truss wants to be irrecoverably holed below the waterline in a matter of weeks. Top tip: she doesn’t.
Of course there will be action. But it will be too little too late for a number of reasons: 1. The latest mental price cap is unveiled on Friday. Then we have a week and a half where the Tory party and the government refuse to engage on the subject. 2. Truss will cut taxes as the priority. We know this because her team are telling the Times. That it won't have been run through the OBR & Treasury because there isn't time 3. This tells us two things: that as it is quickly modelled the experts will point out how fucking insane borrowing to fund tax cuts for the well off is and then arguments will break out; and that if they haven't modelled the big priority they won't have modelled the thing she repeatedly and stridently tells us she won't do is 4. Truss appears to be an absolute believer in her beliefs. Brits are skivers. They don't deserve a handout. Only the earn more pay less tax carrot will force them to work. So when she keeps saying "no handouts" why do some of her supporters believe she is lying?
She may not want to become unpopular, but her wing of the Tory Party has dug itself a zealotry pit and shows no sign of wanting to extract itself. Its response to the various problems hasn't just been to deny reality, its been to sneer whilst doing so. Not a good look.
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
If you have a capacity of c. 100,000 and existing utilisation of 75,000, how many people do you fit in on top of that? Note as well that the closer you get to capacity, the harder it is, and in many hospitals you'll already be over capacity (above 90% and you're in serious trouble) As it was, we added a bit under 20,000 in the first wave. They called the second lockdown when they could see they were heading over 15,000 additions (in winter, when the existing utilisation is closer to 85,000+) In the third one, they added nearly 35,000, and yes, heavy triaging was going on and we'll be feeling the effects of that for a long time.
With your airy "Oh, it would have been more swamped" - we'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of extra beds needed.
If people need intensive care to stay alive, then removing that intensive care is pretty sure to result in them being dead. To a slightly lesser extent, hospitalisation itself. It's rare that people go to hospital for fun.
And the ones who most benefited from ICU and hospitalisation were the younger ones and those without serious conditions. Unsurprisingly.
Fair points, but why didn't Sweden's health system collapse as you outline?
The main ones are:
1 - More voluntary compliance with requested restrictions (notably here, the moment things became voluntary, those who most shouted that we should have gone for voluntary compliance instantly stated they weren't doing it). The amount of people traveling for any purpose fell off a cliff. 2 - Much less housing density in terms of population in a small place (the one exception, Stockholm, had bad outcomes). (The above two had the largest impacts) 3 - Smaller household units 4 - A culture of greater social distance naturally
To add to the above, until the beginning of February this year, Sweden still had restrictions on group sizes at public gatherings, still had the requirement to provide vaccination certificates at events, still had restrictions on group sizes inside pubs and restaurants, still had social distancing restrictions in shops and shopping centres, still had restrictions against major indoor events, and still advised the general public to avoid social gatherings, etc. Sweden had more restrictions than England at the beginning of this year, as well as at other times throughout this pandemic. (The "Sweden!" lot try to imply that Sweden did nothing. Sure.)
Its closure was announced five years ago due to safety concerns after the government ended subsidy funding for maintenance and upgrades needed to keep it going. At the time, ministers said its closure would save the UK £750m over 10 years by switching the focus on securing the country's energy needs to different 'cleaner' alternatives, including the importation of liquid gas from the Middle East. However, critics warned the move would leave the UK at the mercy of the potentially volatile global gas market while forcing it to compete with other countries to attract imports.
Just over a year ago, business secretary Kwasi Kwanteng dismissed concerns raised by MPs on a parliamentary select committee over rising gas prices and a reliance on Russian gas. He said he was not convinced by calls for more domestic gas storage and described criticism of the closure of the Rough storage facility as "a bit of a red herring".
Interesting analysis by @ShippersUnbound@thetimes on state of the Union. IMO what shld most alarm Unionists throughout UK is English indifference: 42% in 🏴 wld welcome or aren't bothered by 🏴 separation, goes up to 55% re Irish unification @YouGov
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
If you have a capacity of c. 100,000 and existing utilisation of 75,000, how many people do you fit in on top of that? Note as well that the closer you get to capacity, the harder it is, and in many hospitals you'll already be over capacity (above 90% and you're in serious trouble) As it was, we added a bit under 20,000 in the first wave. They called the second lockdown when they could see they were heading over 15,000 additions (in winter, when the existing utilisation is closer to 85,000+) In the third one, they added nearly 35,000, and yes, heavy triaging was going on and we'll be feeling the effects of that for a long time.
With your airy "Oh, it would have been more swamped" - we'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of extra beds needed.
If people need intensive care to stay alive, then removing that intensive care is pretty sure to result in them being dead. To a slightly lesser extent, hospitalisation itself. It's rare that people go to hospital for fun.
And the ones who most benefited from ICU and hospitalisation were the younger ones and those without serious conditions. Unsurprisingly.
Fair points, but why didn't Sweden's health system collapse as you outline?
The main ones are:
1 - More voluntary compliance with requested restrictions (notably here, the moment things became voluntary, those who most shouted that we should have gone for voluntary compliance instantly stated they weren't doing it). The amount of people traveling for any purpose fell off a cliff. 2 - Much less housing density in terms of population in a small place (the one exception, Stockholm, had bad outcomes). (The above two had the largest impacts) 3 - Smaller household units 4 - A culture of greater social distance naturally
To add to the above, until the beginning of February this year, Sweden still had restrictions on group sizes at public gatherings, still had the requirement to provide vaccination certificates at events, still had restrictions on group sizes inside pubs and restaurants, still had social distancing restrictions in shops and shopping centres, still had restrictions against major indoor events, and still advised the general public to avoid social gatherings, etc. Sweden had more restrictions than England at the beginning of this year, as well as at other times throughout this pandemic. (The "Sweden!" lot try to imply that Sweden did nothing. Sure.)
Its public buildings are also rather better designed, allowing for better ventilation, and its schools have much smaller classes.
Genuinely, Boris's most valuable legacy is the permanent discreditation of any form of lockdown by Partygate. It's just not gonna happen again. Which is excellent but has no bearing on the inevitability of it in 2020.
One day I hope there will be an examination of the intense propaganda campaign waged on the people of Britain throughout lockdown.
Who ran it? how did they execute it? Who funded it? who approved it?
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
If you have a capacity of c. 100,000 and existing utilisation of 75,000, how many people do you fit in on top of that? Note as well that the closer you get to capacity, the harder it is, and in many hospitals you'll already be over capacity (above 90% and you're in serious trouble) As it was, we added a bit under 20,000 in the first wave. They called the second lockdown when they could see they were heading over 15,000 additions (in winter, when the existing utilisation is closer to 85,000+) In the third one, they added nearly 35,000, and yes, heavy triaging was going on and we'll be feeling the effects of that for a long time.
With your airy "Oh, it would have been more swamped" - we'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of extra beds needed.
If people need intensive care to stay alive, then removing that intensive care is pretty sure to result in them being dead. To a slightly lesser extent, hospitalisation itself. It's rare that people go to hospital for fun.
And the ones who most benefited from ICU and hospitalisation were the younger ones and those without serious conditions. Unsurprisingly.
Fair points, but why didn't Sweden's health system collapse as you outline?
Much lower population density and a much higher incidence of remote working prior to the pandemic. But even so they did terribly in comparison with their neighbours.
I would still be willing to bet on a modest Truss lead.
I refuse to believe that she wants to enter office and by December/January be the most unpopular PM of all time.
She has never held a view or political position for any longer than once it ceases to be politically advantageous to her.
There will be action on energy bills because simply put there has to be unless Truss wants to be irrecoverably holed below the waterline in a matter of weeks. Top tip: she doesn’t.
Of course there will be action. But it will be too little too late for a number of reasons: 1. The latest mental price cap is unveiled on Friday. Then we have a week and a half where the Tory party and the government refuse to engage on the subject. 2. Truss will cut taxes as the priority. We know this because her team are telling the Times. That it won't have been run through the OBR & Treasury because there isn't time 3. This tells us two things: that as it is quickly modelled the experts will point out how fucking insane borrowing to fund tax cuts for the well off is and then arguments will break out; and that if they haven't modelled the big priority they won't have modelled the thing she repeatedly and stridently tells us she won't do is 4. Truss appears to be an absolute believer in her beliefs. Brits are skivers. They don't deserve a handout. Only the earn more pay less tax carrot will force them to work. So when she keeps saying "no handouts" why do some of her supporters believe she is lying?
She may not want to become unpopular, but her wing of the Tory Party has dug itself a zealotry pit and shows no sign of wanting to extract itself. Its response to the various problems hasn't just been to deny reality, its been to sneer whilst doing so. Not a good look.
Don’t put too much stock in number 4. She’s an absolute believer in her beliefs until she isn’t. She’s proven that all the way through her career.
Just my opinion, but I still think we are headed for a price cap freeze. Probably on top of the tax cuts too.
And I asked the waiter for bruschetta and pronounced it brooshetta as posh Italians have told me it is NOT broosketta and I like to do it the posh way
But the Italian waiter just called it broosketta
😶😶😶
What is right???
My wife, who is fluent in Italian calls it "broosketta". I am fluent in Brummie and call it "brooshetta". I think you will find the pronunciation guides on Google will confirm I am correct.
If it happened Keir Starmer's strategy would be vindicated and he would be the best Labour performer in many years, particularly in one election cycle. To come from 200 seats to a majority is very rare indeed
I still really struggle to see it. Writing off Scotland for Labour (which I think is reasonable) and noting that Labour already have more than half the seats in Wales, well over 100 of the gains need to come in England. Regaining everything they lost in England in 2019 doesn't even get them halfway there.
Not saying it's impossible, but the by-elections and local elections don't yet hint at that sort of surge.
Have you factored in that Wales loses the most seats under the new boundaries? That makes the demands on English Labour even more daunting.
The immediate problem is there is not enough gas, causing prices to skyrocket as countries outbid each other.
Thinking outside the box, should we be trying to come to an international agreement around gas/energy rationing (particularly in Europe)? Curtailing usage would reduce the size of price increases over winter and all the negative effects that will have.
This is being attempted for the EU. The Germans are pushing the proposal for a 15% cut IIRC
A purchasing cartel might be the only way out of this, but it does rather depend on a lot of countries agreeing to it.
Who is bidding up the price? Is is 90% Europe or is the demand worldwide?
Entirely consistent with recent personal experience (the A&E wait, not the death). In my case 24h from accident to ward admission. After that they got their skates on, but it was a grim start.
An excellent and detailed analysis. And, sadly, a brilliant example of Brandolini's Law (the effort required to counter bullshit is orders of magnitude greater than that required to generate it).
The Telegraph came up with their crap in order to seed the idea that the excess deaths were due to lockdown. Didn't need any effort for Sarah Knapton to come up with it, and instantly publicised by the Usual Suspects (and added to the "we now know..." lines).
John Burn-Murdoch put huge amounts of effort in to deep dive what is happening and where the excess deaths are and concluded it's down to the healthcare system collapse, especially in A&E and ambulances. What are the odds it gets the attention it deserves? Versus the odds that it vanishes under the Telegraph's crap?
The healthcare system collapse now is due to lockdown though.
Had we not locked down, had we allowed Covid to take its course, then we'd have had extra fatalities then, sure, but we wouldn't have trashed the future or the NHS for the long-term by abolishing everything else leading to mammoth waiting lists etc.
People who would have died from Covid wouldn't be on any waiting lists now. People who survived, wouldn't be paying the price of lockdown.
No, it's not. It's got very little to do with that. As Burn-Murdoch analyses. It's got most to do with the soaring waits in A&E and ambulances post-July 2021. But you will never accept that, because you hated lockdown (Can't blame you there; I hated it too) and therefore have to insist that bad things that happen must have come from it.
And why did it soar post-July 2021 (the unlocking)? Surely not because people who had been complying by staying at home to protect the NHS finally sought treatment for what had been afflicting them for some time?
No. Because we still had thousands of people going to hospital for covid. Far less than earlier, but a sustained and consistent high rate of utilisation of beds.
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact. It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
No but people who could have been treated sooner for diseases like diabetes etc that are not urgently life-threatening but lead to cardiovascular etc demands later on if left untreated could have been seen sooner. Similar for cancer etc
1 - The excess deaths are not in the diabetes and cancer area, but across the board. 2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
If we hadn't had lockdown then the NHS wouldn't have been more swamped with Covid than it was.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Head. Desk. If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid. By the time of the second lockdown, about 9% By the third lockdown, about 12% (Source - ONS antibodies survey). That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
"We should have just let it rip crowd" refuse to acknowledge that only a tiny proportion of the country had got Covid by December 2020.
They cling to the fantasy of "everyone secretly got it." peddled by charlatans like Gupta.
The let it rip argument assumes that restrictions acted like some kind of 'thermostat' control on the virus.
That assumption is not correct. The relationship was far more complex, if it existed at all.
That infections dropped after lockdowns were announced, every time, was a pure coincidence. Just like that "meta-analysis"* by a trio of hard right economists "proved" that lockdowns and border closures had no impact on covid spread.
When one of them was asked, "So why didn't Australia or New Zealand see big outbreaks if their border closures and lockdowns had no effect?" the answer was "Don't know. Could have been just luck."
* A meta-analysis that filers out all bar one of tens of thousands of studies and then reverses the conclusions of that one remaining one is not what most would call a meta-analysis. However, the Toby Disciples instantly believed it and accepted it as fact.
Genuinely, Boris's most valuable legacy is the permanent discreditation of any form of lockdown by Partygate. It's just not gonna happen again. Which is excellent but has no bearing on the inevitability of it in 2020.
One day I hope there will be an examination of the intense propaganda campaign waged on the people of Britain throughout lockdown.
Who ran it? how did they execute it? Who funded it? who approved it?
Not sure it was a propaganda campaign - didn't need one the way the public caved. Our gov acted cus other European govs acted. That was the big factor IMO. Turns out we didn't have the checks and balances to protect fundamentals such as personal choice, the ability for parents to see children, the right to attend school, the right to leave the country, etc etc etc.
And I asked the waiter for bruschetta and pronounced it brooshetta as posh Italians have told me it is NOT broosketta and I like to do it the posh way
But the Italian waiter just called it broosketta
😶😶😶
What is right???
he thinks he is conforming to your expectations.
There was a cheap French table wine called Piat d'Or heavily advertised on telly. it was 100% exported to the UK but then a bit had to be re-exported to the restaurants of Calais because sophisticated day trippers knew it was what the french drink.
Comments
When you're normally running at 85%+ utilisation, adding 10-15% on top consistently makes a big impact.
It's also unlikely that these people would be phoning ambulances and getting categorised in the "emergency" category to seek treatment, isn't it? Few people would be waiting months during a heart attack in order to call for an ambulance.
Simply using words like triage doesn't mean you actually understand them or what is involved with them. Letting people die just because they are old and have no value in your eyes is not the way to run a health service or a country, no matter how much you personally might advocate it.
Thinking outside the box, should we be trying to come to an international agreement around gas/energy rationing (particularly in Europe)? Curtailing usage would reduce the size of price increases over winter and all the negative effects that will have.
It isn't hard to identify that we are circling the drain, but much like the government, he doesn't seem to be able to find a suitable plug.
A universal price cap is not it.
I hope he starts to show some signs of life soon, as he's going to be prime minister.
The problem is that preventing the extra Covid deaths had a price too. Too many people like to act as if preventing the extra Covid deaths was a "no-brainer" with no downsides and no price to pay.
Yes more people would have presented to the NHS with Covid, but many of those more people would have been told there was nothing the NHS could do for them and they would either live or die depending upon if they recovered or not. If they didn't recover, they'd have died, and that's a sad price for them to pay and their families but that wouldn't then have entailed cancelling society for two years leading to the problems we see today.
https://unherd.com/2022/08/the-tories-are-criminally-blind/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3&mc_cid=e952284470&mc_eid=16eb4e1890
What are you going to ping off and sort next then? Can you get that Einstein Doomsday Clock thing ticking towards midnight back a couple of hours? And a slushy daiquiri please.
Rationing treatment based upon what's available to whoever needs it, is how the NHS has always operated. You act as if I'm presenting some unthinkable atrocity in suggesting the price was not worth paying to keep those people alive, but that is literally how the NHS always has and always will operate.
I'd love to see some decent QALY figures showing what lockdown cost, including both monetary values and monetary equivalents for the loss of education, civil liberties etc - versus the years of lives "saved" and see how that compares to non-pandemic NICE style QALY figures at the best of times.
That you think "letting people die" is unthinkable just shows you're running with emotions and divorced from reality.
Put that first lockdown back three days, you double the problem. Put it back a week, you quadruple it. Delay it a fortnight, the problem becomes sixteen times bigger and at some point you don't even have the capacity to triage.
There's no point stamping one's feet that you don't want things to work that way, or writing an elegant polemic about how it shouldn't be that way. Maths does what it does whether you vote for it or not.
And the trauma to socieity in that situation is one that would scar everyone who lived through it and kill the Conservative party forever.
Bring in your lockdown three days sooner and you haven't halved the problem, as if you just come out of lockdown sooner then the virus is still there waiting to start exponentially growing all over again.
Running out of capacity would have been better than the alternative. Allow people to die or recover, mourn those who die, those who recover haven't had the entire country mortgaged to the hilt to keep them alive storing up future deaths waiting to happen.
... We're talking about the people in the healthcare system. Who skewed younger, particularly those in ICU.
Half of those in ICU were under 60.
A quarter weren't even fifty yet.
90%+ did not have severe pre-existing conditions.
Hell, a sixth of the women in ICU last summer were pregnant.
Those are the ones you would condemn to death, and say "well, at least they're not on the waiting lists now."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/22/china-drought-causes-yangtze-river-to-dry-up-sparking-shortage-of-hydropower
Another upward headwind to global lng prices.
By the way up thread people were saying covid hasn’t caused the energy crisis. Well it has had a major impact on crude refining capacity, which is primarily what led to spikes in diesel, jet and gasoline this year. But China’s continued covid lockdowns have conversely tempered crude prices in 2022.
That would often prioritise the routine treatment of elderly people over the emergency treatment of the young. You're all over the place.
The real failing here is that we are two years, seven months and three and a bit weeks on from Covid being declared a global emergency, and yet the government have done next to nothing to expand our training of medical staff to deal with the resulting increased demand on the health service.
Blaming lockdown (whether someone thinks we locked down too much, or not enough) is just a way to let them off the hook.
2 - Your apparent belief that if the NHS was more swamped with covid, we'd somehow have been able to treat more cancer patients alongside (and kept them more separate?) and that having far more NHS stuff off sick with covid would have helped capacity does seem rather optimistic.
Who would have thought that the cynical weaponisation of the nation's drooling worship of the NHS in 2016 would have adverse consequences of any kind?
The deaths are the people who died. There may have been some incremental deaths from people who might have survived had they gone to ICU but couldn't, but they wouldn't be the entirety of the deaths and you are using false statistics to claim otherwise.
The problem with Covid is that approach went out the window and instead we dedicated the entire country for two years to just Covid, rather than saying in more circumstances "if you want to avoid Covid, you need to take more responsibility for that yourself" or "if you catch Covid and get sick, we may not be able to treat you".
How long do you think it takes to expand training of medical staff? This is like the pregnancy critical pathway problem, you can have 9 times as many women but you still can't get a birth in just one month. Medical training takes years.
Besides, we give too much money to the NHS already. Its the one department that's never faced proper austerity and ratchetting up spending on the NHS is a self-fulfilling prophecy to just have more NHS demands in the future. The NHS needs to have a budget then cope as well as it can, within its budget. If that means telling more people than we do today "we can't help you" then that might be the price, but its a price the NHS has always paid.
Let’s look at how we reach that conclusion, by taking a deep-dive into non-Covid excess mortality and its possible causes
https://www.ft.com/content/f36c5daa-9c14-4a92-9136-19b26508b9d2 https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1562004612172873728/photo/1
We were in the midst of wholesale school closures, roundly applauded by most.
It would have been more swamped at the peak, but then that peak would have entailed telling more people "we can't help you" and the peak would have been over sooner and then the downhill would have happened sooner. Exponential figures again.
Instead we "flattened the sombrero" with lockdown so that the NHS had nothing but Covid for two years, rather than 3 horrific months of Covid then it was done.
Howls of derisive laughter.
#stoprewritinghistory
I backed it. I apologise, I was completely wrong. I'll never back another one again.
LOL
I refuse to believe that she wants to enter office and by December/January be the most unpopular PM of all time.
She has never held a view or political position for any longer than once it ceases to be politically advantageous to her.
There will be action on energy bills because simply put there has to be unless Truss wants to be irrecoverably holed below the waterline in a matter of weeks. Top tip: she doesn’t.
This post below sums up the poster's grasp of reality and humanity (or rather, lack thereof). What is even more remarkable is that it got a like from @state_go_away .
In fact, the only thing worse than lockdown would have been letting the virus continue to spread freely.
And the catpoo on top of the fairy cake is that those who complained loudest about lockdown also complained about the lighter restrictions that might have avoided, or massively reduced, the need for lockdown 2 and 3.
"The question now is whether she will come good on her promise to deliver £50bn worth of immediate tax cuts or whether she now agrees with Rishi that the priority must first be to grip inflation and help people with the cost of living."
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/3545028#Comment_3545028
Your elitism is showing.
Desk.
If you'd only ever come up with actual facts and numbers supporting your position - well, you'd not bother trying it, anyway.
During the first wave, under 5% of the country had been exposed to covid.
By the time of the second lockdown, about 9%
By the third lockdown, about 12%
(Source - ONS antibodies survey).
That means we had LOADS of doubling left to do.
If you have a capacity of c. 100,000 and existing utilisation of 75,000, how many people do you fit in on top of that?
Note as well that the closer you get to capacity, the harder it is, and in many hospitals you'll already be over capacity (above 90% and you're in serious trouble)
As it was, we added a bit under 20,000 in the first wave.
They called the second lockdown when they could see they were heading over 15,000 additions (in winter, when the existing utilisation is closer to 85,000+)
In the third one, they added nearly 35,000, and yes, heavy triaging was going on and we'll be feeling the effects of that for a long time.
With your airy "Oh, it would have been more swamped" - we'd be looking at hundreds of thousands of extra beds needed.
If people need intensive care to stay alive, then removing that intensive care is pretty sure to result in them being dead. To a slightly lesser extent, hospitalisation itself. It's rare that people go to hospital for fun.
And the ones who most benefited from ICU and hospitalisation were the younger ones and those without serious conditions. Unsurprisingly.
The tier system seriously sucked. What a ****** awful garbage policy that was.
Many did, that's why the first wave probably peaked before lockdown.
I was, at the time of Lockdowns 2 and 3, certain that we could have avoided them if we'd gone hard on Tier 3. But the moment any restrictions were imposed, you had the "skeptics" whining that "It's false positives," or "But look at Sweden," or "But if we cherry pick out this small part of this area, cases are going down."
Where I was, we were in Tier 2 and all the Councils were asking for us to go to Tier 3 (across the political spectrum). But the local Tory MPs were complaining to the Government that we needed to decrease to Tier 1.
Three weeks later, we were in lockdown.
I banged on and on until I was blue in the face about "finding the low hanging fruit" and properly analysing the effects of each separate intervention, but every possible intervention was dismissed as useless. Leaving us with nothing but lockdown.
Lockdown is the result of a failure of public health policy. It is hugely damaging. And it is used when not locking down is worse.
Which is really strange, given it was devised by civil servants (who mostly commute) and politicians (90% of whom own second homes).
Some elements were blatantly silly - banning parkrun while obesity was a major comorbidity. Madness.
And the fact young people, particularly in education, were not recompensed in some way is a disgrace.
They cling to the fantasy of "everyone secretly got it." peddled by charlatans like Gupta.
But they refused to do a cost/benefit analysis, for a reason which should be obvious to any government watcher.
The link between restrictions and virus spread was shown time and again to be far more complex than the 'thermostat' connection propounded by some on here.
And of course, lockoown proponents never look at the other side of the ledger, the devastating impact on mental health, on exercise regimes, on kids' education, on cancer outcomes, the public purse, the list just goes on and gets longer with each passing month.
Let's give Johnson and the Conservatives all the credit for inventing the vaccines. However, until they had invented the vaccines they needed a blunt object to reduce Covid deaths, lockdown was that blunt object. It was unpleasant, but at least I'm still here to carp on about it...oh, and so are you...and Barty...and Moonshine...and Misty.
Edit: And, of course, the reason that the support for lockdown was overwhelming is that most people believed all the doom they were getting from the TV news and politicians, because any alternative viewpoint was marginalised (at best). Had the government and TV news been more nuanced, the public would have reacted in a more nuanced manner.
That assumption is not correct. The relationship was far more complex, if it existed at all.
..I'm still pretty much convinced that lockdown was an absolutely necessary evil.
@JavierBlas
·
1h
MUST READ: Fingrid, the grid operator in Finland, isn't isn't pulling any punches about the energy crisis:
"Finns should be prepared for possible power outages caused by electricity shortages this coming winter"
Very clear, strong and transparent warning
https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1562024126868606976
AND THIS IS IMPORTANT
I’m having lunch right here with the kiddo
And I asked the waiter for bruschetta and pronounced it brooshetta as posh Italians have told me it is NOT broosketta and I like to do it the posh way
But the Italian waiter just called it broosketta
😶😶😶
What is right???
Anyway, the idea that schools could have stayed open to all (remember, they stayed open for the vulnerable and key workers) when a virus that makes people ill is rampaging through the population is for the birds.
Incidentally I have always found it mildly amusing in that context that Michael York's stepson is called Rick McCallam.
1. The latest mental price cap is unveiled on Friday. Then we have a week and a half where the Tory party and the government refuse to engage on the subject.
2. Truss will cut taxes as the priority. We know this because her team are telling the Times. That it won't have been run through the OBR & Treasury because there isn't time
3. This tells us two things: that as it is quickly modelled the experts will point out how fucking insane borrowing to fund tax cuts for the well off is and then arguments will break out; and that if they haven't modelled the big priority they won't have modelled the thing she repeatedly and stridently tells us she won't do is
4. Truss appears to be an absolute believer in her beliefs. Brits are skivers. They don't deserve a handout. Only the earn more pay less tax carrot will force them to work. So when she keeps saying "no handouts" why do some of her supporters believe she is lying?
She may not want to become unpopular, but her wing of the Tory Party has dug itself a zealotry pit and shows no sign of wanting to extract itself. Its response to the various problems hasn't just been to deny reality, its been to sneer whilst doing so. Not a good look.
1 - More voluntary compliance with requested restrictions (notably here, the moment things became voluntary, those who most shouted that we should have gone for voluntary compliance instantly stated they weren't doing it). The amount of people traveling for any purpose fell off a cliff.
2 - Much less housing density in terms of population in a small place (the one exception, Stockholm, had bad outcomes).
(The above two had the largest impacts)
3 - Smaller household units
4 - A culture of greater social distance naturally
To add to the above, until the beginning of February this year, Sweden still had restrictions on group sizes at public gatherings, still had the requirement to provide vaccination certificates at events, still had restrictions on group sizes inside pubs and restaurants, still had social distancing restrictions in shops and shopping centres, still had restrictions against major indoor events, and still advised the general public to avoid social gatherings, etc. Sweden had more restrictions than England at the beginning of this year, as well as at other times throughout this pandemic.
(The "Sweden!" lot try to imply that Sweden did nothing. Sure.)
https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/huge-gas-storage-site-holderness-7485735
Its closure was announced five years ago due to safety concerns after the government ended subsidy funding for maintenance and upgrades needed to keep it going.
At the time, ministers said its closure would save the UK £750m over 10 years by switching the focus on securing the country's energy needs to different 'cleaner' alternatives, including the importation of liquid gas from the Middle East. However, critics warned the move would leave the UK at the mercy of the potentially volatile global gas market while forcing it to compete with other countries to attract imports.
Just over a year ago, business secretary Kwasi Kwanteng dismissed concerns raised by MPs on a parliamentary select committee over rising gas prices and a reliance on Russian gas. He said he was not convinced by calls for more domestic gas storage and described criticism of the closure of the Rough storage facility as "a bit of a red herring".
Saving of £750m over 10 years LOL
https://twitter.com/dlidington/status/1561390942770405377?s=21&t=xp64aWKqX-FzMDFU9002QQ
One day I hope there will be an examination of the intense propaganda campaign waged on the people of Britain throughout lockdown.
Who ran it? how did they execute it? Who funded it? who approved it?
The Tories will kick her out in a year or so.
I wonder if it is a regional thing. He’s from Naples
Just my opinion, but I still think we are headed for a price cap freeze. Probably on top of the tax cuts too.
Sweeties for all.
Who is bidding up the price? Is is 90% Europe or is the demand worldwide?
Just like that "meta-analysis"* by a trio of hard right economists "proved" that lockdowns and border closures had no impact on covid spread.
When one of them was asked, "So why didn't Australia or New Zealand see big outbreaks if their border closures and lockdowns had no effect?" the answer was "Don't know. Could have been just luck."
* A meta-analysis that filers out all bar one of tens of thousands of studies and then reverses the conclusions of that one remaining one is not what most would call a meta-analysis. However, the Toby Disciples instantly believed it and accepted it as fact.
There was a cheap French table wine called Piat d'Or heavily advertised on telly. it was 100% exported to the UK but then a bit had to be re-exported to the restaurants of Calais because sophisticated day trippers knew it was what the french drink.