The bit missing from the Guardian article is the rate of refusal - what percentage are being turned down?
You will expect the number of rejected schemes to go up, if the number of overall schemes is increasing (the number of applications for solar schemes is through the roof)
There may also be a rush of hastily designed/planned schemes as part of such an increase.
Without such information it is just Daily Mailing from the other point of view.
Do journalists even understand what percentages are?
Don't get me started on percentages v percentage points.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
The bit missing from the Guardian article is the rate of refusal - what percentage are being turned down?
You will expect the number of rejected schemes to go up, if the number of overall schemes is increasing (the number of applications for solar schemes is through the roof)
There may also be a rush of hastily designed/planned schemes as part of such an increase.
Without such information it is just Daily Mailing from the other point of view.
Do journalists even understand what percentages are?
Remarkably. They seem fascinated when interest rates on their mortgages go up.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Look at heart/circulatory excess deaths - heart problems ignored during lockdown?
Look at diabetes - poor diets during lockdown?
Look at liver disease - increased alcohol intake during lockdown?
Also exercise. Gyms were shut with police coming to make sure rules were obeyed. Sports clubs and sports events closed for months on end with all the attendant physical and social harms that caused, especially for young people.
Lockdown wasn't just no good, it was downright evil. It was downright dangerous. Our politicians should be saying sorry to us..
We got half an apology from Sunak.
My brother lives in a shack on a hilltop near Pisac, Peru. He’s eccentric, sometimes crazy, but also fiercely intelligent. One of the smartest people I know (when he’s on form). He can be brutally forensic with data
At the beginning of Covid he told me, witheringly, that the lockdowns were a calamitous mistake, and we were pointlessly sacrificing the future to “save the obese and the very old”
At the time I thought he was being a tad sociopathic. And that he didn’t understand the pandemic
Increasingly, and tragically, I think he was right
Didn't Peru get absolutely smashed by COVID? I salute his bravery in holding that view, even if I don't entirely agree with it.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Look at heart/circulatory excess deaths - heart problems ignored during lockdown?
Look at diabetes - poor diets during lockdown?
Look at liver disease - increased alcohol intake during lockdown?
And, miraculously, only in the UK out of the countries with lockdown.
You're pushing the motivated reasoning a bit further than you can get to.
Meanwhile, the causes of increased harm by ambulance delays and insufficient beads aren't questions, but actually known. The facts of increased heart and diabetic (and liver) problems from having had covid and recovered aren't questions but actually known.
Not even the whole UK. Scotland is seeing a smaller rise in excess deaths than England and Wales. Haven't checked Northern Ireland.
More hustings tonight to discuss the precise positioning of the deckchairs.
Fraid we have to suck it up to support Ukraine, so says Boris.
In a way that will truly do little to maintain support for our support of Ukraine.
Still all these nice pubs, especially ones like the one in the article in London, will be acquired by property developers eager to change them to HMO's.
A facebook group I follow about local restaurants was reporting a bar/restaurant in a part of Durham, popular and well run, was facing an increase from £20K to £55K in its energy bills. At the moment.
People like @RochdalePioneers and I have been saying this for weeks.
A shitstorm is coming for hospitality and these fuckers who run the country or want to run the country don't, yet, have the first clue how to solve it and as each day passes more and more businesses are facing going to the wall.
If they expect us to suffer high energy prices as a consequence of politicians wanting to support Ukraine, and it is the right thing to do, then instead of saying we just need to get on with it they need a plan to mitigate to get through the next 12-24 months.
Governments of all political colours abandoned energy security years ago. The windmills are fine, but we should have kept gas storage facilities or even expanded them as well as building the tidal barrages that campaigners have been highlighting for the last 20 or 30 years.
The UK is finished, but not in the way many of us thought. It has simply become a debtor nation with little control of its infrastructure and economy.
It seems to be ending with a whimper, not a bang...
The bit missing from the Guardian article is the rate of refusal - what percentage are being turned down?
You will expect the number of rejected schemes to go up, if the number of overall schemes is increasing (the number of applications for solar schemes is through the roof)
There may also be a rush of hastily designed/planned schemes as part of such an increase.
Without such information it is just Daily Mailing from the other point of view.
Do journalists even understand what percentages are?
In my UnDictatorship, statistics will be compulsory.
“Today, we are learning about decimation. Get in groups of 10. 9 clubs per group have been provided…”
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
Excess deaths is a weird concept. We should really be experiencing lower deaths than normal, given all the low hanging fruit were knocked off during COVID.
Embarrassingly slanted "survey" - really from the same mindset as the authors of LibDem barcharts, but from our own Government. Even if I agreed with the objective, my toes would curl if I had anything to do with it.
It could be in the Sun or the Daily Express. But they have no shame.
It's scary. If Truss gives Leavers their pounds and inches back, few of them will call her Remainy-face any more. Next on the list for reversal could be the bill their patron saint made a speech against in 1968.
Interesting timing for that "survey".
"3a. If you had a choice, would you want to purchase items (i) in imperial units? (ii) in imperial units alongside a metric equivalent?"
No metric only option.
Nor even a purchase in metric alongside an imperial equivalent.
"Is the Tory Party i) A fucking shambles? ii) A fucking disaster?"
Not to mention the many many lives stunted by lockdown - the children with social skills retarded, educations crippled, their families forced into divorce
The lovers that never met. The friends who lost touch. The scattered families who never saw close relatives for years
The lockdowns were a catastrophic mistake, apart from the first one, when we didn’t know what we were dealing with
Well, if you're fucking sufficiently ovine to obey the government and stay indoors for a year just because Johnson and Hancock told you to then you did it to yourself.
Embarrassingly slanted "survey" - really from the same mindset as the authors of LibDem barcharts, but from our own Government. Even if I agreed with the objective, my toes would curl if I had anything to do with it.
It could be in the Sun or the Daily Express. But they have no shame.
It's scary. If Truss gives Leavers their pounds and inches back, few of them will call her Remainy-face any more. Next on the list for reversal could be the bill their patron saint made a speech against in 1968.
Interesting timing for that "survey".
"3a. If you had a choice, would you want to purchase items (i) in imperial units? (ii) in imperial units alongside a metric equivalent?"
No metric only option.
Nor even a purchase in metric alongside an imperial equivalent.
"Is the Tory Party i) A fucking shambles? ii) A fucking disaster?"
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
Not to mention the many many lives stunted by lockdown - the children with social skills retarded, educations crippled, their families forced into divorce
The lovers that never met. The friends who lost touch. The scattered families who never saw close relatives for years
The lockdowns were a catastrophic mistake, apart from the first one, when we didn’t know what we were dealing with
Lockdown is ok as a temporary thing, where it has a clear beginning and end. It is living in a half way surveillance state that I found hard to cope with. Many people liked the surveillance and rules on social conduct and wanted it to go on forever, it seemed to weirdly fulfill a human need for security. It also fulfills some deep 'progressive' need to take control of the direction of society and reshape it. This is evidenced by the popularity of covid rules being particularly high on the political left and opposed by the political right.
People with boring lives enjoyed the power it gave them to snitch on other people with more interesting lives. That's my explanation.
Indeed it is. But. We urgently need to be expanding domestic energy generation.
Lady Dorries will soon be announcing the Truss government plan to keep people warm, instil a work ethic into the next generation AND solve our domestic power needs.
BRING BACK THE TREADMILL!!!!!
You want an exercise bike hooked up to a dynamo. People can use all that energy they've stored up as fat.
The bit missing from the Guardian article is the rate of refusal - what percentage are being turned down?
You will expect the number of rejected schemes to go up, if the number of overall schemes is increasing (the number of applications for solar schemes is through the roof)
There may also be a rush of hastily designed/planned schemes as part of such an increase.
Without such information it is just Daily Mailing from the other point of view.
Do journalists even understand what percentages are?
Remarkably. They seem fascinated when interest rates on their mortgages go up.
I did read an article recently (forget where) that described a 2/3 reduction in something as a 300% decrease
Embarrassingly slanted "survey" - really from the same mindset as the authors of LibDem barcharts, but from our own Government. Even if I agreed with the objective, my toes would curl if I had anything to do with it.
It could be in the Sun or the Daily Express. But they have no shame.
It's scary. If Truss gives Leavers their pounds and inches back, few of them will call her Remainy-face any more. Next on the list for reversal could be the bill their patron saint made a speech against in 1968.
Interesting timing for that "survey".
It was set up months back - May? We discussed it then.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Look at heart/circulatory excess deaths - heart problems ignored during lockdown?
Look at diabetes - poor diets during lockdown?
Look at liver disease - increased alcohol intake during lockdown?
And, miraculously, only in the UK out of the countries with lockdown.
You're pushing the motivated reasoning a bit further than you can get to.
Meanwhile, the causes of increased harm by ambulance delays and insufficient beads aren't questions, but actually known. The facts of increased heart and diabetic (and liver) problems from having had covid and recovered aren't questions but actually known.
Not even the whole UK. Scotland is seeing a smaller rise in excess deaths than England and Wales. Haven't checked Northern Ireland.
The bit that will be noticed in a month or 2 is that the excess deaths are (as with COVID deaths) biased towards certain groups.
In a world of rolling crises, nice to see the old ones fading as the new ones arrive. Shipping costs falling rapidly now, albeit still elevated from historic levels:
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Look at heart/circulatory excess deaths - heart problems ignored during lockdown?
Look at diabetes - poor diets during lockdown?
Look at liver disease - increased alcohol intake during lockdown?
Also exercise. Gyms were shut with police coming to make sure rules were obeyed. Sports clubs and sports events closed for months on end with all the attendant physical and social harms that caused, especially for young people.
Lockdown wasn't just no good, it was downright evil. It was downright dangerous. Our politicians should be saying sorry to us..
We got half an apology from Sunak.
My brother lives in a shack on a hilltop near Pisac, Peru. He’s eccentric, sometimes crazy, but also fiercely intelligent. One of the smartest people I know (when he’s on form). He can be brutally forensic with data
At the beginning of Covid he told me, witheringly, that the lockdowns were a calamitous mistake, and we were pointlessly sacrificing the future to “save the obese and the very old”
At the time I thought he was being a tad sociopathic. And that he didn’t understand the pandemic
Increasingly, and tragically, I think he was right
Didn't Peru get absolutely smashed by COVID? I salute his bravery in holding that view, even if I don't entirely agree with it.
Totally smashed. Highest Covid death rate in the world?
He is quite a shamanic figure. My bro. Slightly schizo but with a superb brain (when he’s not hearing voices). He taught himself to code and could earn big six figures tomorrow but chooses not to
He is the sort of left field voice you NEED when there is a consensus elsewhere
As I say I dismissed his opinions early on in covid. I now fear I was mistaken and he was probably and prophetically right, in the main
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Look at heart/circulatory excess deaths - heart problems ignored during lockdown?
Look at diabetes - poor diets during lockdown?
Look at liver disease - increased alcohol intake during lockdown?
Also exercise. Gyms were shut with police coming to make sure rules were obeyed. Sports clubs and sports events closed for months on end with all the attendant physical and social harms that caused, especially for young people.
Lockdown wasn't just no good, it was downright evil. It was downright dangerous. Our politicians should be saying sorry to us..
We got half an apology from Sunak.
My brother lives in a shack on a hilltop near Pisac, Peru. He’s eccentric, sometimes crazy, but also fiercely intelligent. One of the smartest people I know (when he’s on form). He can be brutally forensic with data
At the beginning of Covid he told me, witheringly, that the lockdowns were a calamitous mistake, and we were pointlessly sacrificing the future to “save the obese and the very old”
At the time I thought he was being a tad sociopathic. And that he didn’t understand the pandemic
Increasingly, and tragically, I think he was right
Didn't Peru get absolutely smashed by COVID? I salute his bravery in holding that view, even if I don't entirely agree with it.
World leader. 0.6% of everyone died of it. And it locked down like a bastard.
Embarrassingly slanted "survey" - really from the same mindset as the authors of LibDem barcharts, but from our own Government. Even if I agreed with the objective, my toes would curl if I had anything to do with it.
It could be in the Sun or the Daily Express. But they have no shame.
It's scary. If Truss gives Leavers their pounds and inches back, few of them will call her Remainy-face any more. Next on the list for reversal could be the bill their patron saint made a speech against in 1968.
Interesting timing for that "survey".
"3a. If you had a choice, would you want to purchase items (i) in imperial units? (ii) in imperial units alongside a metric equivalent?"
No metric only option.
Nor even a purchase in metric alongside an imperial equivalent.
"Is the Tory Party i) A fucking shambles? ii) A fucking disaster?"
Embarrassingly slanted "survey" - really from the same mindset as the authors of LibDem barcharts, but from our own Government. Even if I agreed with the objective, my toes would curl if I had anything to do with it.
It could be in the Sun or the Daily Express. But they have no shame.
It's scary. If Truss gives Leavers their pounds and inches back, few of them will call her Remainy-face any more. Next on the list for reversal could be the bill their patron saint made a speech against in 1968.
Interesting timing for that "survey".
It was set up months back - May? We discussed it then.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
Dunno. The scientists give advice, it's up to ministers to make decisions.
How quickly we forget the way we all fetishised the boffins. Worshipped them as we worshipped the NHS
Politicians are humans. They don’t operate in a void. They were susceptible to the same pressures of public opinion as anyone. “Listen to Chris Whitty! Lock everything down!”
So they did
If our gullible Oxford PPE and Classics educated government has no understanding of science or its limitations then that is their fault. They are willfully ignorant most of the time.
Seeing as it's the issue du nos jours, how many geologists and engineers are there in gov't at the moment.
Anyway on Covid what's done is done, the UK probably would have done things differently if we knew there was going to be a land war in europe immediately after the crisis but it's all in the hindsight mirror now.
Do you know, I can'ty think of any geologists - the first five pages in Google throw up various MPs in Peel's time but I can't quickly find one after 1900. This chap Mr Andrew Miller MP seems to be more of an instrumentation specialist (in very important and complex technical fields mind) than a field geologist.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
you and whose army?
Me for a start. The army of me. For my name is Legion
Not to mention the many many lives stunted by lockdown - the children with social skills retarded, educations crippled, their families forced into divorce
The lovers that never met. The friends who lost touch. The scattered families who never saw close relatives for years
The lockdowns were a catastrophic mistake, apart from the first one, when we didn’t know what we were dealing with
Lockdown is ok as a temporary thing, where it has a clear beginning and end. It is living in a half way surveillance state that I found hard to cope with. Many people liked the surveillance and rules on social conduct and wanted it to go on forever, it seemed to weirdly fulfill a human need for security. It also fulfills some deep 'progressive' need to take control of the direction of society and reshape it. This is evidenced by the popularity of covid rules being particularly high on the political left and opposed by the political right.
People with boring lives enjoyed the power it gave them to snitch on other people with more interesting lives. That's my explanation.
People with clinically vulnerable friends or family enjoyed their friends and family members not dying.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
you and whose army?
Truss ruled out more lockdowns weeks ago and Sunak has now tacitly ruled them out too with his mea culpa on the SAGE committee.
At one time on here, any criticism or examination of the SAGE committee whatever was not to be brooked. It invited climb on after climb on with your good self in the vanguard.
Now one of the main protagonists, Sunak, has admitted we were wrong to give these people so much power. I hope you're happy.
Britain needs a NIMBY tax. You have the right to object to planning proposals as you do now, but only if you've paid an extra 10% of your income for the NIMBY Levy, otherwise you have to STFU.
Alternatively you have the right to object to planning proposals, but if you do you and any other objectors are collectively liable to pay 110% of the Council Tax of every home that would have been built if you hadn't objected.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Um. Thanks? (In all seriousness, you got a genuine laugh. Which did actually hurt a bit, but that's only because, you know, got covid and my throat hurts)
Haven't you got an alien to chase, or an AI to panic about? It's quite sad how you love to congratulate yourself on insight and knowledge when your real skillsets are overdramatising and insulting people.
Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
you and whose army?
Me for a start. The army of me. For my name is Legion
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
More hustings tonight to discuss the precise positioning of the deckchairs.
Fraid we have to suck it up to support Ukraine, so says Boris.
In a way that will truly do little to maintain support for our support of Ukraine.
Still all these nice pubs, especially ones like the one in the article in London, will be acquired by property developers eager to change them to HMO's.
A facebook group I follow about local restaurants was reporting a bar/restaurant in a part of Durham, popular and well run, was facing an increase from £20K to £55K in its energy bills. At the moment.
People like @RochdalePioneers and I have been saying this for weeks.
A shitstorm is coming for hospitality and these fuckers who run the country or want to run the country don't, yet, have the first clue how to solve it and as each day passes more and more businesses are facing going to the wall.
If they expect us to suffer high energy prices as a consequence of politicians wanting to support Ukraine, and it is the right thing to do, then instead of saying we just need to get on with it they need a plan to mitigate to get through the next 12-24 months.
Governments of all political colours abandoned energy security years ago. The windmills are fine, but we should have kept gas storage facilities or even expanded them as well as building the tidal barrages that campaigners have been highlighting for the last 20 or 30 years.
The UK is finished, but not in the way many of us thought. It has simply become a debtor nation with little control of its infrastructure and economy.
It seems to be ending with a whimper, not a bang...
An economy rapidly moving towards the status of that of developing nation is what has been said by some financial commentators in the US as well as some of the OP-ED's in some of the US papers.
I cannot see any political party doing anything that needs to be done to change this as they are all, really, massively influenced by various special interest groups.
They will just keep doing what they are doing, keep failing, keep blaming the other party and the spiral of decline will persist.
I have not been as pessimistic about our nation for many a year. I see little to be optimistic about.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
When have I ever argued for more lockdowns
Jeez. After lockdown one I was all "Need to find the low-hanging fruit so we don't actually have to lock down again) and I got annoyed at LD2 because I was adamant that if they'd done the Tiers properly, it was avoidable.
And argued again and again and again after we emerged from restrictions in 2021 that the Delta wave (and Omicron wave) did NOT mean a need for lockdowns.
But you do you, I guess. You've got this image and you need to feed it.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
What about if Andy comes back and says "ok, yep, lockdowns were terrible and killed more than they saved and are killing thousands per week right now" (which I imagine he will if there is ever evidence of that, being apparently an evidence-led kind of person). You'll be in a bit of a pickle with your 'never stop opposing you' line, won't you?
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
If it kills one in hundred, but with no reference to age or physical fitness, but by a mechanism we can't explain, then we will de facto lockdown regardless of what any bugger thinks or any government says.
More hustings tonight to discuss the precise positioning of the deckchairs.
Fraid we have to suck it up to support Ukraine, so says Boris.
In a way that will truly do little to maintain support for our support of Ukraine.
Still all these nice pubs, especially ones like the one in the article in London, will be acquired by property developers eager to change them to HMO's.
A facebook group I follow about local restaurants was reporting a bar/restaurant in a part of Durham, popular and well run, was facing an increase from £20K to £55K in its energy bills. At the moment.
People like @RochdalePioneers and I have been saying this for weeks.
A shitstorm is coming for hospitality and these fuckers who run the country or want to run the country don't, yet, have the first clue how to solve it and as each day passes more and more businesses are facing going to the wall.
If they expect us to suffer high energy prices as a consequence of politicians wanting to support Ukraine, and it is the right thing to do, then instead of saying we just need to get on with it they need a plan to mitigate to get through the next 12-24 months.
Governments of all political colours abandoned energy security years ago. The windmills are fine, but we should have kept gas storage facilities or even expanded them as well as building the tidal barrages that campaigners have been highlighting for the last 20 or 30 years.
The UK is finished, but not in the way many of us thought. It has simply become a debtor nation with little control of its infrastructure and economy.
It seems to be ending with a whimper, not a bang...
An economy rapidly moving towards the status of that of developing nation is what has been said by some financial commentators in the US as well as some of the OP-ED's in some of the US papers.
I cannot see any political party doing anything that needs to be done to change this as they are all, really, massively influenced by various special interest groups.
They will just keep doing what they are doing, keep failing, keep blaming the other party and the spiral of decline will persist.
I have not been as pessimistic about our nation for many a year. I see little to be optimistic about.
By some US papers I assume you mean the notoriously Anglophobic NY Times that makes Stuart Dickson look enlightened?
“On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season”
Half a billion dollars for one season of TV drama. Which I will certainly watch, to be fair
Will be far too woke for your tastes if it's marketing is accurate. I'll be shocked if it's anything other than complete trash. Re-writing Galadriel as some revenge driven shieldmaiden shows how clueless the showrunners are.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
Let people who want to lock themselves down do so.
Let those who don't want to do so, live their own lives and take the chance.
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
Well, we generate the irrefutable counterfactual of what no lockdowns during Covid would have meant, I guess. Good, solid science, natural experiment Good luck getting it past a Research Ethics Committee though (just had a ~50 question multi-hour grilling in the last few days from a REC where all we want to do is look at pre-existing data, not even killing anyone).
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
What about if Andy comes back and says "ok, yep, lockdowns were terrible and killed more than they saved and are killing thousands per week right now" (which I imagine he will if there is ever evidence of that, being apparently an evidence-led kind of person). You'll be in a bit of a pickle with your 'never stop opposing you' line, won't you?
Fair point and I will rephrase.
I will never stop opposing arguments that I consider facilitate more lockdowns or restrictions on adult people who have tested as healthy.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
Leon listed the arguments that you chose to dismiss. Many doctors and researchers say they 'don't know' what the causes of these excess deaths are, which I take to mean they don't want to admit lockdown caused so much distress, as they were so much in favour of it at the time.
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
you and whose army?
Truss ruled out more lockdowns weeks ago and Sunak has now tacitly ruled them out too with his mea culpa on the SAGE committee.
At one time on here, any criticism or examination of the SAGE committee whatever was not to be brooked. It invited climb on after climb on with your good self in the vanguard.
Now one of the main protagonists, Sunak, has admitted we were wrong to give these people so much power. I hope you're happy.
Was someone mentioning the Dunning Kruger effect? Because there was some arse on here back then who thought that his perception that paying everybody not to work is not great for the economy, made him look like Maynard Keynes. I mean, it was like being told that there was no option but to amputate your leg and having a really thick five year old Touretter repeatedly saying You won't be much good at football you know. And now he's 2 years older and has regressed quite sharply and is saying You aren't much good at football now, are you, with only one leg? I told you but would you listen? Now do you see how clever I am?
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them. However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
I would imagine there are quite a few emergency measures we could operate this winter - refit of gas-powered stations to burn other things etc. The quickest new power generation to bring on stream I would say would be increasing the level of incineration of non-recyclable rubbish.
Embarrassingly slanted "survey" - really from the same mindset as the authors of LibDem barcharts, but from our own Government. Even if I agreed with the objective, my toes would curl if I had anything to do with it.
Why are you sneering at the Lib Dems, Dr Palmer? I thought they were going to be the prop for the next Labour government. If the Lib Dems do not do well where it counts, Labour is sunk.
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them. However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
Solicitors with a right of audience…. I think that is the term? Look up the interesting history of that.
I have had a punt on the Democrats holding the House in November. With this drip-drip of horror stories now the can of worms has been opened re the Roe v Wade repeal, I think there’s got to be a chance.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
If it kills one in hundred, but with no reference to age or physical fitness, but by a mechanism we can't explain, then we will de facto lockdown regardless of what any bugger thinks or any government says.
So the people who choose to lockdown can do so, no big deal.
Those who choose not to, that's their choice too.
Last time it took 16 months from lockdown to rolling out vaccines and lifting lockdown. At a stretch if we can bring that down to 12 months, well more than 1% of the population dies in 12 months anyway.
Sacrificing 12 months, which will kill over 1% of the population by the mere passage of time, is not worthwhile to "save" 1% of the population.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Look at heart/circulatory excess deaths - heart problems ignored during lockdown?
Look at diabetes - poor diets during lockdown?
Look at liver disease - increased alcohol intake during lockdown?
And, miraculously, only in the UK out of the countries with lockdown.
You're pushing the motivated reasoning a bit further than you can get to.
Meanwhile, the causes of increased harm by ambulance delays and insufficient beads aren't questions, but actually known. The facts of increased heart and diabetic (and liver) problems from having had covid and recovered aren't questions but actually known.
Not even the whole UK. Scotland is seeing a smaller rise in excess deaths than England and Wales. Haven't checked Northern Ireland.
The bit that will be noticed in a month or 2 is that the excess deaths are (as with COVID deaths) biased towards certain groups.
Are there stats for that for the excess deaths?
The covid stats are eyepopping. Turns out much the best strategy is: be white, but then it gets confusing. Wave 1, black deaths = 2x asian. Wave 2 that reverses.
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them. However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them. However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
Solicitors with a right of audience…. I think that is the term? Look up the interesting history of that.
Used to have unlimited rights in Truro because the Bar got so fed up with being mugged/murdered crossing Bodmin moor.
More hustings tonight to discuss the precise positioning of the deckchairs.
Fraid we have to suck it up to support Ukraine, so says Boris.
In a way that will truly do little to maintain support for our support of Ukraine.
Still all these nice pubs, especially ones like the one in the article in London, will be acquired by property developers eager to change them to HMO's.
A facebook group I follow about local restaurants was reporting a bar/restaurant in a part of Durham, popular and well run, was facing an increase from £20K to £55K in its energy bills. At the moment.
People like @RochdalePioneers and I have been saying this for weeks.
A shitstorm is coming for hospitality and these fuckers who run the country or want to run the country don't, yet, have the first clue how to solve it and as each day passes more and more businesses are facing going to the wall.
If they expect us to suffer high energy prices as a consequence of politicians wanting to support Ukraine, and it is the right thing to do, then instead of saying we just need to get on with it they need a plan to mitigate to get through the next 12-24 months.
Governments of all political colours abandoned energy security years ago. The windmills are fine, but we should have kept gas storage facilities or even expanded them as well as building the tidal barrages that campaigners have been highlighting for the last 20 or 30 years.
The UK is finished, but not in the way many of us thought. It has simply become a debtor nation with little control of its infrastructure and economy.
It seems to be ending with a whimper, not a bang...
An economy rapidly moving towards the status of that of developing nation is what has been said by some financial commentators in the US as well as some of the OP-ED's in some of the US papers.
I cannot see any political party doing anything that needs to be done to change this as they are all, really, massively influenced by various special interest groups.
They will just keep doing what they are doing, keep failing, keep blaming the other party and the spiral of decline will persist.
I have not been as pessimistic about our nation for many a year. I see little to be optimistic about.
By some US papers I assume you mean the notoriously Anglophobic NY Times that makes Stuart Dickson look enlightened?
That was one, for sure.
Stuart may be anglophobic but his comments on polling are pretty insightful
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
Well, we generate the irrefutable counterfactual of what no lockdowns during Covid would have meant, I guess. Good, solid science, natural experiment Good luck getting it past a Research Ethics Committee though (just had a ~50 question multi-hour grilling in the last few days from a REC where all we want to do is look at pre-existing data, not even killing anyone).
What kind of woke, liberal, namby pamby science doesn’t kill anyone in testing?
{Lois Slotin has entered the chat. All the DuPont engineers leave}
Not to mention the many many lives stunted by lockdown - the children with social skills retarded, educations crippled, their families forced into divorce
The lovers that never met. The friends who lost touch. The scattered families who never saw close relatives for years
The lockdowns were a catastrophic mistake, apart from the first one, when we didn’t know what we were dealing with
Lockdown is ok as a temporary thing, where it has a clear beginning and end. It is living in a half way surveillance state that I found hard to cope with. Many people liked the surveillance and rules on social conduct and wanted it to go on forever, it seemed to weirdly fulfill a human need for security. It also fulfills some deep 'progressive' need to take control of the direction of society and reshape it. This is evidenced by the popularity of covid rules being particularly high on the political left and opposed by the political right.
People with boring lives enjoyed the power it gave them to snitch on other people with more interesting lives. That's my explanation.
People with clinically vulnerable friends or family enjoyed their friends and family members not dying.
I hate this binary thing. You're both right, to an extent.
The park run ban was very much in the former category.
Here's an interesting argument for PB - some Edinburgh folk want to ban RAF flypasts over the castle, and even the one o'clock gun, to avoid traumatising Ukrainian refugees. I feel very sorry for someone who sees a jet going overhead and panics. I'm awfully privileged to look up and say "cool!"
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
Thanks. As I said, it was so over-the-top that I laughed instead of being insulted.
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday: "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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to home in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
Glad we've parked the NT discussion (apparently). So, anyone want to join me in a discussion on the veracity of the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Well......
Keir Starmer may come to miss Boris Johnson. Some historians believe that each prime minister is the antithesis of their predecessor, as we always replace overly charismatic leaders with boring ones. The historian David Starkey says all PMs are either bookies or bishops, and that the righteous Starmer has just lost his useful sinner. “Boris is the archetypal cheating bookie,” Starkey tells All Talk.
“Starmer is worse than a bishop: he’s a moderator of the Church of Scotland.” The theory might fall down if Liz Truss wins. It’s hard to see how she could be viewed as a bishop, though she might be more of a nun-entity.
Truss does not easily fall into the category of either charismatic or dull. She is no Brown or Major or Callaghan. But then again, she clearly isn't a Wilson, Thatcher, Blair or Cameron.
If I had to choose an analog for Ms Truss, it would not be a British politician.
I've just cracked up laughing watching Harold Wilson in the Crown, having to repeat to the Queen, the obscene limericks shared by Princess Margaret and Lyndon Johnson.
Nervously, Wilson begins "There once was a woman from Dallas, who enjoyed a dynamite phallus"
Queen, poker-faced, " You've come this f
"She left her vagina, in North Carolina, and her arsehole in Buckingham Palace."
I sort of went off the Crown. Olivia Coleman played it as Olivia Coleman with an accent - perhaps she couldn’t help herself - and I thought the producers wouldn’t be able to help themselves with the Thatcher years and, low and behold, I was right.
It was best done as a period piece in the 50s and 60s and left at that.
Agreed. Olivia Colman, good actress though she is, was miscast as HMQ. She should have played Thatcher. Gillian Anderson played Thatcher as a parody.
The only characters well acted were Wilson, Charles and Anne and, above all, Philip, beautifully played by Tobias Menzies.
But the earlier period was also more interesting because it was about the transition to becoming Queen and the personal and political aspects of that, as well as interesting depictions of events from the country's past.
I also preferred the earlier series. I can't quite decide whether it was the lack of familiarity with the earlier period that made it more interesting to me... or the fact that it was kind of depoliticised by distance. I thought Claire Foy was really brilliant and watchable.
Genuinely a show that had all 3 generations in my household watching at one point - which is pretty rare. It also sparked some curiosity in me about certain historical events (Great smog, Aberfan disaster) which I hadn't heard of, and so went away to read up on.
It is striking that back then, there was no expectation that the state would, in Boris's words, put its arms round the victims. Sometimes I wonder if we've gone too far the other way, with today's news that: Kobe Bryant's widow has been awarded $16m (£13.6m) in damages over leaked graphic photos of the helicopter crash that killed the US basketball star and his daughter in 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62669240
In darker moments, I wonder if lottery-sized payouts should not be confined to those who actually play the lottery, but there ought to be a halfway house between this and nothing as at Aberfan.
It was worse than that. The state claimed to be helping but instead put a dagger in the wound. Read my article if you can't bear to listen to the programme.
"Without informing the families, let alone getting their consent, subjecting children who had survived to psychiatric interventions designed not to help them but to justify reducing the amount of compensation paid if they could be classified as “sane”.
Accusing those parents who petitioned for compensation higher than the £500 originally offered as “seeking to capitalize” on the tragedy."
The families had to wait decades for an apology from those authorities which got matters so very very wrong. The treatment of the town was a scandal every bit as bad in its own way as the original tragedy. And the saddest thing is that the same mistakes have been made in other tragedies since right up to the present day.
See, for instance, the decision not to compensate the children of those who died from being given tainted blood. They lost their parents but, no, they will get nothing. It is just calculated meanness.
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
Thanks. As I said, it was so over-the-top that I laughed instead of being insulted.
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday: "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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to hone in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
Please: home in, like a pigeon. honing is sharpening razors.
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
Thanks. As I said, it was so over-the-top that I laughed instead of being insulted.
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday: "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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to hone in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
Please: home in, like a pigeon. honing is sharpening razors.
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them. However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
Solicitors with a right of audience…. I think that is the term? Look up the interesting history of that.
In Scotland we have solicitor advocates and they form a substantial part of the criminal bar. In my experience they include some of the best criminal lawyers in Scotland but they are also a bit more variable in quality than advocates tend to be. We have always had more solicitors appearing in court than is the case south of the border. When I was a solicitor I did cases against counsel most of the time.
This is, in my view, just a distraction by Raab. The reality is that fees for criminal legal aid work have fallen below the level that is sustainable for the majority. By that I mean that the very busy do ok but the not quite so busy just can't make a living and the lightly instructed go hungry. Unless that is addressed too many people will go elsewhere to make a living and the criminal justice system will grind to a halt.
I have had a punt on the Democrats holding the House in November. With this drip-drip of horror stories now the can of worms has been opened re the Roe v Wade repeal, I think there’s got to be a chance.
I think it's going to make the big one (2024) look very different too. I've invested in Biden for both the pres and nom, I think his price heads in somewhat after the fact of a Dem senate and a close to even House of reps sinks in.
Not to mention the many many lives stunted by lockdown - the children with social skills retarded, educations crippled, their families forced into divorce
The lovers that never met. The friends who lost touch. The scattered families who never saw close relatives for years
The lockdowns were a catastrophic mistake, apart from the first one, when we didn’t know what we were dealing with
Lockdown is ok as a temporary thing, where it has a clear beginning and end. It is living in a half way surveillance state that I found hard to cope with. Many people liked the surveillance and rules on social conduct and wanted it to go on forever, it seemed to weirdly fulfill a human need for security. It also fulfills some deep 'progressive' need to take control of the direction of society and reshape it. This is evidenced by the popularity of covid rules being particularly high on the political left and opposed by the political right.
People with boring lives enjoyed the power it gave them to snitch on other people with more interesting lives. That's my explanation.
People with clinically vulnerable friends or family enjoyed their friends and family members not dying.
I hate this binary thing. You're both right, to an extent.
The park run ban was very much in the former category.
Here's an interesting argument for PB - some Edinburgh folk want to ban RAF flypasts over the castle, and even the one o'clock gun, to avoid traumatising Ukrainian refugees. I feel very sorry for someone who sees a jet going overhead and panics. I'm awfully privileged to look up and say "cool!"
But ban the RAF from low passes? Ban the tattoo?
Hmm. Bans do exist for sensitive areas, both permanent and temporary (e.g. a relative was buried in a village graveyard right under one of the main training flight paths and the Raf claimed to stop flights for tyhat hour, though it didn't work in reality).
And the 1300 field piece is silent on certain days such as Good Friday and Sunday.
So the question is whether there are enough Ukrainians etc. in Edinburgh.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
If it kills one in hundred, but with no reference to age or physical fitness, but by a mechanism we can't explain, then we will de facto lockdown regardless of what any bugger thinks or any government says.
As a ball park figure, original covid doubled the risk of dying that year for all ages. Obviously older people or other diseases started at higher risk.
Glad we've parked the NT discussion (apparently). So, anyone want to join me in a discussion on the veracity of the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Well......
Keir Starmer may come to miss Boris Johnson. Some historians believe that each prime minister is the antithesis of their predecessor, as we always replace overly charismatic leaders with boring ones. The historian David Starkey says all PMs are either bookies or bishops, and that the righteous Starmer has just lost his useful sinner. “Boris is the archetypal cheating bookie,” Starkey tells All Talk.
“Starmer is worse than a bishop: he’s a moderator of the Church of Scotland.” The theory might fall down if Liz Truss wins. It’s hard to see how she could be viewed as a bishop, though she might be more of a nun-entity.
Truss does not easily fall into the category of either charismatic or dull. She is no Brown or Major or Callaghan. But then again, she clearly isn't a Wilson, Thatcher, Blair or Cameron.
If I had to choose an analog for Ms Truss, it would not be a British politician.
I've just cracked up laughing watching Harold Wilson in the Crown, having to repeat to the Queen, the obscene limericks shared by Princess Margaret and Lyndon Johnson.
Nervously, Wilson begins "There once was a woman from Dallas, who enjoyed a dynamite phallus"
Queen, poker-faced, " You've come this f
"She left her vagina, in North Carolina, and her arsehole in Buckingham Palace."
I sort of went off the Crown. Olivia Coleman played it as Olivia Coleman with an accent - perhaps she couldn’t help herself - and I thought the producers wouldn’t be able to help themselves with the Thatcher years and, low and behold, I was right.
It was best done as a period piece in the 50s and 60s and left at that.
Agreed. Olivia Colman, good actress though she is, was miscast as HMQ. She should have played Thatcher. Gillian Anderson played Thatcher as a parody.
The only characters well acted were Wilson, Charles and Anne and, above all, Philip, beautifully played by Tobias Menzies.
But the earlier period was also more interesting because it was about the transition to becoming Queen and the personal and political aspects of that, as well as interesting depictions of events from the country's past.
I also preferred the earlier series. I can't quite decide whether it was the lack of familiarity with the earlier period that made it more interesting to me... or the fact that it was kind of depoliticised by distance. I thought Claire Foy was really brilliant and watchable.
Genuinely a show that had all 3 generations in my household watching at one point - which is pretty rare. It also sparked some curiosity in me about certain historical events (Great smog, Aberfan disaster) which I hadn't heard of, and so went away to read up on.
It is striking that back then, there was no expectation that the state would, in Boris's words, put its arms round the victims. Sometimes I wonder if we've gone too far the other way, with today's news that: Kobe Bryant's widow has been awarded $16m (£13.6m) in damages over leaked graphic photos of the helicopter crash that killed the US basketball star and his daughter in 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62669240
In darker moments, I wonder if lottery-sized payouts should not be confined to those who actually play the lottery, but there ought to be a halfway house between this and nothing as at Aberfan.
It was worse than that. The state claimed to be helping but instead put a dagger in the wound. Read my article if you can't bear to listen to the programme.
"Without informing the families, let alone getting their consent, subjecting children who had survived to psychiatric interventions designed not to help them but to justify reducing the amount of compensation paid if they could be classified as “sane”.
Accusing those parents who petitioned for compensation higher than the £500 originally offered as “seeking to capitalize” on the tragedy."
The families had to wait decades for an apology from those authorities which got matters so very very wrong. The treatment of the town was a scandal every bit as bad in its own way as the original tragedy. And the saddest thing is that the same mistakes have been made in other tragedies since right up to the present day.
See, for instance, the decision not to compensate the children of those who died from being given tainted blood. They lost their parents but, no, they will get nothing. It is just calculated meanness.
The state has all the aspects of a large multinational. Except that they *really* own the police and the courts. I can remember the time when Crown Immunity covered big areas of public life…
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
Thanks. As I said, it was so over-the-top that I laughed instead of being insulted.
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday: "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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to home in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
Trouble is that all that preventing bad things by good public health stuff is boring. (And yes- air filtering looks like a fairly obvious intervention given how much sickness and time off work is caused by airborne viruses.) And it requires collective action and defering to boffins to work.
If you can get the same effect by just saying "I don't want to do bad things", that's so much cheaper, easier and more fun.
It is a genuinely good thing that at least one of the Tory leadership candidates is questioning the entire Lockdown Narrative
Why? What does it achieve? Seriously. How does it practically effect anything at all?
There will always be demands to delegate political decisions to 'experts' so it has wider relevance.
I think the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
I'm overwhelmed by your incisive numerical approach.
Glad we've parked the NT discussion (apparently). So, anyone want to join me in a discussion on the veracity of the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Well......
Keir Starmer may come to miss Boris Johnson. Some historians believe that each prime minister is the antithesis of their predecessor, as we always replace overly charismatic leaders with boring ones. The historian David Starkey says all PMs are either bookies or bishops, and that the righteous Starmer has just lost his useful sinner. “Boris is the archetypal cheating bookie,” Starkey tells All Talk.
“Starmer is worse than a bishop: he’s a moderator of the Church of Scotland.” The theory might fall down if Liz Truss wins. It’s hard to see how she could be viewed as a bishop, though she might be more of a nun-entity.
Truss does not easily fall into the category of either charismatic or dull. She is no Brown or Major or Callaghan. But then again, she clearly isn't a Wilson, Thatcher, Blair or Cameron.
If I had to choose an analog for Ms Truss, it would not be a British politician.
I've just cracked up laughing watching Harold Wilson in the Crown, having to repeat to the Queen, the obscene limericks shared by Princess Margaret and Lyndon Johnson.
Nervously, Wilson begins "There once was a woman from Dallas, who enjoyed a dynamite phallus"
Queen, poker-faced, " You've come this f
"She left her vagina, in North Carolina, and her arsehole in Buckingham Palace."
I sort of went off the Crown. Olivia Coleman played it as Olivia Coleman with an accent - perhaps she couldn’t help herself - and I thought the producers wouldn’t be able to help themselves with the Thatcher years and, low and behold, I was right.
It was best done as a period piece in the 50s and 60s and left at that.
Agreed. Olivia Colman, good actress though she is, was miscast as HMQ. She should have played Thatcher. Gillian Anderson played Thatcher as a parody.
The only characters well acted were Wilson, Charles and Anne and, above all, Philip, beautifully played by Tobias Menzies.
But the earlier period was also more interesting because it was about the transition to becoming Queen and the personal and political aspects of that, as well as interesting depictions of events from the country's past.
I also preferred the earlier series. I can't quite decide whether it was the lack of familiarity with the earlier period that made it more interesting to me... or the fact that it was kind of depoliticised by distance. I thought Claire Foy was really brilliant and watchable.
Genuinely a show that had all 3 generations in my household watching at one point - which is pretty rare. It also sparked some curiosity in me about certain historical events (Great smog, Aberfan disaster) which I hadn't heard of, and so went away to read up on.
It is striking that back then, there was no expectation that the state would, in Boris's words, put its arms round the victims. Sometimes I wonder if we've gone too far the other way, with today's news that: Kobe Bryant's widow has been awarded $16m (£13.6m) in damages over leaked graphic photos of the helicopter crash that killed the US basketball star and his daughter in 2020. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62669240
In darker moments, I wonder if lottery-sized payouts should not be confined to those who actually play the lottery, but there ought to be a halfway house between this and nothing as at Aberfan.
It was worse than that. The state claimed to be helping but instead put a dagger in the wound. Read my article if you can't bear to listen to the programme.
"Without informing the families, let alone getting their consent, subjecting children who had survived to psychiatric interventions designed not to help them but to justify reducing the amount of compensation paid if they could be classified as “sane”.
Accusing those parents who petitioned for compensation higher than the £500 originally offered as “seeking to capitalize” on the tragedy."
The families had to wait decades for an apology from those authorities which got matters so very very wrong. The treatment of the town was a scandal every bit as bad in its own way as the original tragedy. And the saddest thing is that the same mistakes have been made in other tragedies since right up to the present day.
See, for instance, the decision not to compensate the children of those who died from being given tainted blood. They lost their parents but, no, they will get nothing. It is just calculated meanness.
The state has all the aspects of a large multinational. Except that they *really* own the police and the courts. I can remember the time when Crown Immunity covered big areas of public life…
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
If it kills one in hundred, but with no reference to age or physical fitness, but by a mechanism we can't explain, then we will de facto lockdown regardless of what any bugger thinks or any government says.
As a ball park figure, original covid doubled the risk of dying that year for all ages. Obviously older people or other diseases started at higher risk.
I wonder who off topiced you? Fat finger, one hopes.
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
Thanks. As I said, it was so over-the-top that I laughed instead of being insulted.
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday: "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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to home in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
Trouble is that all that preventing bad things by good public health stuff is boring. (And yes- air filtering looks like a fairly obvious intervention given how much sickness and time off work is caused by airborne viruses.) And it requires collective action and defering to boffins to work.
If you can get the same effect by just saying "I don't want to do bad things", that's so much cheaper, easier and more fun.
If that works.
Has anyone looked at the cost of (gradually?) adding HEPA filters/UV to building air conditioning standards? Once in the standards for new and replacement systems, within a surprisingly small number of years a big percentage of places would be covered…. Make the future bug proof?
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
I'm overwhelmed by your incisive numerical approach.
400,000 people die per annum on average, approximately 800 per week.
Lockdowns by default kill 800 per week merely for the passage of time during that lockdown.
It is a genuinely good thing that at least one of the Tory leadership candidates is questioning the entire Lockdown Narrative
Why? What does it achieve? Seriously. How does it practically effect anything at all?
This is the same weird argument you get from people about “lab leak”. How does it matter now? Who cares where it came from?
Quite bizarre. If an airplane crashed killing 20 million people wouldn’t you like to know the cause? Wouldn’t you like to know if the response could have been better, saving 10 million of those lives?
Why is a pandemic different?
It’s not different. For the many millions of dead people, and their families, and for the BILLIONS of people badly damaged by lockdowns, we need to learn every lesson possible. And to do this we will need to question everything. Including that consensus science about lockdowns, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
If it kills one in hundred, but with no reference to age or physical fitness, but by a mechanism we can't explain, then we will de facto lockdown regardless of what any bugger thinks or any government says.
As a ball park figure, original covid doubled the risk of dying that year for all ages. Obviously older people or other diseases started at higher risk.
Which is precisely why lockdown was an utter disaster.
2 years of restrictions, to evade 1 year of risk, is an awful trade off.
Sunak is making a perfectly valid point. We gave the lockdowny boffins way too much unaccountable power. Yet the red mist of Remoanerism means Dunt cannot see this
It's not the substantive point it's the "He was for it before he was against it" thing.
The PB right had a curiously retro mini-wave of anti lockdown mewling yesterday. Either Sunak reads here (hi Rishi!) or it was part of a bigger trend on twitter or somewhere that he has picked up on. To test the hypothesis let's all moan about, I dunno, the swathe of high rise hedgehog sanctuaries disfiguring the countryside and see if that crops up this evening.
If you consider a perfectly decent retrospective questioning of whether we may have been a little too eager to restrict personal liberty 'mewling' then it sort of shows the problem of the tyranny of a fearful majority, doesn't it?
Given that we are now seeing 1000 excess deaths a day - same as the worst days of Covid - and that these deaths might have been CAUSED by lockdown (at least in part) a little anti-lockdown “mewling” is, I would say, justified
It's really only an idiot at the Telegraph who howled out "These are caused by lockdowns!" with zero evidence. And I think you mean "500 excess deaths per week"
1 - Overloaded healthcare system on day-to-day basis (because too few beds left) - we never recovered it from running it past the red line for too long and have consistently had 5%-15% of beds occupied by covid patients since the start of the Delta wave last summer (which messes us up when we run at 80%+ occupancy all the time to begin with 2 - Chronic effects of covid
That's not to say that we won't ever see effects from the lockdown period. But the biggest alarm bell for that would be excess cancer deaths. ... and they don't seem to be the big contributor.
Also, consider: almost all the continent had lockdowns. Yet we're the ones who have age-standardised excess deaths (other than Spain and Portugal which had very prolonged heatwaves having excess deaths coincide with their heatwaves)
Lockdowns kill, Andy. They don't save anything, they don't protect anything. They merely alter the balance of risks.
Let me address your arguments.
...
...
Sorry. Couldn't find any. Just assertions. And ignoring of other arguments.
You are a witless, dessicated nerd with your charts of excess beads and weekly litres of drool and your daily graphic of X lives saved by preventing people kissing or fucking for 19 weeks and you are mentally incapable of seeing the bigger picture. What lockdowns do to human society and the human soul
Your time as the go-to PB wiseacre on all things covid and statistical is done. Your fame has passed. Now is the moment for you to slink into the shadows with your desperate little diagrams of shame
Desiccated
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
And yet.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
Well, we generate the irrefutable counterfactual of what no lockdowns during Covid would have meant, I guess. Good, solid science, natural experiment Good luck getting it past a Research Ethics Committee though (just had a ~50 question multi-hour grilling in the last few days from a REC where all we want to do is look at pre-existing data, not even killing anyone).
What kind of woke, liberal, namby pamby science doesn’t kill anyone in testing?
{Lois Slotin has entered the chat. All the DuPont engineers leave}
#RealDangerousScience
Well, it might kill a few RAs who have to do the actual data extraction from electronic and paper records, I guess. Or at least, it will seem like it to them. Is that better?
Which is precisely why lockdown was an utter disaster.
2 years of restrictions, to evade 1 year of risk, is an awful trade off.
Like paying £1000 insurance to evade a £500 bill.
No, it's like counting to 1000 to evade a £500 bill, in my view - but that's because I was fine with lockdown, and saw it as just a minor inconvenience. Your parallel is apples and pears - it depends entirely on the relative value that you place on % risks to life vs lockdown.
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
Thanks. As I said, it was so over-the-top that I laughed instead of being insulted.
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday: "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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to home in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
I think the single thing that annoyed me most during the whole pandemic was the apparent lack of interest in what restrictions worked and what didn't. If there was any science being done on that it was not making either the public domain or public policy.
Your examples about filtration are a good example but there were so many others. Boris insisted we had to wash our hands whilst singing Happy Birthday twice. For a virus that was almost exclusively airborne. The nonsense with shopping trollies, books etc. We had a period where the plinth from which you asked your questions had to be cleaned before your opponent used it. This didn't die out until only a month or two ago.
At the start we are dealing with more unknowns and caution is understandable but as time went on we should have focused on the stuff that was a genuine risk. Had we done that I think compliance would have been better and lockdowns would have been much more focused rather than sledgehammers.
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
Thanks. As I said, it was so over-the-top that I laughed instead of being insulted.
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday: "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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to home in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
Yes I agree. No one can argue entirely with Lockdown 1. There was a new deadly virus stalking the globe. The only reaction is to shelter in place
There are big debates about schools and lesser debates about dates, masks, etc, but most governments were utterly floored in the first months of covid
It’s lockdown 2 and onwards where the debate is fundamental. Were they truly necessary? In that form? My doubts grow
Unless I'm losing my marbles, I could have sworn that it was Boris Johnson back in March 2020 appearing on TV, putting on his most serious demeanour, and telling me that I must stay at home. Now I discover that it was nothing to do with him, but all about some evil scientists and 'experts' ordering us about. Well I never.
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them. However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
Solicitors with a right of audience…. I think that is the term? Look up the interesting history of that.
Will they be any more keen to appear for current legal aid rates ?
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them. However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
Solicitors with a right of audience…. I think that is the term? Look up the interesting history of that.
I went down a hole on this once, and it's pretty fascinating (imo). I had wondered whether the strike might precipitate a fusion of the professions. The Criminal Bar is obviously in a lot of trouble, especially as DavidL says at the legal aid end of things. The Civil Bar is doing better, but I believe also has problems with recruitment. I suspect the chambers model is less lucrative than the Firm and so less able to throw money around to sustain careers at an early level, especially since Barristers are traditionally independent contractors and have to sing for their supper (this has changed slightly and Barristers can enter into some types of partnership and some do work salaried for firms but this is the exception rather than the rule).
Of course legal training would have to change massively if either the professions fused formally or if solicitors gained automatic rights of audience. At the moment, Solicitors are not trained for it as a matter of course. My understanding is that even Solicitor advocates are used for more simple matters in the lower courts but won't generally touch more complex litigation.
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
Thanks. As I said, it was so over-the-top that I laughed instead of being insulted.
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday: "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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to home in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
Trouble is that all that preventing bad things by good public health stuff is boring. (And yes- air filtering looks like a fairly obvious intervention given how much sickness and time off work is caused by airborne viruses.) And it requires collective action and defering to boffins to work.
If you can get the same effect by just saying "I don't want to do bad things", that's so much cheaper, easier and more fun.
If that works.
Has anyone looked at the cost of (gradually?) adding HEPA filters/UV to building air conditioning standards? Once in the standards for new and replacement systems, within a surprisingly small number of years a big percentage of places would be covered…. Make the future bug proof?
Here's a piece from Schools Week, suggesting about £500 - £1000 to put a suitable air filter into a classroom;
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them. However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
Just shows how pig ignorant Raab is. We have solicitor advocates already. The problem is that solicitors are abandoning Legal Aid work as well because ... er ... it doesn't pay.
His next proposal will probably be to have a Criminal Defence Service paid for by the state. Which sounds like a possibly good idea until you realise that it will cost more than paying the criminal bar proper rates for the job they do.
I think this government wants to destroy the independent criminal bar and does not care if that means that defendants get no legal representation or have to bankrupt themselves.
I have had a punt on the Democrats holding the House in November. With this drip-drip of horror stories now the can of worms has been opened re the Roe v Wade repeal, I think there’s got to be a chance.
I think it's going to make the big one (2024) look very different too. I've invested in Biden for both the pres and nom, I think his price heads in somewhat after the fact of a Dem senate and a close to even House of reps sinks in.
If democrats outperform in November then there is also less of a chance of a Trump run in 2024, though I’m not quite sure that benefits Democrats in the Presidential. Ideally for them, DeSantis will also lose (though that looks unlikely).
Comments
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/08/biden-federal-abortion-rights-texas-judge.html
“On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season”
Half a billion dollars for one season of TV drama. Which I will certainly watch, to be fair
The UK is finished, but not in the way many of us thought. It has simply become a debtor nation with little control of its infrastructure and economy.
It seems to be ending with a whimper, not a bang...
“Today, we are learning about decimation. Get in groups of 10. 9 clubs per group have been provided…”
But hey Andy, you go on arguing for more lockdowns if you want.
You should know, however, that I am your implacable enemy and consider you not just wrongheaded but morally evil and dangerous. I will never stop opposing you.
I was thinking two posts back, how much you had mellowed over the years
It was a mistake but one we had no alternative but to make. Won't happen again: boris's greatest legacy has been the involuntary trashing of the lockdown brand.
Need to measure this stuff using QALYs, as ever.
If you cannot wait that long, then 'Paper Girls' on Prime has proved to be good sci-fi fun so far (we're only a few episodes in though...)
https://www.drewry.co.uk/supply-chain-advisors/supply-chain-expertise/world-container-index-assessed-by-drewry
He is quite a shamanic figure. My bro. Slightly schizo but with a superb brain (when he’s not hearing voices). He taught himself to code and could earn big six figures tomorrow but chooses not to
He is the sort of left field voice you NEED when there is a consensus elsewhere
As I say I dismissed his opinions early on in covid. I now fear I was mistaken and he was probably and prophetically right, in the main
But twenty three each quarter day.
I think cats must be extinct now.
Yes, seems to have stepped down in 2001.
At one time on here, any criticism or examination of the SAGE committee whatever was not to be brooked. It invited climb on after climb on with your good self in the vanguard.
Now one of the main protagonists, Sunak, has admitted we were wrong to give these people so much power. I hope you're happy.
(In all seriousness, you got a genuine laugh. Which did actually hurt a bit, but that's only because, you know, got covid and my throat hurts)
Haven't you got an alien to chase, or an AI to panic about?
It's quite sad how you love to congratulate yourself on insight and knowledge when your real skillsets are overdramatising and insulting people.
Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.
Suppose another infectious nasty comes along. And the gods of evolution will ensure that another infectious nasty will come along, eventually.
Similar numbers to classic Coivd- left alone, it doubles in half a week, kills about 1 percent, and leaves 10 percent needing medical attention.
The brilliant twist is that, now we know how to make mRNA vaccinces, there will probably be a safe effective vaccination in a smallish number of months. (It was about nine this time, it will be less next time.)
If we don't lock down, what the hell do we do?
I cannot see any political party doing anything that needs to be done to change this as they are all, really, massively influenced by various special interest groups.
They will just keep doing what they are doing, keep failing, keep blaming the other party and the spiral of decline will persist.
I have not been as pessimistic about our nation for many a year. I see little to be optimistic about.
Jeez. After lockdown one I was all "Need to find the low-hanging fruit so we don't actually have to lock down again) and I got annoyed at LD2 because I was adamant that if they'd done the Tiers properly, it was avoidable.
And argued again and again and again after we emerged from restrictions in 2021 that the Delta wave (and Omicron wave) did NOT mean a need for lockdowns.
But you do you, I guess. You've got this image and you need to feed it.
Let those who don't want to do so, live their own lives and take the chance.
“Which you are, indeed, pretty good at, and you've managed to get a well-remunerated career out of, so you can't complain, I guess.”
Thanks. I’ll take that
In all seriousness your Covid stat stuff has been enlightening and much gratitude for that. I simply believe you’ve lost sight, perhaps, of the incredible yet invisible damage wrought by lockdowns…
And I only insulted you because I realised I hadn’t insulted anyone for days, and you have to keep practising
Hope you get well soon
I will never stop opposing arguments that I consider facilitate more lockdowns or restrictions on adult people who have tested as healthy.
Unsuprisingly, the resolution to the criminal barristers strike is to try and get rid of them.
However, I don't think that having a solicitor represent you in court instead of a barrister would be a good situation.
Those who choose not to, that's their choice too.
Last time it took 16 months from lockdown to rolling out vaccines and lifting lockdown. At a stretch if we can bring that down to 12 months, well more than 1% of the population dies in 12 months anyway.
Sacrificing 12 months, which will kill over 1% of the population by the mere passage of time, is not worthwhile to "save" 1% of the population.
The covid stats are eyepopping. Turns out much the best strategy is: be white, but then it gets confusing. Wave 1, black deaths = 2x asian. Wave 2 that reverses.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/updatingethniccontrastsindeathsinvolvingthecoronaviruscovid19englandandwales/24january2020to31march2021
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-reported-sars-cov-2-deaths-in-england/covid-19-confirmed-deaths-in-england-to-31-may-2021-report
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solicitor_advocate
Stuart may be anglophobic but his comments on polling are pretty insightful
{Lois Slotin has entered the chat. All the DuPont engineers leave}
#RealDangerousScience
The park run ban was very much in the former category.
Here's an interesting argument for PB - some Edinburgh folk want to ban RAF flypasts over the castle, and even the one o'clock gun, to avoid traumatising Ukrainian refugees. I feel very sorry for someone who sees a jet going overhead and panics. I'm awfully privileged to look up and say "cool!"
But ban the RAF from low passes? Ban the tattoo?
What does it achieve?
Seriously. How does it practically effect anything at all?
I will say, as I've said several times before: Lockdowns are terrible things. To quote myself from just yesterday:
"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 remain genuinely angry that they didn't do enough analysis during the first summer to home in on what worked best and what didn't, so went back to that crude hammer simply because they didn't know any other way to achieve it. I mean, we already knew that outside stuff was far safer by then, at the very least.
I hated the lockdown periods - partly because I have a severely autistic son who struggled a lot, and partly because I had to do a lot of work to help organise the food parcels to those being shielded, and that got far harder in lockdown.
My latest obsession has been: for the love of God, properly investigate things like HEPA filtration and far-uv for air filtering. The early stuff indicates that it can halve transmission rates or more, which is stunningly good. In effect, that could provide something like two Tiers-worth of restrictions (or two steps in the emergence from lockdown roadmap) in one.
Meaning that Tier 2 restrictions (with schools open, etc) would equate to a full Tier 4 lockdown. Twenty-twenty hindsight, but we know there'll be another pandemic again some day. I'd prefer the period of waiting for a vaccine to never get another lockdown.
"Without informing the families, let alone getting their consent, subjecting children who had survived to psychiatric interventions designed not to help them but to justify reducing the amount of compensation paid if they could be classified as “sane”.
Accusing those parents who petitioned for compensation higher than the £500 originally offered as “seeking to capitalize” on the tragedy."
The families had to wait decades for an apology from those authorities which got matters so very very wrong. The treatment of the town was a scandal every bit as bad in its own way as the original tragedy. And the saddest thing is that the same mistakes have been made in other tragedies since right up to the present day.
See, for instance, the decision not to compensate the children of those who died from being given tainted blood. They lost their parents but, no, they will get nothing. It is just calculated meanness.
This is, in my view, just a distraction by Raab. The reality is that fees for criminal legal aid work have fallen below the level that is sustainable for the majority. By that I mean that the very busy do ok but the not quite so busy just can't make a living and the lightly instructed go hungry. Unless that is addressed too many people will go elsewhere to make a living and the criminal justice system will grind to a halt.
And the 1300 field piece is silent on certain days such as Good Friday and Sunday.
So the question is whether there are enough Ukrainians etc. in Edinburgh.
Government - a useful servant. A fearful master.
If you can get the same effect by just saying "I don't want to do bad things", that's so much cheaper, easier and more fun.
If that works.
Lockdowns by default kill 800 per week merely for the passage of time during that lockdown.
Quite bizarre. If an airplane crashed killing 20 million people wouldn’t you like to know the cause? Wouldn’t you like to know if the response could have been better, saving 10 million of those lives?
Why is a pandemic different?
It’s not different. For the many millions of dead
people, and their families, and for the BILLIONS of people badly damaged by lockdowns, we need to learn every lesson possible. And to do this we will need to question everything. Including that consensus science about lockdowns, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us
2 years of restrictions, to evade 1 year of risk, is an awful trade off.
Like paying £1000 insurance to evade a £500 bill.
Your examples about filtration are a good example but there were so many others. Boris insisted we had to wash our hands whilst singing Happy Birthday twice. For a virus that was almost exclusively airborne. The nonsense with shopping trollies, books etc. We had a period where the plinth from which you asked your questions had to be cleaned before your opponent used it. This didn't die out until only a month or two ago.
At the start we are dealing with more unknowns and caution is understandable but as time went on we should have focused on the stuff that was a genuine risk. Had we done that I think compliance would have been better and lockdowns would have been much more focused rather than sledgehammers.
There are big debates about schools and lesser debates about dates, masks, etc, but most governments were utterly floored in the first months of covid
It’s lockdown 2 and onwards where the debate is fundamental. Were they truly necessary? In that form? My doubts grow
Devon ran away with it. By a country mile.
Cumbria was second.
25 min podcast with Phillips O’Brien, “Who is winning the Ukraine War”.
Spoiler: Russia are stuffed unless Putin orders full mobilisation.
Of course legal training would have to change massively if either the professions fused formally or if solicitors gained automatic rights of audience. At the moment, Solicitors are not trained for it as a matter of course. My understanding is that even Solicitor advocates are used for more simple matters in the lower courts but won't generally touch more complex litigation.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-buy-air-purifier-covid-cleaning-unit-dyson-camfil/
You don't need to stop that much sickness for that to be a sensible spend.
His next proposal will probably be to have a Criminal Defence Service paid for by the state. Which sounds like a possibly good idea until you realise that it will cost more than paying the criminal bar proper rates for the job they do.
I think this government wants to destroy the independent criminal bar and does not care if that means that defendants get no legal representation or have to bankrupt themselves.
Well, his arse will be.