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The Covid 19 legacy – politicalbetting.com
The Covid 19 legacy – politicalbetting.com
Does it matter if those working in Downing Street during the pandemic did not abide by the Covid rules?It matters a lot: 64%It matters a fair amount: 16%It doesn't matter very much: 10%It doesn't matter at all: 6%https://t.co/8HSbsqRAFW pic.twitter.com/Rd1IC43L24
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The government's strategy of terrifying people about a virus with a measly 99.8% recovery rate (>99.9% for under 70s) blew up in its face. On this, they deserve everything they get, though of course Labour would have been far worse, and indeed were in Wales, for no obvious benefit. At least the Conservatives took the right decision on Omicron though. Starmer would probably still have us in lockdown. That alone should disqualify him from ever becoming PM.
Meanwhile, richer, older people had extraordinarily high savings rates through the pandemic. The holiday/restaurant class have plenty of those savings left to burn, fueling inflation, while everyone else suffers through the cost of living crisis.
That's why furlough has not translated into younger people voting for the Tories. What's interesting about that Yougov polling is how age doesn't seem to have much of an effect on how people think about lockdown.
I'm not a Great Barrington-ite by any means, but I think that you could achieve 90% of the reduction in R with significantly fewer restrictions, and with many other things merely being recommendations.
We could have had a lot more freedoms, and possibly no lockdowns at all, if people had got over their obsessive dislike of masks. They clearly helped prevent the spread as everyone in Asia knows.
We in the UK were also very slow off the mark. Johnson in his typical cavalier fashion, not paying attention to detail, allowed events such as the Cheltenham festival to continue after countries like Italy had already introduced significant restrictions.
Anyway, water under the bridge. The point isn’t really about whether we did or didn’t get it right, it’s that the Conservative Government in office didn’t follow its own rules which it had stringently imposed upon its citizens. The very definition of abuse of power and there will come a reckoning.
I hated lockdown with a passion, but much of the population loved it.
F1: will peruse the markets (sleepily) shortly.
On-topic: the lockdowns, aside from the healthcare and economic consequences, were also a very rare case of the extroverted being forced to act in a much more introverted manner. Studies should be done into how many, and to what extent, people were affected by this. That should then have some (secondary) weight for future pandemic countermeasure consideration.
Of course, the inquiry should be focused on how best to proceed in the future.
Those who were in favour of very heavy restrictions naturally disapprove of those in power not obeying the rules.
But equally many of those who resented the restrictions will be annoyed that the people who imposed them were ignoring them.
Convinced me that, were we ever occupied by a hostile oppressive power, they'd find plenty of willing collaborators.
Sod this.
But that's by the by: the sad conclusion I've reached is that most people simply aren't liberals and actually prefer autocracy.
I can tell you now it will conclude we should have locked down harder, earlier, stronger and with tougher sanctions, that the scientists weren't listened to, that next time they should, and it will otherwise focus on the trivia of WhatsApp messages sent by easy to dislike politicians, who'll be put in the stocks, and excuse those of civil servants and advisors.
To the extent it does focus on the future none of the lessons will be learned by those who need to learn them.
The more nuanced approach that @rcs1000 alludes to or a serious assessment of damage to education, young people, or wider mental health and healthcare won't feature.
IMV one of the issues with Covid - and the inquiry - is that it is all too easy to forget how little we knew about the little bugger (*) when all of this started. (**). We were not even sure how it was transmitted (hence people wiping down their post). And if you went online, there were 1,001 different views on what should be done - and most of these were for a harder lockdown. There was a great deal of fear about as well.
We need to avoid looking at decisions with hindsight, and instead look at them in the light of what we knew at the time - and that varied over time, as well.
(*) No, not Sunak.
(**) Thanks, China...
You have to ask of those who do click 'donate': how much of that money will end up directly in the pockets of Hamas in just a few weeks time?
Numerate enough to understand and interrogate the modelling and understanding the uncertainties. (Scientists do the latter way better than mathematicians.) Those uncertainties were always going to look horrible because there's an exponential process in the working of this thing, even if it couldn't carry on forever.
Willingness to do the unpleasant thing now to avoid the worse thing later. The lockdowns could have been attenuated, if not outright avoided, by keeping more lower order restrictions when things were relatively good.
The personal integrity and sense of leadership to do at least as much as you are demanding of others. See our own dear late Queen for an example of how to do it.
Conclusion: almost any other PM of recent years would have handled this better.
Betting PostF1: backed Norris at 9.5 to win each way, with a hedge at 3 on Betfair for the straight win, just in case:
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2023/11/brazil-pre-race-2023.html
He and Verstappen were in a class of two in the sprint, and passing is eminently possible.
In particular, just thinking of education, a willingness to be more flexible about blended learning in November might have left us not needing to lock down in January.
The decision to work by arbitrary dates and the whims of rather stupid and frequently drunk civil servants rather than on expertise and a cool appraisal of the actual situation was a disaster.
But it’s what you get when you appoint the likes of Acland-Hood to senior positions.
Major house builder says not a single extra home will be built by Starmer
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/11/04/keir-starmer-labour-housing-crest-nicholson-property/
ouch !
Jake Berry complained to the police that they were not dealing properly with rape allegations against an unnamed MP. And a suggestion that the Conservative Party was paying somebody involved.
This may or may not relate to the widely known case of the MP who has been banned from Parliament for about 18 months now. But it points to a deeply unsatisfactory relationship between Government, the Party, the Police and due process. This is unfair to all involved.
I mean, Starmer's probably going to be quite busy running the country. It's not going to leave him much time for bricklaying.
There were three of the feckers checking it and they still got it wrong.
The game is better without it
I mean, that was part of the problem, wasn't it? Too many experts giving contradictory advice; along with other 'experts' giving their views to the media, stating what a disaster would occur if their views were not listened to. The government was overwhelmed with contradictory advice, particularly in the early days.
As I've said all along, I feel very sorry for the people who had to make the decisions. I;m effing glad I wasn't the one having to make them.
The irony is she snitched on my wife, who kept within the rules, but not me, who didn't.
Some people are just frustrated school prefects.
It seems ironic of you to accuse the Inquiry of prematurely reaching a conclusion, when it is you who has prematurely reached a conclusion on the Inquiry.
Some of the restrictions were a bit bonkers, such as one way systems in pubs, and masking while moving around but not while eating. True Lockdown was actually only a smallish part of the whole time, with lesser restrictions for long periods.
In terms of furlough, it perhaps went on too long, but the alternative was not normal economic activity. Without furlough and similar measures many businesses and jobs would have gone broke.
A point that I have repeatedly made is that the alternative was not living normally. The appearance of the virus removed that option. We do also need to accept that a lot of the damage was from the pandemic itself, not from control measures.
In terms of the enquiry it is revealing that Downing St was the chotic mess that we had glimpsed, and rightly exposed how amateurish and incompetent our government can be.
The more important bit though is not this trivia and gossip, but rather the dispassionate analysis of what worked and what did not in terms of disease control. Our pandemic plan was based on flu rather than coronavirus, and that needs to be addressed as the risks and measures needed were not identical. Surface contact and hand washing are of little importance in covid, while very important for flu. Airborne and asymptomatic spread are much more problematic.
Pandemic flu remains a risk, and the devastating effect of bird flu quite sobering. Take the recent tragic outbreak in an Argentinian elephant seal colony. Up to 3/4 of the pups in the breeding colony have died, compared with a usual mortality of 1%.
The worst possible conclusion to take into the next pandemic is that we should do nothing.
You did have a few 'child psychologists' on SAGE, including Michie. But no teachers. Only civil servants. Even the unions were frozen out.
This is one reason why the exam substitutes proved a major fiasco (well, that and the botched nature of Gibbs' reforms).
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-157/churchill-as-bricklayer/
It's be good to know a little more about the hobbies of our leaders; what do they do to unwind, to enjoy themselves? I mean, they all have to support a football club or two (how I'd love one to say "I can't stand football"); but what else do they do?
Robin Cook was famously a hillwalker (and sadly died whilst out on the hills); but aside from supporting Arsenal (hurl!) what are Starmer's hobbies? What are his passions? Ditto Sunak.
It was at this point I concluded the DfE were either actively malicious or so stupid they should all be sectioned.
We all believe in the wisdom of crowds and the foolishness of the mob.
And he also funds a sanctuary for superannuated animals of the species equus asinus.
That seems to me to be something that the Inquiry might focus on. How do we stop something similar bringing our Health Service to a standstill? Not an easy task.
IMV both stories actually make them seem a little more real; a little more human. Actually, I'd argue there's a rather interesting aspect to Corbyn's 'passion'; wrt what municipal works have done for us over the last couple of centuries.
If you look at the excess mortality it was overwhelmingly of viral cause, not from cancer etc.
Cancer and other emergency treatment never stopped, but it couldn't continue normally during a pandemic. My Trusts ITU, operating theatres and specialist breast cancer ward weren't sitting idle during the grim days of Jan to March 2021, they were stuffed to the brim with covid pneumonia patients. The beds and staff were already in use.
If you have a novel, rapidly spreading infection, back of an envelope maths says that it will overwhelm any health system if you let it.
Suppose the NHS had twice the capacity it had in spring 2020. Ruinously expensive, I'm sure. Would have bought us about 3 days.
In a mathematical fight, exponential growth always wins. And the immunity we bought by infection in the pre-vaccine waves barely took a nibble out of that, whatever the Oxford modellers might have said.
I also, through my work, know 3 people who committed suicide during Covid. The Faculty became seriously concerned about the consequences of isolation and depression during lockdowns and even afterwards with remote courts and little social contact.
Maybe the Nightingale hospitals we never really used would have been a better way forward although staffing them would have been difficult. I am not disputing at all that the Health Service was under immense pressure.
Things we got wrong, or did not get right included:-
We simply cannot afford surplus capacity sitting around waiting. Many, many people are dying on waiting lists as it is. I see this impact on capacity as the greatest challenge of a pandemic. But there are no easy solutions.
I remember court hearings where we each had to wipe the lectern once we had finished our questioning. This went on for over a year, long after we knew the infection was almost exclusively airborne. It never really changed.
I agree with others who say the lockdowns brought out the snitches and school prefects in many, particularly certain police forces who seem to have taken the scientific advice that Covid was spread by fun and were clearing people off deserted beaches and buzzing them on moorlands.
Obviously we needed some restrictions in 2020 and 21 before the vaccines arrived. But we also needed common sense, and in retrospect the closure of schools almost certainly did way more harm than good.
I would have done if the decision makers were bright, hardworking people who had decided to put their skills at the disposal of the country for everyone's benefit and found themselves facing this horror show when they had other ideas they wanted to implement for all our benefit.
Instead we had Cummings, Johnson, Case.
They wanted to be the ones making the decisions. They schemed, plotted, lied and forced their way to the top, at enormous cost to our economy and democracy, and when they got there found they only wanted the power and the glamour not to have to make difficult decisions they hadn't the intellectual firepower to understand.
Karma's a bitch.
The snag was the rest of us were buggered by their incompetence too.
The studies on 33 countries including the UK didn't show a rise in suicide over the covid period until October 2021. Indeed there was a slight decrease in most.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(22)00303-0/fulltext
That, plus the madness of masks when moving in pubs, but not when sitting, is the height of the absurdity for me.
It would very likely have met the needs of both the cautious, as well as those unwillingly restricted.
“BREAKING: Israeli Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu says that dropping an atomic weapon on Gaza is 'one of the possible options”
https://x.com/spectatorindex/status/1721070704806989884?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
How do we stop something similar bringing our Health Service to a standstill? Invest more in the Health Service. Waiting lists had been rising before the pandemic.
It seems funny now, but Lord it was bleak at the time
The main variant of concern in autumn 2020, and the first major mutation was the alpha covid. It was traced back to Kent.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/19/the-uk-has-identified-a-new-covid-19-strain-that-spreads-more-quickly-heres-what-they-know.html
Perhaps it spread in Spain via British tourists, but it originated here.
- whether we need more spare capacity (even though this is less efficient by another measure)
- whether we needed to put every other speciality on hold
- staff illness and burnout
- GP capacity (still below demand)
- care homes not receiving visitors
- care homes receiving infected hospital patients (perhaps Nightingale hospitals might have formed a buffer here)
The inquiry seems more exercised by whether Matt Hancock had any friends at Number 10.In the real world, by the end of December 2020, c. 10% of the country had been infected. Somewhat over 4% of those infected had been so ill they'd been hospitalised, and c. 1% of those infected had died.
Of those infected, between a fifth and a quarter were 54 and under.
If this, in Fishing-maths, equates to "a... 99.8% recovery rate (>99.9% for under 70s)", then we really need to scrutinise any other stats you've calculated.
The reason for the issue was, as said repeatedly in all of the witness testimony, that the NHS would collapse if it needed to deal with that many people simultaneously, and when the real figures for infectivity and exponential growth, coupled with the real figures for those needing hospitalisation, they needed to do something serious.
Because, as they said repeatedly in the witness testimony, if we destroy the NHS, everyone who relies on it for anything (and even in the depths of covid, 70%+ of NHS activity was on non-covid healthcare) will be in a lot of problems.
Not to mention the economic chaos and destruction, but the "no, no, nothing happened, just a sniffle, shut up" tendency just prefer to pretend that everything would have swum on serenely, don't they?
In all seriousness, reading the witness testimonies can be very interesting, especially comparing back to back of people who didn't much rate each other (eg Cummings and MacNamara) https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/31180752/INQ000273872.pdf
https://covid19.public-inquiry.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/01172228/INQ000273841.pdf
On the suicide thing I am not sure what was going on. It may have just been a statistical anomaly. The deaths were all late 2021, not earlier. We have invested quite heavily in wellbeing, support groups and collegiality since. It may be that as a group we are more gregarious than most and were more susceptible. Or it might just be a coincidence.
They relied on people adjusting their own behaviour in light of the known threat.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/sweden-during-pandemic#excess-deaths
Two thoughts in response, though;
1. If such thing as ‘evildoers’ exist, they clearly exist on both sides of this and, at present, I am indirectly aiding one side purely by being a citizen of a country giving nearly carte blanche to their military response. Just on the phrase ‘from the river to the sea’ bad actors on both sides use it to promote ethnic cleansing: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/original-party-platform-of-the-likud-party
2. Again an analogy from my enthusiastic youth I volunteered for a disaster relief charity. One of the many places we responded was in the Darien gap in Panama. We knew in giving out tents and tarps to indigenous communities, some of them would end up in the hands of violent drug smugglers who traverse from Colombia to Panama. So by doing what we were doing we were indirectly aiding ‘evildoers’. I don’t believe it made what we were doing wrong.
I will say, though, that the links to PSC organisers interviews that @FrankBooth posted last night have given me serious pause for thought. If the organisers of the demo are displaying antisemitism then I think that challenges much of what I have argued above. Had I seen those links, without knowing more I think I would not
have attended.
The failure to do proper analyses and take advantage of opportunity-RCTs on relaxations (highlighted in witness testimonies as a failure even at the time) was inexcusable.
I firmly believe that a fraction of the interventions were powerful and a fraction were pointless and the rest were somewhere in between, and we could, and should, have ascertained which were which by autumn 2020.
But they didn't, so they had to go heavy-and-clumsy-handed yet again.
https://www.youtube.com/@UKCovid-19Inquiry
I am a Starmer sceptic - but that means I’ll judge him once he’s in office, and not in advance.
The Apr-Dec 2020 suicide rate was *lower* than that in 2019 or 2018, but comparable to 2017: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/deathsfromsuicidethatoccurredinenglandandwales/apriltodecember2020
There’s still a complicated picture in terms of the effects of the pandemic and of lockdowns on mental health. Some studies report increases in poor mental health; others don’t. Those finding increases in poor mental health don’t necessarily find those increases correlate with lockdowns. The pandemic itself had a negative effect on people’s mental health. Too many people assume that it was the restrictions rather than the risk of the illness and the loss of loved ones to the disease that was the cause of poorer mental health. But I think we’re still to get to bottom of all the different factors, and different people were affected in different ways.
1 - You could have avoided lockdowns completely, in theory, but this was probably impractical for the first one as we just wouldn't have taken on board what was needed.
2 - The administrative setup was far too inflexible and slow to react in both directions
3 - They failed to take on board the needs of many segments of the population, including those who were poorer, did not have much room, did not have gardens, were pregnant, or had children
4 - The capacity to carry out proper cost-benefit analyses wasn't there
5 - Scientists were as slow to react to the severity of the disease and believe in what could and could not be done as anyone else
6 - There was a complete failure to properly assess which interventions worked best and which were least effective. It was highlighted that the failure to allow people to meet up carefully out of doors all along was serious.
... and so on. Seriously, I'd recommend reading them.
The alternative is government funding, but neither national nor local government is in a financial position to spend big on housing.
So to increase house building we either need to reduce costs (for example lower specification) or restore private sector profitability.
Lockdowns.
Our Medical Students from the lockdown years are an interesting bunch. There are both more dropouts and expulsions than usual, but the most striking thing is not mental illness but attitudes. Hopefully they will learn normal social skills in time.
Here's a different look at that excess deaths for Sweden, Norway, the UK, and New Zealand, which famously took a very different approach to lockdown.