As much as I am glad I don't live in London, also glad I don't live in a hotspot where posh Londoners have second homes e.g. Cotswold and Cornwall. I fear for Cornwall if all these escapees take the plague with them, as far as I know, Cornwall only has one hospital.
Their main hospital is in Treliske. I've been reliably informed they've already had five Corona deaths there.
I have heard the same. It’s a hotspot.
It takes a certain level of metro land narcism to write an article about how fleeing plague in London to decamp to your cotswold second home has the massive benefit of allowing you to discover the better angels of yourself.
In some ways Johnson is likely to be on a hiding to nothing from here on in.
Whatever he does or doesn't do, he will be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
Critics thought the lockdown should have been actioned on Friday and still doesn't go far enough. Peter Hitchens says any lockdown is the mark of an oppressive dictatorship. So Boris is buggered either way.
Except that no one gives a fuck what Peter Hitchens thinks...
Agreed Boris cant do too much only too little methinks.
Anyway goodnight all.
Not an easy day Daughter got positive test but is slightly less bad symptom wise thankfully
1. A belated Happy Birthday to PB and thank you to Mike and Robert for running the site so well. It has been - and is - a privilege to write for it and to have so many excellent header writers to keep one up to the mark and so many knowledgeable, interesting and humorous posters.
2. An enormous thank you to Dr Foxy and all his colleagues in the NHS who are doing such heroic work for us all - and at some risk to themselves. No words can really express my appreciation and admiration. A big thank you also to supermarket workers who are also doing vital work and getting some abuse for it too. I hope we will remember all of these people when this ends and show our appreciation and gratitude.
I am no stats guys nor even have a passing acquaintance with epidemiology, but it seems to me that there many PBers reporting extended family or friends have this thing.
I agree with that. I thought he struck a good tone. There will be many debates about how effective he was leading up to this (maybe a bit blazé, maybe playing the situation down unacceptably) but credit where credits due. Tonight he was statesmanlike.
I don't think it is blazé, I think although Boris has flip-flopped on lots of political decision that at his heart he is a lot more liberal in his outlook when it comes to personal freedoms than those Boris Derangement Syndrome like to remember.
I genuinely think that taking these steps were ones he never wanted to take and hoped people would just respond to the nudge nudge approach.
He has looked pained when the media have screamed at him to lock everybody down.
1. A belated Happy Birthday to PB and thank you to Mike and Robert for running the site so well. It has been - and is - a privilege to write for it and to have so many excellent header writers to keep one up to the mark and so many knowledgeable, interesting and humorous posters.
2. An enormous thank you to Dr Foxy and all his colleagues in the NHS who are doing such heroic work for us all - and at some risk to themselves. No words can really express my appreciation and admiration. A big thank you also to supermarket workers who are also doing vital work and getting some abuse for it too. I hope we will remember all of these people when this ends and show our appreciation and gratitude.
I am no stats guys nor even have a passing acquaintance with epidemiology, but it seems to me that there many PBers reporting extended family or friends have this thing.
Which gives me (probably unfounded) hope that the mortality rate is actually a lot lower than thought.
I am no stats guys nor even have a passing acquaintance with epidemiology, but it seems to me that there many PBers reporting extended family or friends have this thing.
Haven't seen GideonWise since his post last night about coming down with a sudden fever and cough. Hope he's OK.
I am no stats guys nor even have a passing acquaintance with epidemiology, but it seems to me that there many PBers reporting extended family or friends have this thing.
Well I think there are least 400,000-500,000 people who have it now in the UK, so lets say 1 in 150. I don't know how many regular posters there are on here, but 100+ and many live in urban areas like London where much higher chance of somebody having it.
I would think in 3 weeks time everybody will know somebody close to them that has it.
I am no stats guys nor even have a passing acquaintance with epidemiology, but it seems to me that there many PBers reporting extended family or friends have this thing.
Haven't seen GideonWise since his post last night about coming down with a sudden fever and cough. Hope he's OK.
His profile indicates he was lurking this evening, so he is still alive, at least. All the best to him though.
'If it was up to the doctors they'd shut down the entire world!' Donald Trump says he is ready to get American 'open for business' in DAYS by confining lockdowns to 'hot spots'
They are going to be testing the herd immunity strategy to destruction.
I wish we had some kind of video player that replaced most of the words with "blah" so we could hear what the voters are hearing, for example if you turn that quote into
"mortality rate, blah blah blah substantially blah 1 percent blah blah blah death terrible blah" then it's just as good as anything Macron or Merkel might have said. Probably better, because it's optimized to have the best words in it.
New York scientists have created the first blood test to detect whether someone has already been infected by and developed immunity to coronavirus.
Researchers at Mt Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine have made the first so-called serologic test for COVID-19 in the US, and they plan to roll it out in the next few days in its clinics.
'If it was up to the doctors they'd shut down the entire world!' Donald Trump says he is ready to get American 'open for business' in DAYS by confining lockdowns to 'hot spots'
They are going to be testing the herd immunity strategy to destruction.
Trump isn't in charge of lockdowns, it's up to the states.
I hope Mike Ashley gets a phone call from the government at 9am tomorrow morning informing him that he might like to reconsider his claims of Sport Direct are the 5th emergency service or perhaps the tax man, the H&S executive and every other arm of the state will be taking a huge interest in every area of his businesses for many years to come.
Hotels, hostels, BnBs, as well as campsites and commercial boarding houses and caravan parks are all expected to close down. But ministers have said there will be exceptions where people are living in them permanently or while their primary residences are unavailable.
All those thinking they are escaping the plague by going glamping are going to have to head back to the big smoke.
I wish we had some kind of video player that replaced most of the words with "blah" so we could hear what the voters are hearing, for example if you turn that quote into
"mortality rate, blah blah blah substantially blah 1 percent blah blah blah death terrible blah" then it's just as good as anything Macron or Merkel might have said. Probably better, because it's optimized to have the best words in it.
“The whole concept of death is terrible, but....” With Trump, who knows where that thought might end ?
Would be interested to see what @Charles has to say about the article. Bear in mind it's written by a "biotechnology investor and virologist" so in his world vaccines are a great thing and he doesn't say much about their downsides. (That may be being harsh. Perhaps he doesn't mention them due to space constraints, or because he's trying to be "responsible" and not put people off vaccination due to them misinterpreting what he says about risks, therefore preferring to brush them under the carpet. But risks are real!)
Here's how he handles anti-vaxxers:
And worst of all, the common-cold vaccine would fall victim to the lies of anti-vaxxers. Examples of people being diagnosed with cancer or arthritis or multiple sclerosis in the days or weeks after receiving the common-cold vaccine would be easy to find, just based on random coincidence. Anti-vaxxers would pounce. No matter that data would demonstrate that there’s no link between the vaccine and these conditions, many people will think: “why risk it, I’ll get over a cold.”
Now industry types are obviously not keen on anti-vaxxers but the characterisation here that they are a bunch of crazy, irrational liars only captures a part of what's a very complex movement. It runs a wide spectrum from the spreading of fake news by people who'd rather flog you their snake oil, to very well-meaning concerned parents who might nevertheless lack the scientific literacy and either access to or ability to judge the evidence.
I met a public health worker who set up a community mobilisation project for economically disadvantaged mums with the aim of empowering them to take better care of their own health and that of their families and young children. Brilliant idea, right? But it turned into a nightmare - the newly-empowered ladies started looking up medical advice on the internet and things deviated very far from what the public health team had intended to achieve. The project basically evolved into a forum that allowed the women to organise a community campaign against the vaccinations the health services wanted to deliver to them (I was going to say things got "out of control" but the point of community mobilisation projects is that, in principle, it's desirable for the control and ultimate direction of the movement to lie with the participants themselves - which in this case had unintended consequences).
People taking control over their own health/bodies don't always "do as they're told"; goodness knows what the health implications of that misadventure were. But these anti-vaxxers were not evil mendacious liars, they were passionate caring devoted mothers who just so happened to be deeply mistaken.
It's also simplistic to say anti-vaxxers are just fooled by random coincidences. The article doesn't make this point, but vaccines generally have adverse events associated. Usually rare, and if you experience one it will likely be mild, but the worst adverse events can be very gruesome indeed. Frankly, just reading the list of harms we do know vaccines can cause is sufficient to tip some people into the anti-vaxx column. A lot of cost-benefit style calculations get number-crunched before vaccines get signed off. In principle a rational person might disagree with that calculation, feel the risks are not worth it, and take their chances - in fact this is scarily rational if other people are more compliant and so you can still get the benefits of the vaccine via herd immunity without having to face the risk of any adverse events! But if too many people try freeloading like that, then the herd immunity fails. What do you do to stop them - make it compulsory? Ban kids from schools unless they've had their shots or have a medical condition that prevents them doing so? These are vexed questions.
There's a strong chance that vaccines developed in a rush to beat a pandemic are going to have a greater rate of nasty adverse events than a vaccine that's had many years of careful trials, for obvious reasons. But you really, really want people to take it rather than freeload. Some countries (including the UK) have a sort of no-fault insurance scheme whereby people who suffer vaccine injury can receive compensation (some countries limit this to pandemic vaccines only). Hopefully this encourages people to take the vaccines up by providing some mitigation if e.g. they miss a few days of work due to nasty side-effects. There's an occasional counter-argument: telling a mum that there's a scheme in place to pay her X dollars if the vaccine kills her darling daughter may not encourage her to think the vaccine is perfectly safe (which, after all, it isn't - but if you're tasked with maximising vaccine uptake, you might rather wish parents believed it was), and people may be wary of taking active steps that endanger loved ones in a psychologically asymmetric way to the risks they're prepared to expose their loved ones to via negligent inaction.
There's also an issue implicit in that article but never really addressed because of its failure to consider the genuine health risks that vaccination can cause. We are correctly informed that the government is relying on young and middle-aged people to get vaccinated in order to keep older people safe, because older people's immune systems generally don't get the full benefit of vaccination. And the risks of COVID-19 lie mostly with the elderly. So we are expecting one group to accept the harms of vaccination for minimal personal benefit, largely in order to confer benefits to another group... that certainly raises "interesting" ethical issues! But also from a messaging point of view, has plenty of potential to backfire.
Pence must have the most deadpan face in the history of american politics.
I despair of Trump. I used to despise him but now I think he is just in obvious mental decline (like Biden) so overt contempt seems cruel.
He’s just not up to the job and will only get worse.
That said, he is making a valid point here. Death is horrible, but so is poverty, depression, unemployment, suicide, and all these come from terrible economic damage.
Trump is arguing for a herd immunity approach. And you know who else is doing this? The Swedes.
Pence must have the most deadpan face in the history of american politics.
I despair of Trump. I used to despise him but now I think he is just in obvious mental decline (like Biden) so overt contempt seems cruel.
He’s just not up to the job and will only get worse.
That said, he is making a valid point here. Death is horrible, but so is poverty, depression, unemployment, suicide, and all these come from terrible economic damage.
Trump is arguing for a herd immunity approach. And you know who else is doing this? The Swedes.
How long for though. I'm old enough to remember when the UK was trying out Herd Immunity. Sweden isn't at a critical level yet but they will no doubt lockdown soon. In the US it will be state by state, not sure Trump will have much input. He can't stop States locking down.
Cape Town: on time Lagos: on time Hong Kong: on time Sydney: on time Melbourne: on time Singapore: on time Johannesburg: on time Muscat: on time Nairobi: on time Bangkok: on time
The New York State Academy of Family Physicians is calling for a ban of all tobacco and vaping products across statewide due to the increased risk of COVID-19 in those who use tobacco.
Based on a study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, one factor that influences the progression of COVID-19 is a person’s history of smoking.
The study suggests that “patients who use tobacco are 14 times as likely to have COVID-19 progression.” According to The National Institute of Drug Abuse, this is because the coronavirus attacks the lungs, and people who vape or smoke tobacco are more susceptible to the virus becoming a serious threat.
“Now more than ever, it is critical for the State and medical community to take actions to prevent our youth from ever using these highly addictive, deadly products and to help our patients to reduce their risks through FDA-approved cessation and telehealth during this pandemic,” says Barbara Keber, president of the group that represents more than 6,000 family physicians and medical students in New York.
If you wanted to give some people's lungs a couple of months of recovery time so they were in better shape when they caught COVID-19, particularly in London and other urban areas, I guess you could ban all tobacco sales (would have to be zero-warning to stop folk stockpiling!) and tough restrictions on the most nasty emitting vehicles (in London at least you could presumably ramp up the price tag on the LEZ/ULEZ schemes to help achieve that without requiring a total traffic lockdown though I note they have instead temporarily suspended them to keep key workers mobile).
The New York State Academy of Family Physicians is calling for a ban of all tobacco and vaping products across statewide due to the increased risk of COVID-19 in those who use tobacco.
Based on a study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, one factor that influences the progression of COVID-19 is a person’s history of smoking.
The study suggests that “patients who use tobacco are 14 times as likely to have COVID-19 progression.” According to The National Institute of Drug Abuse, this is because the coronavirus attacks the lungs, and people who vape or smoke tobacco are more susceptible to the virus becoming a serious threat.
“Now more than ever, it is critical for the State and medical community to take actions to prevent our youth from ever using these highly addictive, deadly products and to help our patients to reduce their risks through FDA-approved cessation and telehealth during this pandemic,” says Barbara Keber, president of the group that represents more than 6,000 family physicians and medical students in New York.
If you wanted to give some people's lungs a couple of months of recovery time so they were in better shape when they caught COVID-19, particularly in London and other urban areas, I guess you could ban all tobacco sales (would have to be zero-warning to stop folk stockpiling!) and tough restrictions on the most nasty emitting vehicles (in London at least you could presumably ramp up the price tag on the LEZ/ULEZ schemes to help achieve that without requiring a total traffic lockdown though I note they have instead temporarily suspended them to keep key workers mobile).
Really, if the govt is prepared to use police force to make us stay at home at the moment in the name of health of us and the NHS, it has no non-financial reason to not ban the sale of cigarettes
Unless you think there will be mass (and by mass, I mean 50+%) ignoring of this, and rioting on the streets, why wouldn't it dramatically lower infection rates?
The question is not can governments reduce transmission rates of CV-19 via lockdowns, it is can governments prevent future outbreaks of CV-19 from being as devestating as the first?
The latter question is the difficult one. South Korea has done a good, but not perfect, job. China is removing restrictions somewhat.
Before we see significant loosening, we need to (a) have really good testing regimes in place for next time (the ability to do 50,000+ tests per day); and (b) to find drug regimes that limit serious consequences.
If we can put those things in place, then we will get out of this without too many serious consequences.
New York scientists have created the first blood test to detect whether someone has already been infected by and developed immunity to coronavirus.
Researchers at Mt Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine have made the first so-called serologic test for COVID-19 in the US, and they plan to roll it out in the next few days in its clinics.
Pence must have the most deadpan face in the history of american politics.
I despair of Trump. I used to despise him but now I think he is just in obvious mental decline (like Biden) so overt contempt seems cruel.
He’s just not up to the job and will only get worse.
That said, he is making a valid point here. Death is horrible, but so is poverty, depression, unemployment, suicide, and all these come from terrible economic damage.
Trump is arguing for a herd immunity approach. And you know who else is doing this? The Swedes.
Trump isn't smart enough to understand her immunity. He was an anti-vaxxer FFS.
I think he understands it on a basic, visceral, businesslike level. Yes people will die but people die all the time. Why trash the economy to save half a million mainly old or ill people, who will die anyway and contribute not much, when trashing the economy will severely damage the lives of many young productive people?
He has an argument.
I do not agree with it - I think the collapse of a health system and the trauma that entails is too risky - but it is arguable.
The experiment in Sweden will prove him right, or wrong.
Except in Sweden, everyone has some form of healthcare. In the US, not so much.
The New York State Academy of Family Physicians is calling for a ban of all tobacco and vaping products across statewide due to the increased risk of COVID-19 in those who use tobacco.
Based on a study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, one factor that influences the progression of COVID-19 is a person’s history of smoking.
The study suggests that “patients who use tobacco are 14 times as likely to have COVID-19 progression.” According to The National Institute of Drug Abuse, this is because the coronavirus attacks the lungs, and people who vape or smoke tobacco are more susceptible to the virus becoming a serious threat.
“Now more than ever, it is critical for the State and medical community to take actions to prevent our youth from ever using these highly addictive, deadly products and to help our patients to reduce their risks through FDA-approved cessation and telehealth during this pandemic,” says Barbara Keber, president of the group that represents more than 6,000 family physicians and medical students in New York.
If you wanted to give some people's lungs a couple of months of recovery time so they were in better shape when they caught COVID-19, particularly in London and other urban areas, I guess you could ban all tobacco sales (would have to be zero-warning to stop folk stockpiling!) and tough restrictions on the most nasty emitting vehicles (in London at least you could presumably ramp up the price tag on the LEZ/ULEZ schemes to help achieve that without requiring a total traffic lockdown though I note they have instead temporarily suspended them to keep key workers mobile).
Really, if the govt is prepared to use police force to make us stay at home at the moment in the name of health of us and the NHS, it has no non-financial reason to not ban the sale of cigarettes
Cigarettes don't give other people cancer (or at least not to anything like the same extent as viruses can be transmitted).
Also we can tax them at point of sale. What's the equivalent option with the virus?
The New York State Academy of Family Physicians is calling for a ban of all tobacco and vaping products across statewide due to the increased risk of COVID-19 in those who use tobacco.
Based on a study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, one factor that influences the progression of COVID-19 is a person’s history of smoking.
The study suggests that “patients who use tobacco are 14 times as likely to have COVID-19 progression.” According to The National Institute of Drug Abuse, this is because the coronavirus attacks the lungs, and people who vape or smoke tobacco are more susceptible to the virus becoming a serious threat.
“Now more than ever, it is critical for the State and medical community to take actions to prevent our youth from ever using these highly addictive, deadly products and to help our patients to reduce their risks through FDA-approved cessation and telehealth during this pandemic,” says Barbara Keber, president of the group that represents more than 6,000 family physicians and medical students in New York.
If you wanted to give some people's lungs a couple of months of recovery time so they were in better shape when they caught COVID-19, particularly in London and other urban areas, I guess you could ban all tobacco sales (would have to be zero-warning to stop folk stockpiling!) and tough restrictions on the most nasty emitting vehicles (in London at least you could presumably ramp up the price tag on the LEZ/ULEZ schemes to help achieve that without requiring a total traffic lockdown though I note they have instead temporarily suspended them to keep key workers mobile).
Really, if the govt is prepared to use police force to make us stay at home at the moment in the name of health of us and the NHS, it has no non-financial reason to not ban the sale of cigarettes
Cigarettes don't give other people cancer (or at least not to anything like the same extent as viruses can be transmitted).
Also we can tax them at point of sale. What's the equivalent option with the virus?
The point the NY doctors were making (though frankly they would love to ban tobacco at the best of times!) is that smoking degrades the lungs, and stopping smoking allows lungs to recover (surprisingly quickly actually). Their hope is you can limit the harm of the virus, allow more people to recover, recover faster, and do so with less drain on health care resources, if you get them to stop smoking.
Like @isam says, if the government is going to such extreme lengths to limit the harm done by the virus, prohibition of tobacco - once an unthinkable step - would now be a relatively minor one.
(Obviously the vast majority of health gains from such a policy would be for non-COVID-related diseases!! But if you're gonna go all-out, why not go all-out?)
The New York State Academy of Family Physicians is calling for a ban of all tobacco and vaping products across statewide due to the increased risk of COVID-19 in those who use tobacco.
Based on a study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, one factor that influences the progression of COVID-19 is a person’s history of smoking.
The study suggests that “patients who use tobacco are 14 times as likely to have COVID-19 progression.” According to The National Institute of Drug Abuse, this is because the coronavirus attacks the lungs, and people who vape or smoke tobacco are more susceptible to the virus becoming a serious threat.
“Now more than ever, it is critical for the State and medical community to take actions to prevent our youth from ever using these highly addictive, deadly products and to help our patients to reduce their risks through FDA-approved cessation and telehealth during this pandemic,” says Barbara Keber, president of the group that represents more than 6,000 family physicians and medical students in New York.
If you wanted to give some people's lungs a couple of months of recovery time so they were in better shape when they caught COVID-19, particularly in London and other urban areas, I guess you could ban all tobacco sales (would have to be zero-warning to stop folk stockpiling!) and tough restrictions on the most nasty emitting vehicles (in London at least you could presumably ramp up the price tag on the LEZ/ULEZ schemes to help achieve that without requiring a total traffic lockdown though I note they have instead temporarily suspended them to keep key workers mobile).
Really, if the govt is prepared to use police force to make us stay at home at the moment in the name of health of us and the NHS, it has no non-financial reason to not ban the sale of cigarettes
Cigarettes don't give other people cancer (or at least not to anything like the same extent as viruses can be transmitted).
Also we can tax them at point of sale. What's the equivalent option with the virus?
There may not be an equivalent with the virus. But the reason for the draconian measures, that I don’t really have a big problem with, are to safeguard the NHS. If no one in the UK smoked, how much more time and money would there be for the NHS? Does the tax receipt for them cover it? Even if the answer is yes, it is morally bankrupt
New York look like having policies which include removing ventilators from still alive patients for new ones which have better chances and even lottery based system...
Err, what is he suggesting then? That we let it run rampant because we can't test it?
What a knob.
He's not wrong though. The UK had a lot of time to see what was working and copy it and it didn't, and because they failed to act in a timely manner a bunch of people are about to die unnecessarily, the economy is fucked, and you are no longer allowed out of your house. It's just an astonishing, epic catastrophe.
I can't think of any government failure remotely as disastrous in Britain in centuries. The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way.
Err, what is he suggesting then? That we let it run rampant because we can't test it?
What a knob.
He's not wrong though. The UK had a lot of time to see what was working and copy it and it didn't, and because they failed to act in a timely manner a bunch of people are about to die unnecessarily, the economy is fucked, and you are no longer allowed out of your house. It's just an astonishing, epic catastrophe.
I can't think of any government failure remotely as disastrous in Britain in centuries. The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way.
You can't think of any as disastrous, yet a lot of others failed in the same way?
I can't think of any government failure remotely as disastrous in Britain in centuries. The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way.
You can't think of any as disastrous, yet a lot of others failed in the same way?
I can't think of any government failure remotely as disastrous in Britain in centuries. The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way.
You can't think of any as disastrous, yet a lot of others failed in the same way?
Read the next two words after "disastrous"
That's what I get for reading too fast. Fair enough, but I still don't know what he is suggesting.
I agree with that. I thought he struck a good tone. There will be many debates about how effective he was leading up to this (maybe a bit blazé, maybe playing the situation down unacceptably) but credit where credits due. Tonight he was statesmanlike.
Good work from the government to implement Corbyns Labour manifesto in just three months.
I can't think of any government failure remotely as disastrous in Britain in centuries. The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way.
You can't think of any as disastrous, yet a lot of others failed in the same way?
Read the next two words after "disastrous"
That's what I get for reading too fast. Fair enough, but I still don't know what he is suggesting.
I don't think he has a better plan - the time a better plan could have avoided this has passed - but when a government fails on this scale I don't see why you'd expect the opposition parties to be quiet about it.
I can't think of any government failure remotely as disastrous in Britain in centuries. The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way.
You can't think of any as disastrous, yet a lot of others failed in the same way?
Read the next two words after "disastrous"
That's what I get for reading too fast. Fair enough, but I still don't know what he is suggesting.
I don't think he has a better plan - the time a better plan could have avoided this has passed - but when a government fails on this scale I don't see why you'd expect the opposition parties to be quiet about it.
What else is he supposed to do? He has gone as close to full lockdown as possible now and announced huge measures of economic support, go too early the economic cost would have been even greater, left it later the health cost too much
I suspect this whole thing isn’t sustainable for very long at all, at least in its current form. Because it basically freezes everything in place at a single point and the requirements to make it work will degrade over time. Many people could probably set up to WFH but didn’t have enough time to put it in place. And now the electronics industry has been shut down won’t be able to. Similarly people who have capacity to work from home will have problems as eqpt ages and begins to break down.
Churn in the workforce has been suspended which means overtime gaps will open up as people become ill and/or quit and it will be very difficult to replace (even getting humans in place let alone conducting training for roles).
And meanwhile the Govt carries on paying people 80% when they have almost nothing to spend money on.
I just don’t see where we’re going with it because even if there is a temporary relaxing in rules can we really repeat it all again in a few months?
I get the whole “listening to the medical and scientific experts” thing, and on some level there was no choice but to follow them this time - but at some point you need to be able to question the underlying assumptions underpinning their advice. If they are to be continued to be listened to unquestioningly then they are going to have to come up with a better solution in future.
What else is he supposed to do, he has gone as close to full lockdown as possible now and announced huge measures if economic support, go too early the economic cost would have been evem greater, left it later the health cost too much
Some of the things he should have done differently, that I'm sure he would do differently if he could go back in time:
- Early call to work from home where practical. Minimal economic cost, can be continued indefinitely. - Early call to stop events instead of for example letting a bunch of contagious people fly in from Madrid and wander around the bars of Liverpool. Fairly low economic cost, can be continued indefinitely. - Earlier and stricter travel restrictions and contact detail followup, instead of letting everybody just wander through the airport from places on the verge of complete lockdown because the disease was so out of control. Low economic cost. - Clear messages instead of all the abortive confusion with herd immunity and pretending he shook hands with infectious people.
I agree that the response *now* is OK given where the UK is. But the UK is where it is because it's spent the last 6 weeks failing so hard, and it's the job of opposition politicians to say so.
What else is he supposed to do, he has gone as close to full lockdown as possible now and announced huge measures if economic support, go too early the economic cost would have been evem greater, left it later the health cost too much
Some of the things he should have done differently, that I'm sure he would do differently if he could go back in time:
- Early call to work from home where practical. Minimal economic cost, can be continued indefinitely. - Early call to stop events instead of for example letting a bunch of contagious people fly in from Madrid and wander around the bars of Liverpool. Fairly low economic cost, can be continued indefinitely. - Earlier and stricter travel restrictions and contact detail followup, instead of letting everybody just wander through the airport from places on the verge of complete lockdown because the disease was so out of control. Low economic cost. - Clear messages instead of all the abortive confusion with herd immunity and pretending he shook hands with infectious people.
I agree that the response *now* is OK given where the UK is. But the UK is where it is because it's spent the last 6 weeks failing so hard, and it's the job of opposition politicians to say so.
Whilst all those measures would undoubtedly have reduced the numbers now, there is still one major unknown. Where will this thing be in four months time? Because there is capacity in the healthcare system at present which there won’t be then. And we may find ourselves grateful that as many people got it at as will have done in advance of that.
Whilst all those measures would undoubtedly have reduced the numbers now, there is still one major unknown. Where will this thing be in four months time? Because there is capacity in the healthcare system at present which there won’t be then. And we may find ourselves grateful that as many people got it at as will have done in advance of that.
Current spare capacity hardly makes a dent. Instead the British have (I guess) overwhelmed their ability to do contact tracing because they've got so many cases. You're about to go into a 3 week lockdown with the goal of getting back to where you should have been if the government had done the less disruptive things soon enough.
Re: Liverpool - is there any evidence that the Liverpool-Madrid game made much difference? I’m not seeing any particular “Liverpool hotspot” in the official figures.
Whilst all those measures would undoubtedly have reduced the numbers now, there is still one major unknown. Where will this thing be in four months time? Because there is capacity in the healthcare system at present which there won’t be then. And we may find ourselves grateful that as many people got it at as will have done in advance of that.
Current spare capacity hardly makes a dent. Instead the British have (I guess) overwhelmed their ability to do contact tracing because they've got so many cases. You're about to go into a 3 week lockdown with the goal of getting back to where you should have been if the government had done the less disruptive things soon enough.
With the exception of South Korea (and Singapore on a much smaller scale) is the ANY country attempting “contact tracing” to combat this? You talk about a failure to learn from others as if the UK was in a uniquely lucky position to observe and follow best practice and yet there have been almost no other countries which have followed your prescriptions either. The main differences in Europe have been the speed or otherwise at which various “lockdown” measures have been attempted - and with various levels of apparent success.
Whilst all those measures would undoubtedly have reduced the numbers now, there is still one major unknown. Where will this thing be in four months time? Because there is capacity in the healthcare system at present which there won’t be then. And we may find ourselves grateful that as many people got it at as will have done in advance of that.
Current spare capacity hardly makes a dent. Instead the British have (I guess) overwhelmed their ability to do contact tracing because they've got so many cases. You're about to go into a 3 week lockdown with the goal of getting back to where you should have been if the government had done the less disruptive things soon enough.
Tokyo’s just reported its largest number of new cases in a day. It’s too early to say which country has got it right.
Just as the countries most devastated after the Second World War subsequently emerged with the strongest economies, the irony of COVID-19 is that those countries which dealt the worst/suffered the most with it could end up with the best long term outcomes. Even in overall number of deaths (if one sets the criteria as dealt the worst/suffered the most in first wave).
Whilst all those measures would undoubtedly have reduced the numbers now, there is still one major unknown. Where will this thing be in four months time? Because there is capacity in the healthcare system at present which there won’t be then. And we may find ourselves grateful that as many people got it at as will have done in advance of that.
Current spare capacity hardly makes a dent. Instead the British have (I guess) overwhelmed their ability to do contact tracing because they've got so many cases. You're about to go into a 3 week lockdown with the goal of getting back to where you should have been if the government had done the less disruptive things soon enough.
Tokyo’s just reported its largest number of new cases in a day. It’s too early to say which country has got it right.
True. I come back to the question I have asked before. How does the pattern of this thing go from where we are now to the 20k deaths “good result” (or population adjusted figures in other countries)? Unless people are suggesting that this is effectively a defeatist figure and we should be/have been aiming for a number much lower than that, many countries are going to find that they are just operating a longer fuse.
Those deaths doesn't particularly mean the strategy here isn't working - somebody returned from NY, and two other people were on the cruise ship. The Japanese strategy is aimed at preventing transmission, it isn't supposed to cure you if you've already got it.
However I definitely think Japan is in danger of pissing away the gains they made by acting early.
I am resting up fellow pbers. This virus feels like an alien disease, like something new my body hasn't tackled.
I've had a lot of communicable disease over the last few years due to having small children. Raging fevers and flu. This is not like that. The fever has been mild and was a blessing when it occurred.
What both my wife and I experienced was far more scary than fever or a cough. It was a shortness of breath. We have had to learn to get used to feeling like we have asthma or some sort of lung disease. I am picturing the CT images showing clouding on my lungs as I breathe and I don't catch the breath fully. I understand totally how this kills people.
I just want to say thank you to Dr Foxy for his tip on spo2 measures. Without using that device, reassuring me that my lungs were still functioning sufficiently, I am quite sure I would have tried to hospitalize myself by now. I do not want to go to hospital unless absolutely necessary. My wife and I use it every few hours and there is a couple of second wait to see whether, it feels like, you are going to live or die.
Last night I sobbed not knowing how we were going to look after our children. Today we managed, tomorrow we shall too. Take care pb.
I agree with that. I thought he struck a good tone. There will be many debates about how effective he was leading up to this (maybe a bit blazé, maybe playing the situation down unacceptably) but credit where credits due. Tonight he was statesmanlike.
Good work from the government to implement Corbyns Labour manifesto in just three months.
Sadly, the governments responses will also have the same effect as Corbyns manifesto, an unnecessarily long recession, a debt bill our grandchildren will still not be able to pay off, and us loosing our place in the would a leading nation.
Those deaths doesn't particularly mean the strategy here isn't working - somebody returned from NY, and two other people were on the cruise ship. The Japanese strategy is aimed at preventing transmission, it isn't supposed to cure you if you've already got it.
However I definitely think Japan is in danger of pissing away the gains they made by acting early.
I wasn’t referring to the deaths but the 16 new cases in Tokyo.
As a thought experiment I wonder how public attitudes would change to how this disease is being combatted if the media were to publish/publicise daily stats of causes of all deaths that occurred in the country over a period of time (even ignoring the fact that coronavirus figures are not “caused by” figures)?
There must be a massive chance at the end of this as we potentially survey a wrecked economy, a newly paranoid, fearful and less confident society, that there is widespread Y2K mk 2 syndrome. On a purely political calculation, I wonder if a death rate of 10k or 200k would be better for the Govt and/or political class (and scientific class, come to think of it).
The sad thing is that those countries with low death counts on the back of draconian measures need other countries to have high figures to show why what they did was necessary.
I am resting up fellow pbers. This virus feels like an alien disease, like something new my body hasn't tackled.
I've had a lot of communicable disease over the last few years due to having small children. Raging fevers and flu. This is not like that. The fever has been mild and was a blessing when it occurred.
What both my wife and I experienced was far more scary than fever or a cough. It was a shortness of breath. We have had to learn to get used to feeling like we have asthma or some sort of lung disease. I am picturing the CT images showing clouding on my lungs as I breathe and I don't catch the breath fully. I understand totally how this kills people.
I just want to say thank you to Dr Foxy for his tip on spo2 measures. Without using that device, reassuring me that my lungs were still functioning sufficiently, I am quite sure I would have tried to hospitalize myself by now. I do not want to go to hospital unless absolutely necessary. My wife and I use it every few hours and there is a couple of second wait to see whether, it feels like, you are going to live or die.
Last night I sobbed not knowing how we were going to look after our children. Today we managed, tomorrow we shall too. Take care pb.
Err, what is he suggesting then? That we let it run rampant because we can't test it?
What a knob.
S Korea are doing about the same number of tests as us now also. They've largely given up mass testing.
Doing 25,000 tests when the are 100 people with the disease is rather different to when there are 5,000 with it
Indeed - but I think the point is that it wasn’t a long term strategy. If it doesn’t kill of the disease (ie containment fails) then the only difference becomes one of timing. And the British Govt/scientific approach has always been about timing. Just one where they’ve had to accelerate measures from where they expected because of changed assumptions about rate of transmission and death. In which case holding up South Korea as a route we should have followed that would have saved us from where we are now becomes somewhat less justified.
Those deaths doesn't particularly mean the strategy here isn't working - somebody returned from NY, and two other people were on the cruise ship. The Japanese strategy is aimed at preventing transmission, it isn't supposed to cure you if you've already got it.
However I definitely think Japan is in danger of pissing away the gains they made by acting early.
I wasn’t referring to the deaths but the 16 new cases in Tokyo.
The national numbers for new cases flat and there will be a spike of people showing up from Europe / US, so that's not particularly alarming. If anything it's the opposite: We know contagious people from overseas are showing up, so it's good that we're seeing them (if we weren't it would show a testing fail) and that the numbers are higher in Tokyo which, has more international travel. If the national numbers are flat but there's a spike in cases that didn't involve domestic transmission, that means there's less domestic transmission.
The reasons to be worried about Japan are: 1) There's still not much testing (although this is complex and a bit controversial) so there's a reason to think there may be more cases coming in than we're seeing. 2) At the same time the response is slackening a bit (mainly because the numbers don't seem to be going up much so people are relaxing), so if we do have all these undetected contagious people walking around, the virus could gain a lot of ground before we see it.
Err, what is he suggesting then? That we let it run rampant because we can't test it?
What a knob.
S Korea are doing about the same number of tests as us now also. They've largely given up mass testing.
Doing 25,000 tests when the are 100 people with the disease is rather different to when there are 5,000 with it
Indeed - but I think the point is that it wasn’t a long term strategy. If it doesn’t kill of the disease (ie containment fails) then the only difference becomes one of timing. And the British Govt/scientific approach has always been about timing. Just one where they’ve had to accelerate measures from where they expected because of changed assumptions about rate of transmission and death. In which case holding up South Korea as a route we should have followed that would have saved us from where we are now becomes somewhat less justified.
Here's the thing. Buying time is a winning strategy. Firstly, it means health services aren't overloaded. Secondly, we can do proper research to understand how many people are asymptotic, and once we have antibody tests, we can ensure people in front line roles already have resistance. Thirdly, every day that passes increases the possibility that we come up with a drug or treatment regime that ameliorates the virus.
If it doesn’t kill of the disease (ie containment fails) then the only difference becomes one of timing.
No, the SK approach does not require killing off the disease. I'm sure killing it off isn't practical, since it's all over the world and SK isn't going to cut itself off. The elements of the strategies used by countries that are winning are, in varying degrees:
1) Test, trace infected people and quarantine them. 2) Reduce the probability of any given infectious person infecting other people, ideally so that the average infectious person infects less than one person, in which case there will be clusters but they'll fizzle out.
Whilst all those measures would undoubtedly have reduced the numbers now, there is still one major unknown. Where will this thing be in four months time? Because there is capacity in the healthcare system at present which there won’t be then. And we may find ourselves grateful that as many people got it at as will have done in advance of that.
Current spare capacity hardly makes a dent. Instead the British have (I guess) overwhelmed their ability to do contact tracing because they've got so many cases. You're about to go into a 3 week lockdown with the goal of getting back to where you should have been if the government had done the less disruptive things soon enough.
With the exception of South Korea (and Singapore on a much smaller scale) is the ANY country attempting “contact tracing” to combat this? You talk about a failure to learn from others as if the UK was in a uniquely lucky position to observe and follow best practice and yet there have been almost no other countries which have followed your prescriptions either. The main differences in Europe have been the speed or otherwise at which various “lockdown” measures have been attempted - and with various levels of apparent success.
At a minimum, as well as South Korea and Singapore: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China. That gives you not only a lot of people, but also a wide range of political systems.
I agree with that. I thought he struck a good tone. There will be many debates about how effective he was leading up to this (maybe a bit blazé, maybe playing the situation down unacceptably) but credit where credits due. Tonight he was statesmanlike.
Good work from the government to implement Corbyns Labour manifesto in just three months.
Must have missed the bit in Labour's Manifesto where they implemented 100,000 extra deaths....
The New York State Academy of Family Physicians is calling for a ban of all tobacco and vaping products across statewide due to the increased risk of COVID-19 in those who use tobacco.
Based on a study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, one factor that influences the progression of COVID-19 is a person’s history of smoking.
The study suggests that “patients who use tobacco are 14 times as likely to have COVID-19 progression.” According to The National Institute of Drug Abuse, this is because the coronavirus attacks the lungs, and people who vape or smoke tobacco are more susceptible to the virus becoming a serious threat.
“Now more than ever, it is critical for the State and medical community to take actions to prevent our youth from ever using these highly addictive, deadly products and to help our patients to reduce their risks through FDA-approved cessation and telehealth during this pandemic,” says Barbara Keber, president of the group that represents more than 6,000 family physicians and medical students in New York.
If you wanted to give some people's lungs a couple of months of recovery time so they were in better shape when they caught COVID-19, particularly in London and other urban areas, I guess you could ban all tobacco sales (would have to be zero-warning to stop folk stockpiling!) and tough restrictions on the most nasty emitting vehicles (in London at least you could presumably ramp up the price tag on the LEZ/ULEZ schemes to help achieve that without requiring a total traffic lockdown though I note they have instead temporarily suspended them to keep key workers mobile).
Really, if the govt is prepared to use police force to make us stay at home at the moment in the name of health of us and the NHS, it has no non-financial reason to not ban the sale of cigarettes
Cigarettes don't give other people cancer (or at least not to anything like the same extent as viruses can be transmitted).
Also we can tax them at point of sale. What's the equivalent option with the virus?
There may not be an equivalent with the virus. But the reason for the draconian measures, that I don’t really have a big problem with, are to safeguard the NHS. If no one in the UK smoked, how much more time and money would there be for the NHS? Does the tax receipt for them cover it? Even if the answer is yes, it is morally bankrupt
Ah, I've now seen the context to your original comment (thanks to MBE for pointing this out). I think the point is that the NHS is set up to cope with long term side effects from tobacco products. It isn't designed to deal with short term crush from pandemics, hence the additional measures.
The answer to whether smokers are net beneficiaries to the Treasury or not seems to depend on who's asking the question - there are simply too many material assumptions to get a definitive answer. While I think it's clear that tobacco would not have been legalised if it had only been discovered recently, we are where we are. I'm ok in principle with adults making informed decisions that could result in lower life expectancy.
As a thought experiment I wonder how public attitudes would change to how this disease is being combatted if the media were to publish/publicise daily stats of causes of all deaths that occurred in the country over a period of time (even ignoring the fact that coronavirus figures are not “caused by” figures)?
There must be a massive chance at the end of this as we potentially survey a wrecked economy, a newly paranoid, fearful and less confident society, that there is widespread Y2K mk 2 syndrome. On a purely political calculation, I wonder if a death rate of 10k or 200k would be better for the Govt and/or political class (and scientific class, come to think of it).
The sad thing is that those countries with low death counts on the back of draconian measures need other countries to have high figures to show why what they did was necessary.
I think this is right, but, unfortunately for them, the US has effectively already agreed to be the control group in this experiment. New York is on course to be the epicentre of the disease within very short order.
I do wonder how Hillary would have fared. I'm sure she would've done a great deal better at portraying the illusion of competence (certainly to non-Americans) but I am not convinced she'd actually have overseen a lower death rate.
I also wonder if a long term outcome of the disease might be a significant weakening in State powers, to make the Executive better able to cope in a crisis like this in future. Or possibly the other way round. The current balance of power is - as I think it's designed to do - creating gridlock.
Here's the thing. Buying time is a winning strategy. Firstly, it means health services aren't overloaded. Secondly, we can do proper research to understand how many people are asymptotic, and once we have antibody tests, we can ensure people in front line roles already have resistance. Thirdly, every day that passes increases the possibility that we come up with a drug or treatment regime that ameliorates the virus.
One other thing it does is to give you time to work out which mitigation strategies work. In Japan they started with a very general "avoid gatherings", but with more data there's now a recommendation that's much more focused, namely that the places you really want to be careful of are where there's a combination of: 1) A closed space 2) Poor ventilation 3) People talking to each other
Arguably there's still not really enough data to be confident about that specific advice yet, but it'll get better, and if instead of saying "people can't be together in one place" you're saying "work out how to remove one of those elements", that becomes way less disruptive, to the point where you can almost resume your normal social life. We'll probably find that once we have more information, we can get maybe 90% of the benefit of these drastic measures that people are taking now with say 10% of the cost.
I can't think of any government failure remotely as disastrous in Britain in centuries. The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way.
You can't think of any as disastrous, yet a lot of others failed in the same way?
Read the next two words after "disastrous"
That's what I get for reading too fast. Fair enough, but I still don't know what he is suggesting.
I don't think he has a better plan - the time a better plan could have avoided this has passed - but when a government fails on this scale I don't see why you'd expect the opposition parties to be quiet about it.
Maybe you don't see it because you're partisan. Here in Spain the vast majority are united against the immediate enemy. There is no real evidence that any government has yet succeeeded in battling this scourge completely. The idea that somehow this is some unique failing that justifies playing party political squabbling rather than a pulling together reflects badly on you I am afraid.
Maybe you don't see it because you're partisan. Here in Spain the vast majority are united against the immediate enemy. There is no real evidence that any government has yet succeeeded in battling this scourge completely. The idea that somehow this is some unique failing that justifies playing party political squabbling rather than a pulling together reflects badly on you I am afraid.
I specifically said "The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way."
I don't see how you can read that and thing I'm talking about a "unique" failing - it's true that Boris Johnson came up with some unique ways to fail like making up a lie about shaking hands with infected people that undermined the message he'd called the press conference for, but the effect of this was at the margins..
A bunch of Asian governments, previously battered by SARS, worked out a good way to respond. Many western governments failed to learn the lessons. Their failure was gruesome, deadly, destructive of freedom and economically ruinous. I don't think it's sensible to expect opposition politicians in the countries that failed to just let that go without comment.
What else is he supposed to do, he has gone as close to full lockdown as possible now and announced huge measures if economic support, go too early the economic cost would have been evem greater, left it later the health cost too much
Some of the things he should have done differently, that I'm sure he would do differently if he could go back in time:
- Early call to work from home where practical. Minimal economic cost, can be continued indefinitely. - Early call to stop events instead of for example letting a bunch of contagious people fly in from Madrid and wander around the bars of Liverpool. Fairly low economic cost, can be continued indefinitely. - Earlier and stricter travel restrictions and contact detail followup, instead of letting everybody just wander through the airport from places on the verge of complete lockdown because the disease was so out of control. Low economic cost. - Clear messages instead of all the abortive confusion with herd immunity and pretending he shook hands with infectious people.
I agree that the response *now* is OK given where the UK is. But the UK is where it is because it's spent the last 6 weeks failing so hard, and it's the job of opposition politicians to say so.
Agreed, apart perhaps the last bit. The opposition were as clueless as the government at the start of this.
One might add that the major reason Asian nations dealt with it so much better right off the bat was their experience with SARS.
Just as the countries most devastated after the Second World War subsequently emerged with the strongest economies, the irony of COVID-19 is that those countries which dealt the worst/suffered the most with it could end up with the best long term outcomes. Even in overall number of deaths (if one sets the criteria as dealt the worst/suffered the most in first wave).
Why is air pollution so bad in the North? Shear level of heavy industry?
Good question. Maybe the population density is higher there as well.
Also the geography means the polluted air is often trapped in the cities, often temperature inversion and little wind
The Po Valley is renowned for thick winter fog (there’s an Italian name for it which I can’t remember) which hangs over the region often for days. Because it’s a low lying flat area with rivers and drainage ditches everywhere, and an area of sinking air coming off the mountains. It’s the worst place to put a lot of industry.
Maybe you don't see it because you're partisan. Here in Spain the vast majority are united against the immediate enemy. There is no real evidence that any government has yet succeeeded in battling this scourge completely. The idea that somehow this is some unique failing that justifies playing party political squabbling rather than a pulling together reflects badly on you I am afraid.
I specifically said "The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way."
I don't see how you can read that and thing I'm talking about a "unique" failing - it's true that Boris Johnson came up with some unique ways to fail like making up a lie about shaking hands with infected people that undermined the message he'd called the press conference for, but the effect of this was at the margins..
A bunch of Asian governments, previously battered by SARS, worked out a good way to respond. Many western governments failed to learn the lessons. Their failure was gruesome, deadly, destructive of freedom and economically ruinous. I don't think it's sensible to expect opposition politicians in the countries that failed to just let that go without comment.
The government has followed the scinetific adfice to the letter from day1. All sensible members of the opposition parties have backed them. Yesyerday we had Ian Lavery saying the virus is a great opportunity for Labour. Says it all for me. Now is the time for unity and as the soclialist Sanchez in Spain said at the weekend it is about buying time for the health system to ride the wave. How on earth in these circumstances petty opposition attempts to point score can achieve anything other than demoralise the people is beyond me. Oh and BTW at this stage in the crisis no government can claim to have worked out the best way to respond as none of us knows what lies around the corner, none of us.
Maybe you don't see it because you're partisan. Here in Spain the vast majority are united against the immediate enemy. There is no real evidence that any government has yet succeeeded in battling this scourge completely. The idea that somehow this is some unique failing that justifies playing party political squabbling rather than a pulling together reflects badly on you I am afraid.
I specifically said "The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way."
I don't see how you can read that and thing I'm talking about a "unique" failing - it's true that Boris Johnson came up with some unique ways to fail like making up a lie about shaking hands with infected people that undermined the message he'd called the press conference for, but the effect of this was at the margins..
A bunch of Asian governments, previously battered by SARS, worked out a good way to respond. Many western governments failed to learn the lessons. Their failure was gruesome, deadly, destructive of freedom and economically ruinous. I don't think it's sensible to expect opposition politicians in the countries that failed to just let that go without comment.
The government has followed the scinetific adfice to the letter from day1. All sensible members of the opposition parties have backed them. Yesyerday we had Ian Lavery saying the virus is a great opportunity for Labour. Says it all for me. Now is the time for unity and as the soclialist Sanchez in Spain said at the weekend it is about buying time for the health system to ride the wave. How on earth in these circumstances petty opposition attempts to point score can achieve anything other than demoralise the people is beyond me. Oh and BTW at this stage in the crisis no government can claim to have worked out the best way to respond as none of us knows what lies around the corner, none of us.
Comments
1. A belated Happy Birthday to PB and thank you to Mike and Robert for running the site so well. It has been - and is - a privilege to write for it and to have so many excellent header writers to keep one up to the mark and so many knowledgeable, interesting and humorous posters.
2. An enormous thank you to Dr Foxy and all his colleagues in the NHS who are doing such heroic work for us all - and at some risk to themselves. No words can really express my appreciation and admiration. A big thank you also to supermarket workers who are also doing vital work and getting some abuse for it too. I hope we will remember all of these people when this ends and show our appreciation and gratitude.
I genuinely think that taking these steps were ones he never wanted to take and hoped people would just respond to the nudge nudge approach.
He has looked pained when the media have screamed at him to lock everybody down.
Trump approval on Coronavirus:
- Emerson 3/18 - 3/19: Approve 49, Disapprove 41, +8
- ABC News/Ipsos 3/18 - 3/19: Approve 55, Disapprove 43, +12
- Axios-Harris 3/17 - 3/18: 2019: Approve 56, Disapprove 44, +12
I would think in 3 weeks time everybody will know somebody close to them that has it.
https://twitter.com/NC_994/status/1241072874888351745?s=20
They are going to be testing the herd immunity strategy to destruction.
"mortality rate, blah blah blah substantially blah 1 percent blah blah blah death terrible blah" then it's just as good as anything Macron or Merkel might have said. Probably better, because it's optimized to have the best words in it.
Lock Biden down in his family home with absolutely no visitors until November
Researchers at Mt Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine have made the first so-called serologic test for COVID-19 in the US, and they plan to roll it out in the next few days in its clinics.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-8144485/Scientists-develop-blood-test-coronavirus-immunity.html
All those thinking they are escaping the plague by going glamping are going to have to head back to the big smoke.
With Trump, who knows where that thought might end ?
Here's how he handles anti-vaxxers:
And worst of all, the common-cold vaccine would fall victim to the lies of anti-vaxxers. Examples of people being diagnosed with cancer or arthritis or multiple sclerosis in the days or weeks after receiving the common-cold vaccine would be easy to find, just based on random coincidence. Anti-vaxxers would pounce. No matter that data would demonstrate that there’s no link between the vaccine and these conditions, many people will think: “why risk it, I’ll get over a cold.”
Now industry types are obviously not keen on anti-vaxxers but the characterisation here that they are a bunch of crazy, irrational liars only captures a part of what's a very complex movement. It runs a wide spectrum from the spreading of fake news by people who'd rather flog you their snake oil, to very well-meaning concerned parents who might nevertheless lack the scientific literacy and either access to or ability to judge the evidence.
I met a public health worker who set up a community mobilisation project for economically disadvantaged mums with the aim of empowering them to take better care of their own health and that of their families and young children. Brilliant idea, right? But it turned into a nightmare - the newly-empowered ladies started looking up medical advice on the internet and things deviated very far from what the public health team had intended to achieve. The project basically evolved into a forum that allowed the women to organise a community campaign against the vaccinations the health services wanted to deliver to them (I was going to say things got "out of control" but the point of community mobilisation projects is that, in principle, it's desirable for the control and ultimate direction of the movement to lie with the participants themselves - which in this case had unintended consequences).
People taking control over their own health/bodies don't always "do as they're told"; goodness knows what the health implications of that misadventure were. But these anti-vaxxers were not evil mendacious liars, they were passionate caring devoted mothers who just so happened to be deeply mistaken.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/swapped-notting-hill-gloucestershire-learnt-self-isolation/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter
There's a strong chance that vaccines developed in a rush to beat a pandemic are going to have a greater rate of nasty adverse events than a vaccine that's had many years of careful trials, for obvious reasons. But you really, really want people to take it rather than freeload. Some countries (including the UK) have a sort of no-fault insurance scheme whereby people who suffer vaccine injury can receive compensation (some countries limit this to pandemic vaccines only). Hopefully this encourages people to take the vaccines up by providing some mitigation if e.g. they miss a few days of work due to nasty side-effects. There's an occasional counter-argument: telling a mum that there's a scheme in place to pay her X dollars if the vaccine kills her darling daughter may not encourage her to think the vaccine is perfectly safe (which, after all, it isn't - but if you're tasked with maximising vaccine uptake, you might rather wish parents believed it was), and people may be wary of taking active steps that endanger loved ones in a psychologically asymmetric way to the risks they're prepared to expose their loved ones to via negligent inaction.
There's also an issue implicit in that article but never really addressed because of its failure to consider the genuine health risks that vaccination can cause. We are correctly informed that the government is relying on young and middle-aged people to get vaccinated in order to keep older people safe, because older people's immune systems generally don't get the full benefit of vaccination. And the risks of COVID-19 lie mostly with the elderly. So we are expecting one group to accept the harms of vaccination for minimal personal benefit, largely in order to confer benefits to another group... that certainly raises "interesting" ethical issues! But also from a messaging point of view, has plenty of potential to backfire.
https://youtu.be/JBB9bA-gXL4
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/23/south-africa-to-go-into-21-day-lockdown-on-thursday-night
"Tasmania says it will turn away non-residents as 149 new cases confirmed in NSW"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/mar/24/coronavirus-australia-national-cabinet-to-consider-lockdowns-of-covid-19-hotspots-live-updates
Meanwhile — Heathrow arrivals:
https://www.heathrow.com/arrivals
Cape Town: on time
Lagos: on time
Hong Kong: on time
Sydney: on time
Melbourne: on time
Singapore: on time
Johannesburg: on time
Muscat: on time
Nairobi: on time
Bangkok: on time
Sites and flights...
https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1242240337143304192?s=20
https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1242241914612723712?s=20
https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1242236046160560129?s=20
Doctors call for a tobacco and vaping ban in New York during the COVID-19 pandemic
The New York State Academy of Family Physicians is calling for a ban of all tobacco and vaping products across statewide due to the increased risk of COVID-19 in those who use tobacco.
Based on a study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, one factor that influences the progression of COVID-19 is a person’s history of smoking.
The study suggests that “patients who use tobacco are 14 times as likely to have COVID-19 progression.” According to The National Institute of Drug Abuse, this is because the coronavirus attacks the lungs, and people who vape or smoke tobacco are more susceptible to the virus becoming a serious threat.
“Now more than ever, it is critical for the State and medical community to take actions to prevent our youth from ever using these highly addictive, deadly products and to help our patients to reduce their risks through FDA-approved cessation and telehealth during this pandemic,” says Barbara Keber, president of the group that represents more than 6,000 family physicians and medical students in New York.
If you wanted to give some people's lungs a couple of months of recovery time so they were in better shape when they caught COVID-19, particularly in London and other urban areas, I guess you could ban all tobacco sales (would have to be zero-warning to stop folk stockpiling!) and tough restrictions on the most nasty emitting vehicles (in London at least you could presumably ramp up the price tag on the LEZ/ULEZ schemes to help achieve that without requiring a total traffic lockdown though I note they have instead temporarily suspended them to keep key workers mobile).
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/i-m-going-keep-pushing-anthony-fauci-tries-make-white-house-listen-facts-pandemic??ncid=newsltukhpmgpols
What a knob.
Unless you think there will be mass (and by mass, I mean 50+%) ignoring of this, and rioting on the streets, why wouldn't it dramatically lower infection rates?
The question is not can governments reduce transmission rates of CV-19 via lockdowns, it is can governments prevent future outbreaks of CV-19 from being as devestating as the first?
The latter question is the difficult one. South Korea has done a good, but not perfect, job. China is removing restrictions somewhat.
Before we see significant loosening, we need to (a) have really good testing regimes in place for next time (the ability to do 50,000+ tests per day); and (b) to find drug regimes that limit serious consequences.
If we can put those things in place, then we will get out of this without too many serious consequences.
Right now, he's making that ridiculous ex-Apprentice woman look sane.
Also we can tax them at point of sale. What's the equivalent option with the virus?
Areas in Italy with the worst air pollution
Like @isam says, if the government is going to such extreme lengths to limit the harm done by the virus, prohibition of tobacco - once an unthinkable step - would now be a relatively minor one.
(Obviously the vast majority of health gains from such a policy would be for non-COVID-related diseases!! But if you're gonna go all-out, why not go all-out?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK-Z4VgfA3M
I can't think of any government failure remotely as disastrous in Britain in centuries. The only thing you can say in their defence is that a lot of other western governments failed in the same way.
https://twitter.com/KTHopkins/status/1240285642711601152?s=20
https://twitter.com/KTHopkins/status/1240327750440935425?s=20
And I'll nick some images from this article:
Churn in the workforce has been suspended which means overtime gaps will open up as people become ill and/or quit and it will be very difficult to replace (even getting humans in place let alone conducting training for roles).
And meanwhile the Govt carries on paying people 80% when they have almost nothing to spend money on.
I just don’t see where we’re going with it because even if there is a temporary relaxing in rules can we really repeat it all again in a few months?
- Early call to work from home where practical. Minimal economic cost, can be continued indefinitely.
- Early call to stop events instead of for example letting a bunch of contagious people fly in from Madrid and wander around the bars of Liverpool. Fairly low economic cost, can be continued indefinitely.
- Earlier and stricter travel restrictions and contact detail followup, instead of letting everybody just wander through the airport from places on the verge of complete lockdown because the disease was so out of control. Low economic cost.
- Clear messages instead of all the abortive confusion with herd immunity and pretending he shook hands with infectious people.
I agree that the response *now* is OK given where the UK is. But the UK is where it is because it's spent the last 6 weeks failing so hard, and it's the job of opposition politicians to say so.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/03/24/national/science-health/coronavirus-death-toll-japan-2/
However I definitely think Japan is in danger of pissing away the gains they made by acting early.
I've had a lot of communicable disease over the last few years due to having small children. Raging fevers and flu. This is not like that. The fever has been mild and was a blessing when it occurred.
What both my wife and I experienced was far more scary than fever or a cough. It was a shortness of breath. We have had to learn to get used to feeling like we have asthma or some sort of lung disease. I am picturing the CT images showing clouding on my lungs as I breathe and I don't catch the breath fully. I understand totally how this kills people.
I just want to say thank you to Dr Foxy for his tip on spo2 measures. Without using that device, reassuring me that my lungs were still functioning sufficiently, I am quite sure I would have tried to hospitalize myself by now. I do not want to go to hospital unless absolutely necessary. My wife and I use it every few hours and there is a couple of second wait to see whether, it feels like, you are going to live or die.
Last night I sobbed not knowing how we were going to look after our children. Today we managed, tomorrow we shall too. Take care pb.
There must be a massive chance at the end of this as we potentially survey a wrecked economy, a newly paranoid, fearful and less confident society, that there is widespread Y2K mk 2 syndrome. On a purely political calculation, I wonder if a death rate of 10k or 200k would be better for the Govt and/or political class (and scientific class, come to think of it).
The sad thing is that those countries with low death counts on the back of draconian measures need other countries to have high figures to show why what they did was necessary.
https://covid19japan.com/
The national numbers for new cases flat and there will be a spike of people showing up from Europe / US, so that's not particularly alarming. If anything it's the opposite: We know contagious people from overseas are showing up, so it's good that we're seeing them (if we weren't it would show a testing fail) and that the numbers are higher in Tokyo which, has more international travel. If the national numbers are flat but there's a spike in cases that didn't involve domestic transmission, that means there's less domestic transmission.
The reasons to be worried about Japan are:
1) There's still not much testing (although this is complex and a bit controversial) so there's a reason to think there may be more cases coming in than we're seeing.
2) At the same time the response is slackening a bit (mainly because the numbers don't seem to be going up much so people are relaxing), so if we do have all these undetected contagious people walking around, the virus could gain a lot of ground before we see it.
Firstly, it means health services aren't overloaded.
Secondly, we can do proper research to understand how many people are asymptotic, and once we have antibody tests, we can ensure people in front line roles already have resistance.
Thirdly, every day that passes increases the possibility that we come up with a drug or treatment regime that ameliorates the virus.
1) Test, trace infected people and quarantine them.
2) Reduce the probability of any given infectious person infecting other people, ideally so that the average infectious person infects less than one person, in which case there will be clusters but they'll fizzle out.
#CorbynTheCovidKiller.....
The answer to whether smokers are net beneficiaries to the Treasury or not seems to depend on who's asking the question - there are simply too many material assumptions to get a definitive answer. While I think it's clear that tobacco would not have been legalised if it had only been discovered recently, we are where we are. I'm ok in principle with adults making informed decisions that could result in lower life expectancy.
I do wonder how Hillary would have fared. I'm sure she would've done a great deal better at portraying the illusion of competence (certainly to non-Americans) but I am not convinced she'd actually have overseen a lower death rate.
I also wonder if a long term outcome of the disease might be a significant weakening in State powers, to make the Executive better able to cope in a crisis like this in future. Or possibly the other way round. The current balance of power is - as I think it's designed to do - creating gridlock.
1) A closed space
2) Poor ventilation
3) People talking to each other
Arguably there's still not really enough data to be confident about that specific advice yet, but it'll get better, and if instead of saying "people can't be together in one place" you're saying "work out how to remove one of those elements", that becomes way less disruptive, to the point where you can almost resume your normal social life. We'll probably find that once we have more information, we can get maybe 90% of the benefit of these drastic measures that people are taking now with say 10% of the cost.
Unless they're epidemiologists, every single one of them now needs to shut the f*** up!
I don't see how you can read that and thing I'm talking about a "unique" failing - it's true that Boris Johnson came up with some unique ways to fail like making up a lie about shaking hands with infected people that undermined the message he'd called the press conference for, but the effect of this was at the margins..
A bunch of Asian governments, previously battered by SARS, worked out a good way to respond. Many western governments failed to learn the lessons. Their failure was gruesome, deadly, destructive of freedom and economically ruinous. I don't think it's sensible to expect opposition politicians in the countries that failed to just let that go without comment.
The opposition were as clueless as the government at the start of this.
One might add that the major reason Asian nations dealt with it so much better right off the bat was their experience with SARS.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/older-people-would-rather-die-than-let-covid-19-lockdown-harm-us-economy-texas-official-dan-patrick
As Donald Trump pushed to re-open the US economy in weeks, rather than months, the lieutenant governor of Texas went on Fox News to argue that he would rather die than see public health measures damage the US economy, and that he believed “lots of grandparents” across the country would agree with him....
They blew it.
deemed a non-essential trip.