To allay Fenster's alarm somewhat, in the UK approx. 800,000 people die every year, mostly from old age. Doctors rarely sign a death certificate attributing the cause of death as 'old age' but insert the illness - flu, pneumonia - that tipped them over the edge. It is likely that these figures are totted up and added to the figures for flu deaths and it is only when the flu season increases this figure dramatically that it makes news. Unfortunately, I can't include road deaths or air pollution deaths in this hypothesis.
616,000 people died in the UK in 2018, and it grows at about 1.5% per annum naturally.
That means this year you'd expect c. 630,000 to die. The difference between the actual and 630,000 will be CV-19 related in one way or another. I would reckon it'll end up 650-680,000, and probably at the bottom end of that range.
I'm not sure it's sound maths to try comparing day by day.
If, in a few days, our rates have continued to move away from Italy AND it's confirmed that there isn't a change in measurement that's affecting everything, then we can *maybe* start thinking a little more positively. Until then I wouldn't draw any conclusions at all.
Me neither, that’s why I am highlighting the person who did it when he thought it was a way of having a risk free pop at our government - if we’d stayed on Italy’s trajectory, he’d have been pointing it out... we haven’t so he isn’t.
I get the impression an awful lot is being made of a pure numerological coincidence! If there had been a comparison like "229 versus 237" or something, I bet the meme wouldn't have spread so far. BBC annoyed me by how much they went on about the apparently freakish resemblance of the UK and Italian figures. Obviously Italy marks out a warning to us all, but comparisons do need to be drawn with caution.
To allay Fenster's alarm somewhat, in the UK approx. 800,000 people die every year, mostly from old age. Doctors rarely sign a death certificate attributing the cause of death as 'old age' but insert the illness - flu, pneumonia - that tipped them over the edge. It is likely that these figures are totted up and added to the figures for flu deaths and it is only when the flu season increases this figure dramatically that it makes news. Unfortunately, I can't include road deaths or air pollution deaths in this hypothesis.
One dead is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic ?
Dead boomers for the FTSE ?
There must become a point where we consider if the deaths of the old the sick and the fat is worth the pain.
I'm not sure it's sound maths to try comparing day by day.
If, in a few days, our rates have continued to move away from Italy AND it's confirmed that there isn't a change in measurement that's affecting everything, then we can *maybe* start thinking a little more positively. Until then I wouldn't draw any conclusions at all.
Me neither, that’s why I am highlighting the person who did it when he thought it was a way of having a risk free pop at our government - if we’d stayed on Italy’s trajectory, he’d have been pointing it out... we haven’t so he isn’t.
I get the impression an awful lot is being made of a pure numerological coincidence! If there had been a comparison like "229 versus 237" or something, I bet the meme wouldn't have spread so far. BBC annoyed me by how much they went on about the apparently freakish resemblance of the UK and Italian figures. Obviously Italy marks out a warning to us all, but comparisons do need to be drawn with caution.
So I wonder which journalist gets the dickhead of the day badge for the most stupid question in relation to this lock down? I bet they have spent all day crafting the most ridiculous scenarios to ask the government if it is permitted or not.
Seems like quite a strange thing to get angry about.
There are plenty of questions people have asked which have been reasonable, and been met with useful answers: e.g. children with separated parents, car MOTs etc.
And in some cases your common-sense answer is clearly wrong: e.g. if someone living in a town has a choice between getting their daily exercise in their local streets, where social distancing might be difficult, or on an empty country path a short drive away, the latter is obviously preferable *provided* they turn around and come home if the country path turns out not to be so empty after all.
Kay Burley to Michael Gove
"If I am a freelance journalist driving my car down the motorway on a non-essential journey am I going to be pulled over by the police?"
Is that a good use of a government interview, or is it better to focus on things that matter?
I'm not sure it's sound maths to try comparing day by day.
If, in a few days, our rates have continued to move away from Italy AND it's confirmed that there isn't a change in measurement that's affecting everything, then we can *maybe* start thinking a little more positively. Until then I wouldn't draw any conclusions at all.
Me neither, that’s why I am highlighting the person who did it when he thought it was a way of having a risk free pop at our government - if we’d stayed on Italy’s trajectory, he’d have been pointing it out... we haven’t so he isn’t.
Do you meant the Stephen Bush tweet, or something someone here said?
Bush seems to be fairly neutral language - the tweet was from the 22nd, so the day after the comparison, so he wouldn't have known today's figures - and he asks what we're doing better and what we're doing worse, and what we can do/what Italy didn't do. Not really a pop at the govt.
So I wonder which journalist gets the dickhead of the day badge for the most stupid question in relation to this lock down? I bet they have spent all day crafting the most ridiculous scenarios to ask the government if it is permitted or not.
Seems like quite a strange thing to get angry about.
There are plenty of questions people have asked which have been reasonable, and been met with useful answers: e.g. children with separated parents, car MOTs etc.
And in some cases your common-sense answer is clearly wrong: e.g. if someone living in a town has a choice between getting their daily exercise in their local streets, where social distancing might be difficult, or on an empty country path a short drive away, the latter is obviously preferable *provided* they turn around and come home if the country path turns out not to be so empty after all.
Kay Burley to Michael Gove
"If I am a freelance journalist driving my car down the motorway on a non-essential journey am I going to be pulled over by the police?"
Is that a good use of a government interview, or is it better to focus on things that matter?
Is watching Sky news a good use of your time ? I think you've answered that one.
So I wonder which journalist gets the dickhead of the day badge for the most stupid question in relation to this lock down? I bet they have spent all day crafting the most ridiculous scenarios to ask the government if it is permitted or not.
Seems like quite a strange thing to get angry about.
There are plenty of questions people have asked which have been reasonable, and been met with useful answers: e.g. children with separated parents, car MOTs etc.
And in some cases your common-sense answer is clearly wrong: e.g. if someone living in a town has a choice between getting their daily exercise in their local streets, where social distancing might be difficult, or on an empty country path a short drive away, the latter is obviously preferable *provided* they turn around and come home if the country path turns out not to be so empty after all.
Kay Burley to Michael Gove
"If I am a freelance journalist driving my car down the motorway on a non-essential journey am I going to be pulled over by the police?"
Is that a good use of a government interview, or is it better to focus on things that matter?
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
But nowhere near 50% are testing positive. It seems like wishful thinking to me unfortunately.
Indeed, and the evidence from the Seattle care home and Diamond Princess ship, suggests that there are not so many asymptomatic cases. A very much higher percentage caught it, and the ship was all tested.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
Quiet out and about on my run just now. And 100% observance of social distancing, runners and dog walkers alike veering almost ostentatiously onto grass verges and into the road.
Observance hereabouts very strong. But it's only day 2...
Noticed same thing this pm, went out for a walk for half an hour.
I'm not sure it's sound maths to try comparing day by day.
If, in a few days, our rates have continued to move away from Italy AND it's confirmed that there isn't a change in measurement that's affecting everything, then we can *maybe* start thinking a little more positively. Until then I wouldn't draw any conclusions at all.
Me neither, that’s why I am highlighting the person who did it when he thought it was a way of having a risk free pop at our government - if we’d stayed on Italy’s trajectory, he’d have been pointing it out... we haven’t so he isn’t.
Do you meant the Stephen Bush tweet, or something someone here said?
Bush seems to be fairly neutral language - the tweet was from the 22nd, so the day after the comparison, so he wouldn't have known today's figures - and he asks what we're doing better and what we're doing worse, and what we can do/what Italy didn't do. Not really a pop at the govt.
Whether or not it was a pop, the numbers did tally remarkably closely, and now, happily they are drifting a little apart. I understand the cases and deaths we're seeing are the outplaying of the policies and habits of two weeks ago. Two weeks ago we were handwashing a lot but not really distancing. Nadine Dorries getting Coronavirus was the big news, and was quite shocking. Possible that some of that stuff had a beneficial effect.
I'm not sure it's sound maths to try comparing day by day.
If, in a few days, our rates have continued to move away from Italy AND it's confirmed that there isn't a change in measurement that's affecting everything, then we can *maybe* start thinking a little more positively. Until then I wouldn't draw any conclusions at all.
Me neither, that’s why I am highlighting the person who did it when he thought it was a way of having a risk free pop at our government - if we’d stayed on Italy’s trajectory, he’d have been pointing it out... we haven’t so he isn’t.
Do you meant the Stephen Bush tweet, or something someone here said?
Bush seems to be fairly neutral language - the tweet was from the 22nd, so the day after the comparison, so he wouldn't have known today's figures - and he asks what we're doing better and what we're doing worse, and what we can do/what Italy didn't do. Not really a pop at the govt.
I think generally it was set up to highlight a fail if it happened
To allay Fenster's alarm somewhat, in the UK approx. 800,000 people die every year, mostly from old age. Doctors rarely sign a death certificate attributing the cause of death as 'old age' but insert the illness - flu, pneumonia - that tipped them over the edge. It is likely that these figures are totted up and added to the figures for flu deaths and it is only when the flu season increases this figure dramatically that it makes news. Unfortunately, I can't include road deaths or air pollution deaths in this hypothesis.
616,000 people died in the UK in 2018, and it grows at about 1.5% per annum naturally.
That means this year you'd expect c. 630,000 to die. The difference between the actual and 630,000 will be CV-19 related in one way or another. I would reckon it'll end up 650-680,000, and probably at the bottom end of that range.
I suspect that there will also be a slight 'rebound' effect the following year or 2 as well. Covid-19 will also in all likelihood have "brought forward" deaths of those that only had 2-4 years remaining anyway (Cystic Fibrosis seems a likely candidate here, but there will I'm sure be others).
There is a prominent politician with form for Yes Minister references. Ms Arcuri's company was named Hacker House, after the distinguished former prime minister.
Most people at Westminster of any intelligence or humour know the scripts and all the good quotes. That and House of Cards.
Bit like IT and the Silicon Valley TV series... This is very common across the professions - they love the stories about them.
At very eminent medical consultant of my acquaintance admitted she felt an incredible thrill about a possible diagnosis of Lupus.....
Mike Ashley definitely trying to top the leaderboard of biggest bastard of the crisis...
Sports Direct has hiked prices by more than 50 per cent on sports equipment as millions are locked down in their homes during the coronavirus crisis.
And another of Mike Ashley's Frasers Group retailers, Jack Wills, is asking staff to continue working in its stores despite Government advice to stay at home unless you are an 'essential' worker, employees claim.
I still can't get my head round the fact that 44,000 people died in the UK from flu in thw winter of 2014/2015 and nobody raised as much as an eyebrow.
I get that this virus is much worse but 44,000 flu deaths! Blinking heck, across five months that's 9k per month (roughly 300 a day). That's still big numbers.
I`m with you. I think it`s because CV-19 is new and scary. And there is no vaccine yet. I continue to believe - though my view is not well represented on this forum - that the global response is an error. A very serious health crisis is being parlayed into a very serious economic and loss of liberty crisis.
I'm in the 'overblown' camp. I accept we need to protect the NHS and some special measures are required for this virus but completely collapsing the economy seems a bit barking to me when the maximum number of deaths was considered to be 400k (250k of whom would likely die anyway). I'm pretty sure we could have cut that 400k armageddon prediction by a third just by forcibly isolating over 70s for three months.
Given the amount of money which the government is throwing at this, the NHS could have been massively supported with just a proportion of this sum over the crisis period.
Lockdown will also cost lives. What about suicides due to loss of livelihoods? We have to live with this new virus, at least until a vaccine is found. That`s the reality. I worry that the global response goes much too far, that it is a political response from scared politicians.
Isolating the elderly and vulnerable would have been sensible, but shutting down the economy for everyone is a threat to the livelihoods of everyone and the loss of freedom is simply astonishing. Could the costs end up being worse than the virus itself? These costs will be borne disproportionally by the young.
My family`s plans for the future are pretty much destroyed. My pension fund is down 30%. My daughter`s GCSEs cancelled. What jobs can these school leavers expect with a destroyed economy?
I`ve been saying this all along and I know I`ll be criticised which upsets me so I`m off from the forum for a while so don`t bother.
Suicides usually decline sharply in times of national crisis. It'll be interesting to see if that happens this time. I hope so.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
But nowhere near 50% are testing positive. It seems like wishful thinking to me unfortunately.
Indeed, and the evidence from the Seattle care home and Diamond Princess ship, suggests that there are not so many asymptomatic cases. A very much higher percentage caught it, and the ship was all tested.
I suppose that it's possible that some are able to clear it very quickly though, so might test negative unless a serological examination were performed (especially as they had to wait quite a few days for testing I think?). Note also that the group in Oxford are very serious scientists so would not have put this out without quite a bit of thought. Doesn't mean they are right of course!
So if the Oxford model is correct, any flattening of the curve would be due to herd immunity rather than the positive impact of the lockdown.
That would be consistent with the Iranain figures, such as they are, since it doesn't seem as though they've achieved anything very effective to slow down the spread.
So if the Oxford model is correct, any flattening of the curve would be due to herd immunity rather than the positive impact of the lockdown.
That would be consistent with the Iranain figures, such as they are, since it doesn't seem as though they've achieved anything very effective to slow down the spread.
I can't even start to imagine how bad the true Iranian figures are.
To allay Fenster's alarm somewhat, in the UK approx. 800,000 people die every year, mostly from old age. Doctors rarely sign a death certificate attributing the cause of death as 'old age' but insert the illness - flu, pneumonia - that tipped them over the edge. It is likely that these figures are totted up and added to the figures for flu deaths and it is only when the flu season increases this figure dramatically that it makes news. Unfortunately, I can't include road deaths or air pollution deaths in this hypothesis.
616,000 people died in the UK in 2018, and it grows at about 1.5% per annum naturally.
That means this year you'd expect c. 630,000 to die. The difference between the actual and 630,000 will be CV-19 related in one way or another. I would reckon it'll end up 650-680,000, and probably at the bottom end of that range.
So if the Oxford model is correct, any flattening of the curve would be due to herd immunity rather than the positive impact of the lockdown.
That would be consistent with the Iranain figures, such as they are, since it doesn't seem as though they've achieved anything very effective to slow down the spread.
So if the Oxford model is correct, any flattening of the curve would be due to herd immunity rather than the positive impact of the lockdown.
That would be consistent with the Iranain figures, such as they are, since it doesn't seem as though they've achieved anything very effective to slow down the spread.
So if lockdowns dont work..
The entire team at Imperial College who posted that Vapid Bilge (tm) of a paper get put in the stocks?
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
But nowhere near 50% are testing positive. It seems like wishful thinking to me unfortunately.
Re the Imperial model, the following thread will reassure all the coders here...
The Oxford model is massively simpler than the ones in the Imperial study or the in-house ones at PHE (there's some cross-over of staff between the Imperial, PHE and LSHTM teams in fact ... almost certainly need to bung some other unis in there too, a lot of the modelling code has a very long life of its own and the people who contribute it do tend to flit between institutions).
If the Oxford results seem at variance with other data sources, remember they're simply not inputs to the model at all - no testing data, no ICU data, no location or age data (the Oxford model isn't compartmentalised either by age or by region!), just the national daily deaths. (Unless I misread when I skimmed the paper...)
Hah, not only does Prof Ferguson get a complete rollocking in the replies to that thread, the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Lots of people saying such-and-such uni have published their model online with all the source code, why can't you!? and they're referring to a bog-standard non-compartmental SIR model in RShiny with user-input parameters that probably took a couple of hundred lines of code, or I'm modelling the Italian deaths using a Fibonacci sequence and extending it to other countries, can I help your team?...
There are definitely advantages to open-sourcing things, but if that's the kind of engagement you're going to get, and given the time/resources it would take to coordinate anything useful, I can see why they might prefer not to bother with the transparency.
On the flip side I hope everyone here is comfortable with so much of the UK's political and economic destiny lying with thousands of lines of some guy's* undocumented C code! (* admittedly a v. smart one, but still...)
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
Mike Ashley definitely trying to top the leaderboard of biggest bastard of the crisis...
Sports Direct has hiked prices by more than 50 per cent on sports equipment as millions are locked down in their homes during the coronavirus crisis.
And another of Mike Ashley's Frasers Group retailers, Jack Wills, is asking staff to continue working in its stores despite Government advice to stay at home unless you are an 'essential' worker, employees claim.
To be fair to him, I was offered a running machine on eBay for £280 last week, and yesterday it sold for £420. The market seems to be 50% higher than it was, why shouldn’t he charge the going rate?
I haven' seen anyone else mention it yet,so I quote from the Guardian live blog:
The British government is not taking part in European Union procurement schemes to buy ventilators, protective gear for medical staff or coronavirus testing kit, the Guardian understands.
UK and EU sources confirmed the government is not currently participating in any of the EU’s bulk-buying schemes linked to tackling coronavirus.
The UK’s absence from the schemes emerged as the European commission declared on Tuesday that a joint effort to buy protective medical gear on behalf of 25 member states was “a success”.
The commission said it expected the equipment to be available two weeks after the member states leading the procurement sign the contracts.
Two other procurement schemes, to supply ventilators and laboratory equipment needed for coronavirus testing, are at an earlier stage, with calls for tenders launched last week. Nearly all EU countries, 25 out of 27, are participating in the procurement scheme on ventilators, while 19 are joining forces to buy laboratory equipment.
The government is Brexiteer stupid. By all means look for other sources but if you have access to a supply for vital equipment you take it.
Like Smiths Medical in Luton?
I suspect that there is a condition that all goods are pooled in this scheme. The government may have decided that there are sufficient sources that they have direct access to not to want to participate.
I am not opining on whether that is the right decision or not.
To allay Fenster's alarm somewhat, in the UK approx. 800,000 people die every year, mostly from old age. Doctors rarely sign a death certificate attributing the cause of death as 'old age' but insert the illness - flu, pneumonia - that tipped them over the edge. It is likely that these figures are totted up and added to the figures for flu deaths and it is only when the flu season increases this figure dramatically that it makes news. Unfortunately, I can't include road deaths or air pollution deaths in this hypothesis.
616,000 people died in the UK in 2018, and it grows at about 1.5% per annum naturally.
That means this year you'd expect c. 630,000 to die. The difference between the actual and 630,000 will be CV-19 related in one way or another. I would reckon it'll end up 650-680,000, and probably at the bottom end of that range.
Interesting. Sort of what I was thinking.
If that is anywhere close to the mark then Eadric would be proven a total ****.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
But nowhere near 50% are testing positive. It seems like wishful thinking to me unfortunately.
Re the Imperial model, the following thread will reassure all the coders here...
The Oxford model is massively simpler than the ones in the Imperial study or the in-house ones at PHE (there's some cross-over of staff between the Imperial, PHE and LSHTM teams in fact ... almost certainly need to bung some other unis in there too, a lot of the modelling code has a very long life of its own and the people who contribute it do tend to flit between institutions).
If the Oxford results seem at variance with other data sources, remember they're simply not inputs to the model at all - no testing data, no ICU data, no location or age data (the Oxford model isn't compartmentalised either by age or by region!), just the national daily deaths. (Unless I misread when I skimmed the paper...)
Hah, not only does Prof Ferguson get a complete rollocking in the replies to that thread, the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Lots of people saying such-and-such uni have published their model online with all the source code, why can't you!? and they're referring to a bog-standard non-compartmental SIR model in RShiny with user-input parameters that probably took a couple of hundred lines of code, or I'm modelling the Italian deaths using a Fibonacci sequence and extending it to other countries, can I help your team?...
There are definitely advantages to open-sourcing things, but if that's the kind of engagement you're going to get, and given the time/resources it would take to coordinate anything useful, I can see why they might prefer not to bother with the transparency.
On the flip side I hope everyone here is comfortable with so much of the UK's political and economic destiny lying with thousands of lines of some guy's* undocumented C code! (* admittedly a v. smart one, but still...)
Put me down in the not comfortable category. Going and contracting the ruddy thing is hardly a reassuring sign. That's a breakdown in risk modelling if I ever saw one.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
But nowhere near 50% are testing positive. It seems like wishful thinking to me unfortunately.
Indeed, and the evidence from the Seattle care home and Diamond Princess ship, suggests that there are not so many asymptomatic cases. A very much higher percentage caught it, and the ship was all tested.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
But nowhere near 50% are testing positive. It seems like wishful thinking to me unfortunately.
Re the Imperial model, the following thread will reassure all the coders here...
The Oxford model is massively simpler than the ones in the Imperial study or the in-house ones at PHE (there's some cross-over of staff between the Imperial, PHE and LSHTM teams in fact ... almost certainly need to bung some other unis in there too, a lot of the modelling code has a very long life of its own and the people who contribute it do tend to flit between institutions).
If the Oxford results seem at variance with other data sources, remember they're simply not inputs to the model at all - no testing data, no ICU data, no location or age data (the Oxford model isn't compartmentalised either by age or by region!), just the national daily deaths. (Unless I misread when I skimmed the paper...)
Hah, not only does Prof Ferguson get a complete rollocking in the replies to that thread, the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Lots of people saying such-and-such uni have published their model online with all the source code, why can't you!? and they're referring to a bog-standard non-compartmental SIR model in RShiny with user-input parameters that probably took a couple of hundred lines of code, or I'm modelling the Italian deaths using a Fibonacci sequence and extending it to other countries, can I help your team?...
There are definitely advantages to open-sourcing things, but if that's the kind of engagement you're going to get, and given the time/resources it would take to coordinate anything useful, I can see why they might prefer not to bother with the transparency.
On the flip side I hope everyone here is comfortable with so much of the UK's political and economic destiny lying with thousands of lines of some guy's* undocumented C code! (* admittedly a v. smart one, but still...)
This is why open source projects are so hard to administer - the very good ones have multiple people whose only job is to beat the crazies with sticks until they go away,
Once this is all over I'm making a career change, I'm going into teaching, these last two days have shown I'm an excellent teacher.
The only question is which subject I'll teach, I've shortlisted it to maths, history, languages, and the sciences.
In fact I reckon I could become a Vice-Chancellor.
Obviously it couldn't be fashion, music or film studies.
Shush. One of the subjects is watch a film and write a short report on it.
This classic Christmas film opens with the main protagonist intending to reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly, at the Christmas Eve party of her employer, the Nakatomi Corporation....
There is something especially horrible in the fact that Italy and Spain, a lot of people's two favourite countries in the world, are currently being hardest hit by the virus. 😞
Once this is all over I'm making a career change, I'm going into teaching, these last two days have shown I'm an excellent teacher.
The only question is which subject I'll teach, I've shortlisted it to maths, history, languages, and the sciences.
In fact I reckon I could become a Vice-Chancellor.
Obviously it couldn't be fashion, music or film studies.
Shush. One of the subjects is watch a film and write a short report on it.
This classic Christmas film opens with the main protagonist intending to reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly, at the Christmas party of her employer, the Nakatomi Corporation....
Not sure that is suitable for a ten year old and a six year old.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
But nowhere near 50% are testing positive. It seems like wishful thinking to me unfortunately.
Re the Imperial model, the following thread will reassure all the coders here...
The Oxford model is massively simpler than the ones in the Imperial study or the in-house ones at PHE (there's some cross-over of staff between the Imperial, PHE and LSHTM teams in fact ... almost certainly need to bung some other unis in there too, a lot of the modelling code has a very long life of its own and the people who contribute it do tend to flit between institutions).
If the Oxford results seem at variance with other data sources, remember they're simply not inputs to the model at all - no testing data, no ICU data, no location or age data (the Oxford model isn't compartmentalised either by age or by region!), just the national daily deaths. (Unless I misread when I skimmed the paper...)
Hah, not only does Prof Ferguson get a complete rollocking in the replies to that thread, the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Lots of people saying such-and-such uni have published their model online with all the source code, why can't you!? and they're referring to a bog-standard non-compartmental SIR model in RShiny with user-input parameters that probably took a couple of hundred lines of code, or I'm modelling the Italian deaths using a Fibonacci sequence and extending it to other countries, can I help your team?...
There are definitely advantages to open-sourcing things, but if that's the kind of engagement you're going to get, and given the time/resources it would take to coordinate anything useful, I can see why they might prefer not to bother with the transparency.
On the flip side I hope everyone here is comfortable with so much of the UK's political and economic destiny lying with thousands of lines of some guy's* undocumented C code! (* admittedly a v. smart one, but still...)
Put me down in the not comfortable category. Going and contracting the ruddy thing is hardly a reassuring sign. That's a breakdown in risk modelling if I ever saw one.
The Irish government has announced stringent new restrictions to limit the spread of coronavirus, starting at midnight on Tuesday, reports Rory Carroll in Dublin.
All non-essential retail businesses and facilities - including theatres, clubs, gyms, hairdressers, betting offices and libraries – are to close and all sports events are cancelled. Cafes and restaurants can do takeaway and delivery only.
People are being asked to stay home. Outdoor gatherings should respect physical distance recommendations and not have more than four people.
The restrictions were unprecedented but not a lockdown, the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, told a press conference. They could last weeks, perhaps months, he said. “We are in this for the long haul.”
Once this is all over I'm making a career change, I'm going into teaching, these last two days have shown I'm an excellent teacher.
The only question is which subject I'll teach, I've shortlisted it to maths, history, languages, and the sciences.
In fact I reckon I could become a Vice-Chancellor.
Obviously it couldn't be fashion, music or film studies.
Shush. One of the subjects is watch a film and write a short report on it.
This classic Christmas film opens with the main protagonist intending to reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly, at the Christmas party of her employer, the Nakatomi Corporation....
Not sure that is suitable for a ten year old and a six year old.
It's not Christmas until someone throws Alan Rickman off a skyscraper.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
Once this is all over I'm making a career change, I'm going into teaching, these last two days have shown I'm an excellent teacher.
The only question is which subject I'll teach, I've shortlisted it to maths, history, languages, and the sciences.
In fact I reckon I could become a Vice-Chancellor.
Obviously it couldn't be fashion, music or film studies.
Shush. One of the subjects is watch a film and write a short report on it.
This classic Christmas film opens with the main protagonist intending to reconcile with his estranged wife, Holly, at the Christmas party of her employer, the Nakatomi Corporation....
Not sure that is suitable for a ten year old and a six year old.
I watched Die Hard 2 as a six year old. I turned out alright.
I still can't get my head round the fact that 44,000 people died in the UK from flu in thw winter of 2014/2015 and nobody raised as much as an eyebrow.
I get that this virus is much worse but 44,000 flu deaths! Blinking heck, across five months that's 9k per month (roughly 300 a day). That's still big numbers.
I`m with you. I think it`s because CV-19 is new and scary. And there is no vaccine yet. I continue to believe - though my view is not well represented on this forum - that the global response is an error. A very serious health crisis is being parlayed into a very serious economic and loss of liberty crisis.
I'm in the 'overblown' camp. I accept we need to protect the NHS and some special measures are required for this virus but completely collapsing the economy seems a bit barking to me when the maximum number of deaths was considered to be 400k (250k of whom would likely die anyway). I'm pretty sure we could have cut that 400k armageddon prediction by a third just by forcibly isolating over 70s for three months.
Given the amount of money which the government is throwing at this, the NHS could have been massively supported with just a proportion of this sum over the crisis period.
Lockdown will also cost lives. What about suicides due to loss of livelihoods? We have to live with this new virus, at least until a vaccine is found. That`s the reality. I worry that the global response goes much too far, that it is a political response from scared politicians.
Isolating the elderly and vulnerable would have been sensible, but shutting down the economy for everyone is a threat to the livelihoods of everyone and the loss of freedom is simply astonishing. Could the costs end up being worse than the virus itself? These costs will be borne disproportionally by the young.
My family`s plans for the future are pretty much destroyed. My pension fund is down 30%. My daughter`s GCSEs cancelled. What jobs can these school leavers expect with a destroyed economy?
I`ve been saying this all along and I know I`ll be criticised which upsets me so I`m off from the forum for a while so don`t bother.
Suicides usually decline sharply in times of national crisis. It'll be interesting to see if that happens this time. I hope so.
Suicides increase in economic recessions!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4473496/ literature review, "Thirty-eight studies met predetermined selection criteria and 31 of them found a positive association between economic recession and increased suicide rates. Two studies reported a negative association, two articles failed to find such an association, and three studies were inconclusive"
https://jech.bmj.com/content/69/2/110 investigated how the type of welfare system in a country affects the rise in suicide during recessions (found that more generous welfare means smaller rise in suicides)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24925987 estimated the "Great Recession is associated with at least 10 000 additional economic suicides between 2008 and 2010" in Europe and North America
Bear in mind that recession causes deaths for many reasons other than increased suicide, e.g. due to reduced funding for healthcare and greater poverty, but those last two studies are interesting markers in terms of the how the economic hit from fighting COVID-19 will have negative health outcomes.
There is a prominent politician with form for Yes Minister references. Ms Arcuri's company was named Hacker House, after the distinguished former prime minister.
Or it might just be named for Florence Nightingale?
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
That isn't how viruses (viri?) work. Herd immunity kicks in bigly past about 60%, because most of the potential carriers are immune. So it should slow down significantly from this point onwards, if it's true that 50% have had it and now have had immunity conferred upon them.
I keep wondering if I actually had it last November. I know this makes no sense, but the bug I caught then was like nothing else I've ever experienced, and matched the experiences of people with positive CV19 diagnoses almost exactly - fever, dry cough, breathing difficulties. The latter in particular was scary as hell. It also hung around for a few weeks, and re-strengthened after I went back to work prematurely, which also seems to tie in with what's being reported.
Well, I definitely didn't. Or at least almost definitely didn't. Because if I did, then where the hell are all the people who died after I gave it to them hiding?
It was weird, though, since I've had loads of colds (15 years of being immunosuppressed will do that) and have never had problems breathing like that. And suddenly a few months later there's a global pandemic with that as one of the most obvious symptoms. I know a few other people who caught the same bug around the same time.
I am definitely not a Chinese mole. Nor have I been eating anything I shouldn't. Like moles.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4473496/ literature review, "Thirty-eight studies met predetermined selection criteria and 31 of them found a positive association between economic recession and increased suicide rates.
There is something especially horrible in the fact that Italy and Spain, a lot of people's two favourite countries in the world, are currently being hardest hit by the virus. 😞
France too - the world’s most popular country for visitors.
So I wonder which journalist gets the dickhead of the day badge for the most stupid question in relation to this lock down? I bet they have spent all day crafting the most ridiculous scenarios to ask the government if it is permitted or not.
Seems like quite a strange thing to get angry about.
There are plenty of questions people have asked which have been reasonable, and been met with useful answers: e.g. children with separated parents, car MOTs etc.
And in some cases your common-sense answer is clearly wrong: e.g. if someone living in a town has a choice between getting their daily exercise in their local streets, where social distancing might be difficult, or on an empty country path a short drive away, the latter is obviously preferable *provided* they turn around and come home if the country path turns out not to be so empty after all.
Kay Burley to Michael Gove
"If I am a freelance journalist driving my car down the motorway on a non-essential journey am I going to be pulled over by the police?"
Is that a good use of a government interview, or is it better to focus on things that matter?
That's a badly formed but understandable question - they won't know if they are a Journo until afterwards.
But I was more concerned about Heather Stewart's digging into blame and comparisons about 'unnecessary deaths'. That is one for the Royal Commission, not for tabloid journalists now.
Mike Ashley definitely trying to top the leaderboard of biggest bastard of the crisis...
Sports Direct has hiked prices by more than 50 per cent on sports equipment as millions are locked down in their homes during the coronavirus crisis.
And another of Mike Ashley's Frasers Group retailers, Jack Wills, is asking staff to continue working in its stores despite Government advice to stay at home unless you are an 'essential' worker, employees claim.
To be fair to him, I was offered a running machine on eBay for £280 last week, and yesterday it sold for £420. The market seems to be 50% higher than it was, why shouldn’t he charge the going rate?
58 cent face masks in New York are selling for $7.50. OK with you?
Well, I definitely didn't. Or at least almost definitely didn't. Because if I did, then where the hell are all the people who died after I gave it to them hiding?
It was weird, though, since I've had loads of colds (15 years of being immunosuppressed will do that) and have never had problems breathing like that. And suddenly a few months later there's a global pandemic with that as one of the most obvious symptoms. I know a few other people who caught the same bug around the same time.
I am definitely not a Chinese mole. Nor have I been eating anything I shouldn't. Like moles.
Perhaps you ate something worse than live bat, did you eat a pizza with a pineapple on it?
A very interesting article in the FT (no paywall); Oxford epidemiologists think that there might be far more undetected cases than the Imperial College modelling shows, with as much as half the UK population already infected. Could be good news if true:
How could London be suddenly getting loads of hospitalisations if 50% of people had already been infected nationwide (and presumably more than that in London) ?
The theory would be that 50% are infected, but a much smaller proportion are symptomatic, and a smaller number again bad enough to need medical care.
That alone is enough to swamp medical capacity.
The virus will keep going, it still has the other 50% of the popn to work through...
But nowhere near 50% are testing positive. It seems like wishful thinking to me unfortunately.
Re the Imperial model, the following thread will reassure all the coders here...
The Oxford model is massively simpler than the ones in the Imperial study or the in-house ones at PHE (there's some cross-over of staff between the Imperial, PHE and LSHTM teams in fact ... almost certainly need to bung some other unis in there too, a lot of the modelling code has a very long life of its own and the people who contribute it do tend to flit between institutions).
If the Oxford results seem at variance with other data sources, remember they're simply not inputs to the model at all - no testing data, no ICU data, no location or age data (the Oxford model isn't compartmentalised either by age or by region!), just the national daily deaths. (Unless I misread when I skimmed the paper...)
Hah, not only does Prof Ferguson get a complete rollocking in the replies to that thread, the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible. Lots of people saying such-and-such uni have published their model online with all the source code, why can't you!? and they're referring to a bog-standard non-compartmental SIR model in RShiny with user-input parameters that probably took a couple of hundred lines of code, or I'm modelling the Italian deaths using a Fibonacci sequence and extending it to other countries, can I help your team?...
There are definitely advantages to open-sourcing things, but if that's the kind of engagement you're going to get, and given the time/resources it would take to coordinate anything useful, I can see why they might prefer not to bother with the transparency.
On the flip side I hope everyone here is comfortable with so much of the UK's political and economic destiny lying with thousands of lines of some guy's* undocumented C code! (* admittedly a v. smart one, but still...)
This is why open source projects are so hard to administer - the very good ones have multiple people whose only job is to beat the crazies with sticks until they go away,
That Fibonacci point reminded me of a very esteemed maths professor who used to bemoan in his Analysis lectures (for the uninitiated, roughly: how do we deal with infinity and things that are infinitesimally small, and why does calculus work?) who complained that a couple of times per year cranks would write in to him claiming they had disproved one of the basic premises of analysis and discovered that the harmonic series actually converges, rather than heads off without bound up to infinity...
Problem is if you program a computer or just knock together a spreadsheet to do the calculation 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + etc etc then eventually the later numbers become, as far as the computer knows or cares, zero, and the sum gets "stuck" no matter how many extra terms you add. Depending which number their sum got stuck on, the good professor was often able to guess which software they had used!
The Irish government has announced stringent new restrictions to limit the spread of coronavirus, starting at midnight on Tuesday, reports Rory Carroll in Dublin.
All non-essential retail businesses and facilities - including theatres, clubs, gyms, hairdressers, betting offices and libraries – are to close and all sports events are cancelled. Cafes and restaurants can do takeaway and delivery only.
People are being asked to stay home. Outdoor gatherings should respect physical distance recommendations and not have more than four people.
The restrictions were unprecedented but not a lockdown, the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, told a press conference. They could last weeks, perhaps months, he said. “We are in this for the long haul.”
What happens if four people from the Republic meet up with two people from Northern Ireland at the border?
The Irish government has announced stringent new restrictions to limit the spread of coronavirus, starting at midnight on Tuesday, reports Rory Carroll in Dublin.
All non-essential retail businesses and facilities - including theatres, clubs, gyms, hairdressers, betting offices and libraries – are to close and all sports events are cancelled. Cafes and restaurants can do takeaway and delivery only.
People are being asked to stay home. Outdoor gatherings should respect physical distance recommendations and not have more than four people.
The restrictions were unprecedented but not a lockdown, the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, told a press conference. They could last weeks, perhaps months, he said. “We are in this for the long haul.”
After the election Varadkar was enormous odds to be next Taoiseach. He is just 2/1 now.
So I wonder which journalist gets the dickhead of the day badge for the most stupid question in relation to this lock down? I bet they have spent all day crafting the most ridiculous scenarios to ask the government if it is permitted or not.
Seems like quite a strange thing to get angry about.
There are plenty of questions people have asked which have been reasonable, and been met with useful answers: e.g. children with separated parents, car MOTs etc.
And in some cases your common-sense answer is clearly wrong: e.g. if someone living in a town has a choice between getting their daily exercise in their local streets, where social distancing might be difficult, or on an empty country path a short drive away, the latter is obviously preferable *provided* they turn around and come home if the country path turns out not to be so empty after all.
Kay Burley to Michael Gove
"If I am a freelance journalist driving my car down the motorway on a non-essential journey am I going to be pulled over by the police?"
Is that a good use of a government interview, or is it better to focus on things that matter?
Is watching Sky news a good use of your time ? I think you've answered that one.
Someone posted it on here, so it passed the first filter
There is something especially horrible in the fact that Italy and Spain, a lot of people's two favourite countries in the world, are currently being hardest hit by the virus. 😞
France too - the world’s most popular country for visitors.
While it seems most Governments are opting for some form of movement restriction to alleviate and depress new cases of the virus, there still seem those who argue for a different route.
If you want to call it the "herd immunity" approach, that's fine but as I understand it the theory is to isolate the elderly and the vulnerable but for the virus to be allowed to run through the rest of the population on the basis the vast majority will emerge unscathed and immune.
That argument also suggests the wider economy would suffer less in terms of disruption - there would still be an impact but not severe.
The argument against the lock-down approach is it causes unnecessary and unwarranted economic damage - basically we're going to have, in economic terms, three weeks of Bank Holidays, if not Christmas Days in terms of output and productivity. We will all be home living off our resources - food and financial.
The argument therefore turns on where you value economic growth against human life or lives and that will be in the eye of the beholder. If we are all simply economic drones whose single purpose is to increase GDP I get that but I'm not sure that where I am philosophically.
While recognising we are all mortal and the Grim Reaper waits for us all at the end of our journey, I'm not convinced a few premature deaths is a good price to pay for a slightly lower GDP figure in the first quarter of 2021/22 but that would be an argument for the banning of smoking, drinking, gambling and a whole range of other activities.
Thus, it comes back to more fundamentals - do we opt to choose to live as we wish accepting the risks or do we choose to accept a temporary dislocation to our lives and our prosperity to maintain our health in the hope of returning to what we know in short order?
Once this is all over I'm making a career change, I'm going into teaching, these last two days have shown I'm an excellent teacher.
The only question is which subject I'll teach, I've shortlisted it to maths, history, languages, and the sciences.
In fact I reckon I could become a Vice-Chancellor.
I might do something similar.
Timetabling is so easy.
I know for a fact that our timetabler (me) will not be in school for about three months, so if you want to volunteer your services...
I don't know how you manage it.
I’m not entirely sure myself to be honest: it’s always a bit of a surprise when it works. When it doesn’t work I end up having to teach Y11 on a Friday afternoon.
Well, I definitely didn't. Or at least almost definitely didn't. Because if I did, then where the hell are all the people who died after I gave it to them hiding?
It was weird, though, since I've had loads of colds (15 years of being immunosuppressed will do that) and have never had problems breathing like that. And suddenly a few months later there's a global pandemic with that as one of the most obvious symptoms. I know a few other people who caught the same bug around the same time.
I am definitely not a Chinese mole. Nor have I been eating anything I shouldn't. Like moles.
Perhaps you ate something worse than live bat, did you eat a pizza with a pineapple on it?
No. I did try eating a Radiohead, but I didn't like it, so didn't finish.
Am I doing this inside joke thing right?
Edit:on a serious note, was the "live" bat thing a joke, or has that actually been suggested somewhere?
Problem is if you program a computer or just knock together a spreadsheet to do the calculation 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + etc etc then eventually the later numbers become, as far as the computer knows or cares, zero .....
That one caught me out not so long ago, was using something similar as a time weighting and couldn't figure out why it suddenly went a bit daft at a specific date.
Always the simplest of problems hardest to diagnose, cos you overlook them :-)
There is something especially horrible in the fact that Italy and Spain, a lot of people's two favourite countries in the world, are currently being hardest hit by the virus. 😞
It is even worse that that may not even be true. I would rather be in either of those countries right now than anywhere in India or Africa.
Somebody said there was no politician in the last fifty years less qualified than Trump to be POTUS.
I was mulling over the truth or otherwise of this, and came up with Goldwater, Joseph McCarthy and Wallace.
But their peak was over fifty years ago. Indeed, McCarthy has been dead for over 60 years.
However, J Strom Thurmond was still active into the 1990s and still a corrupt, creepy, racist nutcase so I suppose we could offer him up as a possible.
Once this is all over I'm making a career change, I'm going into teaching, these last two days have shown I'm an excellent teacher.
The only question is which subject I'll teach, I've shortlisted it to maths, history, languages, and the sciences.
In fact I reckon I could become a Vice-Chancellor.
I might do something similar.
Timetabling is so easy.
I know for a fact that our timetabler (me) will not be in school for about three months, so if you want to volunteer your services...
I don't know how you manage it.
I’m not entirely sure myself to be honest: it’s always a bit of a surprise when it works. When it doesn’t work I end up having to teach Y11 on a Friday afternoon.
I'm struggling with two kids, how do you manage it for schools with like 1,000 plus kids.
I think 'Playstation lessons' will be on the timetable next week.
Comments
That means this year you'd expect c. 630,000 to die. The difference between the actual and 630,000 will be CV-19 related in one way or another. I would reckon it'll end up 650-680,000, and probably at the bottom end of that range.
https://twitter.com/StephanShaxper/status/1242511144075608064
Dead boomers for the FTSE ?
There must become a point where we consider if the deaths of the old the sick and the fat is worth the pain.
"If I am a freelance journalist driving my car down the motorway on a non-essential journey am I going to be pulled over by the police?"
Is that a good use of a government interview, or is it better to focus on things that matter?
Bush seems to be fairly neutral language - the tweet was from the 22nd, so the day after the comparison, so he wouldn't have known today's figures - and he asks what we're doing better and what we're doing worse, and what we can do/what Italy didn't do. Not really a pop at the govt.
Have, thanks to PB, bookmarked other sites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment
I don't think that's paywalled (I have an HSJ subscription via my work)
@Foxy Thanks as well.
Most people at Westminster of any intelligence or humour know the scripts and all the good quotes. That and House of Cards.
Bit like IT and the Silicon Valley TV series... This is very common across the professions - they love the stories about them.
At very eminent medical consultant of my acquaintance admitted she felt an incredible thrill about a possible diagnosis of Lupus.....
Sports Direct has hiked prices by more than 50 per cent on sports equipment as millions are locked down in their homes during the coronavirus crisis.
And another of Mike Ashley's Frasers Group retailers, Jack Wills, is asking staff to continue working in its stores despite Government advice to stay at home unless you are an 'essential' worker, employees claim.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8147501/Sports-Direct-hikes-online-prices-50.html
There are definitely advantages to open-sourcing things, but if that's the kind of engagement you're going to get, and given the time/resources it would take to coordinate anything useful, I can see why they might prefer not to bother with the transparency.
On the flip side I hope everyone here is comfortable with so much of the UK's political and economic destiny lying with thousands of lines of some guy's* undocumented C code! (* admittedly a v. smart one, but still...)
I suspect that there is a condition that all goods are pooled in this scheme. The government may have decided that there are sufficient sources that they have direct access to not to want to participate.
I am not opining on whether that is the right decision or not.
All non-essential retail businesses and facilities - including theatres, clubs, gyms, hairdressers, betting offices and libraries – are to close and all sports events are cancelled. Cafes and restaurants can do takeaway and delivery only.
People are being asked to stay home. Outdoor gatherings should respect physical distance recommendations and not have more than four people.
The restrictions were unprecedented but not a lockdown, the taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, told a press conference. They could last weeks, perhaps months, he said. “We are in this for the long haul.”
Well, now, that's a tricky one....he clearly doesn't have a wine cellar like most of us on PB.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4473496/ literature review, "Thirty-eight studies met predetermined selection criteria and 31 of them found a positive association between economic recession and increased suicide rates. Two studies reported a negative association, two articles failed to find such an association, and three studies were inconclusive"
https://jech.bmj.com/content/69/2/110 investigated how the type of welfare system in a country affects the rise in suicide during recessions (found that more generous welfare means smaller rise in suicides)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24925987 estimated the "Great Recession is associated with at least 10 000 additional economic suicides between 2008 and 2010" in Europe and North America
https://www.bmj.com/content/345/bmj.e5142 estimated about 1000 additional suicides in the UK in 2008-2010 due to the Great Recession
Bear in mind that recession causes deaths for many reasons other than increased suicide, e.g. due to reduced funding for healthcare and greater poverty, but those last two studies are interesting markers in terms of the how the economic hit from fighting COVID-19 will have negative health outcomes.
Vice Chacellors are academics, not teachers.
It was weird, though, since I've had loads of colds (15 years of being immunosuppressed will do that) and have never had problems breathing like that. And suddenly a few months later there's a global pandemic with that as one of the most obvious symptoms. I know a few other people who caught the same bug around the same time.
I am definitely not a Chinese mole. Nor have I been eating anything I shouldn't. Like moles.
https://www.parliament.uk/business/publications/written-questions-answers-statements/written-statement/Commons/2020-03-24/HCWS183/
But I was more concerned about Heather Stewart's digging into blame and comparisons about 'unnecessary deaths'. That is one for the Royal Commission, not for tabloid journalists now.
Problem is if you program a computer or just knock together a spreadsheet to do the calculation 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + 1/5 + etc etc then eventually the later numbers become, as far as the computer knows or cares, zero, and the sum gets "stuck" no matter how many extra terms you add. Depending which number their sum got stuck on, the good professor was often able to guess which software they had used!
https://twitter.com/NYGovCuomo/status/1242469263425908736?s=20
https://twitter.com/briantylercohen/status/1242505419177639936
While it seems most Governments are opting for some form of movement restriction to alleviate and depress new cases of the virus, there still seem those who argue for a different route.
If you want to call it the "herd immunity" approach, that's fine but as I understand it the theory is to isolate the elderly and the vulnerable but for the virus to be allowed to run through the rest of the population on the basis the vast majority will emerge unscathed and immune.
That argument also suggests the wider economy would suffer less in terms of disruption - there would still be an impact but not severe.
The argument against the lock-down approach is it causes unnecessary and unwarranted economic damage - basically we're going to have, in economic terms, three weeks of Bank Holidays, if not Christmas Days in terms of output and productivity. We will all be home living off our resources - food and financial.
The argument therefore turns on where you value economic growth against human life or lives and that will be in the eye of the beholder. If we are all simply economic drones whose single purpose is to increase GDP I get that but I'm not sure that where I am philosophically.
While recognising we are all mortal and the Grim Reaper waits for us all at the end of our journey, I'm not convinced a few premature deaths is a good price to pay for a slightly lower GDP figure in the first quarter of 2021/22 but that would be an argument for the banning of smoking, drinking, gambling and a whole range of other activities.
Thus, it comes back to more fundamentals - do we opt to choose to live as we wish accepting the risks or do we choose to accept a temporary dislocation to our lives and our prosperity to maintain our health in the hope of returning to what we know in short order?
When it doesn’t work I end up having to teach Y11 on a Friday afternoon.
Am I doing this inside joke thing right?
Edit:on a serious note, was the "live" bat thing a joke, or has that actually been suggested somewhere?
Always the simplest of problems hardest to diagnose, cos you overlook them :-)
I was mulling over the truth or otherwise of this, and came up with Goldwater, Joseph McCarthy and Wallace.
But their peak was over fifty years ago. Indeed, McCarthy has been dead for over 60 years.
However, J Strom Thurmond was still active into the 1990s and still a corrupt, creepy, racist nutcase so I suppose we could offer him up as a possible.
I think 'Playstation lessons' will be on the timetable next week.