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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Guest slot from Stocky: Why it should be made clear that lockdown will not extend past 12 weeks
My daughter has started learning about philosophy. She is particularly enamoured with a thought experiment known as The Trolley Problem.
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The options was never business as usual, vs lockdown. It is absurd to expect people to continue going to pubs, restaurants and the Grand National while people drop like flies around them.
I expect restrictions will be loosened soon, with "non-essential" business resuming work, but for the foreseable future social distancing will be near universal.
6 weeks then schools and non food shops to reopen.
Time for a grown up approach to safeguard the future.
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1245114272537096192?s=20
The US Medical establishment really shouldn’t be throwing stones....
Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/01/zoom_spotlight/
I suspect the fed up at home factor will be a big motivant for change in 4-6 weeks time. People aren't going to lock themselves away for ever.
I'd like to see in particular a notice that only British nationals should be allowed on LHR flights.
Till were out of the firefighting stage there can be no return to anything like normality.
(Is Deborah the last of the Great American Birx?)
The UK has 8,000 - with plans to go to 68,000. Which would be the equivalent of 340,000 ventilators for the US (5x).
The 68K are planned in the UK on the basis of a effective lockdown etc vs the US situation. By actual medical scientists.
In other words, if carry the maths forward 340,000 would probably be inadequate for the US - in a very short while.
Gulp.
I was sad to see that Kate Fox, that astute anthropologist of the English, with the best seller "Watching the English*" is now down with COVID19.
*An excellent book, and very funny at times.
The sensible thing to do would be what Foxy said, but I wonder if the next step won't be to listen to people like Stocky and reopen everything, then a load of people die and the hospitals start to melt down and the whole cycle repeats.
India seems to be a poster child for the sudden, all-in-one-go approach being a very bad idea. The problem is definitely worse there now as a result.
A tightening spiral of restrictions seems to be the effective pattern - I think every country that has locked down reasonably well has done that. Even if the spiral wasn't intended - e.g. Italy where they had to crack down ever harder on people being stupid as they introduced new rules day by day.
But that is understandable because it is new and unprecedented, except we now know the government three years ago suppressed the report showing what needed to be done. (One reason I'd not be backing Hunt as next PM.)
Codenamed Exercise Cygnus, the three-day dry run for a pandemic carried out in October 2016 tested how NHS hospitals and other services would cope in the event of a major flu outbreak with a similar mortality rate to Covid-19.
The report on Cygnus’s findings were deemed too sensitive by Whitehall officials to be made public but the Sunday Telegraph has established that it found:...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/28/exclusive-ministers-warned-nhs-could-not-cope-pandemic-three/
But what if the death rate is 0.5% with best treatment, and 10% of people need hospitalisation. If everyone gets sick within a short period, not only would millions of people not get treatment because the hospitals would be full, the death rate could be many times higher than 0.5% because of no treatment.
And that's without even considering the probability of better treatments being found.
Option 1 was never an option.
It's more of an argument about which restrictions are most cost-effective, and which should be eased sooner rather than later.
Unst-able.....
Webex is a much better product, they make their money from corporate subscriptions rather than selling your data.
If you are talking about no effective controls at all - your article is not clear on this (but you do state you were opposed to lockdown), the carnage will be massive. Grisly death in at least the high tens of thousands and a collapsed healthcare system - we've seen the last in several countries and they went to lockdown anyway.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/03/31/get-used-debt-higher-inflation/
Social care, on the other hand, is the tragedy yet to unfold.
California received 170 from the US stockpile, none of which worked see https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/490033-newsom-170-ventilators-sent-from-federal-government-arrived-not-working
That's like me claiming to have 10 working computers at home when 5 of them are old incomplete odds and sods in the garage
Was there a Cheltenham spike? Are we seeing new cases in fast food kitchens, where people are still working close to each other? Are there any clusters that are not due to religious services or 10 Downing Street?
If we knew that, and I'd hope it is being actively researched despite its not being mentioned, then we'd know which parts of the economy and society can be reopened. It should not be the all-or-nothing affair of the header.
Relaxation will clearly occur at some point and I think we can guarantee the government will either call when wrong, or be perceived to have called it wrong regardless. Because in part it's a judgement call.
My gut says the public clamour to relax things, assuming a peak in april, will not peak until june, as it were. I think people will get very irate through May but thered be sufficient acceptance to maintain things then.
Some parts of the lockdown sound like they may last a year, including shielding the very vulnerable. But the current lockdown wont last that long so we need to find ways that we can loosen it that alleviate some of the issues.
Just a couple of little suggestions:
Allowing people living on their own to have contact with at least one other person living on their own. They would then still have far less contact than most people but it would make a big difference to their well being. (Yes difficult to police but most people understand it is serious now).
For public transport, get free cards issued to the NHS and key workers during the full lockdown. Then use the last digit of the debit card/oyster to ration who can use it. During rush hour, it might just be key workers and ending in 1. From 10-11 it could be ending in 2 & 3, 11-12 ending in 4&5 one day and then 6-0 go the next day.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/03/31/2131221/mit-team-shares-new-500-emergency-ventilator-design-with-the-public
What sort of an answer is this ? It should be "No"
There are no easy answers here. As I’ve mentioned before, easing restrictions will be hard because people will use their new freedom to go and do all the things they hadn’t been able to for weeks - see friends, families, go on trips, come into contact with lots of people.
People's current "certainties" are really just hopes and guesses at the moment which ever side of the argument they sit on.
Have you asked your daughter yet what she would do about a marriage proposal from Edward de Bono's Farmer?
https://debonoconsulting.com/resources/free-article-and-best-practices/lesson-in-lateral-thinking-the-tale-of-two-pebbles/
The problem is like a Kay Burley interview this morning with Robert Jenrick - an attempt to bounce a victim into simplistic answers by asking simplistic questions then making bored noises 3 seconds later.
To channel Tone, I do not accept the premise of your question.
The major news organisations need to quarantine all the Lobby hacks and 'opinion' writers, and replace them with medical and science experts.
Moreover, I don't think most people are getting more and more fed up - on the contrary, the people I'm in touch with are getting used to it and less fed up than in the first couple of days.
But Stocky is right that we need a clear idea of the strategy. Not with exact dates, since we can see estimates are constantly changing. But it would be helpful to know, say, that the plan is to allow more freedom of movement and restart a wider range of businesses in a few months, as soon as there is enough testing equipment to test everyone going back to work.
The price is Trump ego stroking which involves pointless verbal attacks on other countries like this.
I think that the government have now established that stopping everything, at the cost of 100s of £billions is a reasonable policy option to prevent hospital capacity being overwhelmed. This means that they absolutely have to achieve the objective of keeping infection levels within NHS capacity. They cannot now let the NHS be overwhelmed when they've already trashed the economy to avoid that outcome.
They will be hoping, as per Casino Royale's argument last night, that by the time of infection wave 2, the increased number of ventilators, better tests, more tests, and other preparations, will mean that infection wave 2 can be managed differently, but if the data suggests they need to slam on the brakes with a full lockdown to avoid overwhelming the NHS then it will certainly happen.
https://twitter.com/ElectProject/status/1245132622566699016?s=19
- increase care capacity - staff, ventilators, new temporary hospitals
- increase testing capacity
- get a better understanding about mortality and hospitalisation rates
It obviously can't go on forever, but the increased capacity will make us better equipped to cope with a second wave, possibly with less severe lockdown and the increased knowledge will put us in a better position to balance the cost of lockdown against better understood numbers of lives that can be saved.
There are, as I see it, two main approaches:
- try and maintain lockdown until new cases are virtually eliminated, then mostly lift restrictions and go hard on a second containment phase with more testing, better tracking of individuals' movements
- gradually ease lockdown once new cases are well in decline and try and find a balance that gives a manageable (linear and not too high - i.e. balanced against those cases concluding) rate of new cases, something that the expanded health service capacity can cope with long term
As it stands at present, we are not in a position to do the first approach (far too many current cases) and don't know enough to calibrate the second approach.
You a mother? (I mean a moth enthusist obviously.) You mentioned moth traps - I`m assuming you are catching them, not zapping them.
I`d like to do a survey of our village`s moths - do you know whether moth traps can be hired? If not, which model would you recommend? I attended a short naturalist course a few years ago and the moth expert and author, Paul Waring, got me interested.
(and yep, i know it doesn't really sound that much like egg)
For example, at the moment, the death rate in Sweden (mitigation with no lockdown) is two-and-a-half times that in Norway (lockdown). The death toll in the US is climbing faster than anywhere else.
By twelve weeks from now, if the mitigation strategies in places like Sweden and the US look bad in terms of death tolls, they will either have swerved into lockdown themselves (making the option of reversing the strategy look very dangerous) or they'll stand as dreadful warnings to the cost of letting it fall off. In short, the track with the people on it would look as though a mob is on there now.
Of course, IF they get away with it, the calls would increase to relax matters. But that's an if.
And we may have experience of countries further in (Italy, Spain, France) having released restrictions to a degree by then and we can see what happens with those.
To be honest, it is to be expected that right now, the calls to lift restrictions in the UK would be at their highest. We're just coming to terms with the effects of the restrictions with no agreed end date in sight - and the death toll keeps rising. It's not intuitive to account for the lag:
- If it takes an average of 7 days to show symptoms and maybe an average of 5-20 days to get from symptoms to death, then those dying yesterday were infected between 4th March-19th March. That is - before the lockdown at the latest, back to before almost anyone was doing anything to protect themselves (the warning to avoid pubs and restaurants went out on the 16th and we were officially in a mitigation strategy at that point).
- The effects of the lockdown should start to be perceived from the 5th of April. By the 19th of April, we should be definitely looking at starting to plateua if the lockdown is working.
(Then again, though, there will be infections even during the lockdown, and the proportion of the population already infected by that point as a source of infection will be far far higher than it was in early March. The shape of the curve at that point is yet to be seen - although it will be able to be compared to the shape of the curve in the US, for example)
People and businesses can then easily plan for those.
Hopefully Starmer will take a more pragmatic and collaborative approach.
The Govt. does need to be able to dangle a carrot though. A back on form Boris saying if you are all good boys and girls, social distance, stop being dickheads with your buffets and BBQs, then by 1st June, x y and z will be permitted again.
But only if.
And if things are really well ahead of the curve, the Govt. can make itself hugley popular by bringing x or y or z out of the deep freeze a week or two earlier.
What happens with those that locked down before us will be key I expect. Except China - either the figures there arent trustworthy or they are but our path has been different regardless.
But politicians are in charge, and they will do what the people shout loudest for. this will mean the lever (almost) all the way.
People dying on our screens vs generic hard to quantify economic hardship can only go one way, the fact that there is a good logical argument against it notwithstanding.
Alive but a bit poorer vs dead. That is how is will be portrayed.
I tend to agree. And as for 0.5% of the population inevitably getting it? Not so (Diamond Princess).
Although NHS capacity is of course an issue.
Who to test, how often and what to do with the results is something Corbyn etc never tackle.
Also has anyone done an audit of he 8k daily tests - are they being used wisely ?
(& denied funding in the stimulus package.)
Without going too far into the details, my work gives me access to some absolutely terrifying economic data that makes me believe the economic damage of the lockdown will be an order of magnitude greater than the damage caused by death to the virus.
What is interesting is that the government must surely have their hands on a much broader dataset and be fully aware of the storm that is coming. Despite this, they have chosen to "pull the lever" as you say. I think this largely down to human psychology. The instinct to preserve life, whether our own or of others, is strong and overrides economic analysis.
In addition to the economic cost there is also the cost in terms of loss of freedom (I fear we are normalising many aspects of the police state) as well as the psychological cost borne largely by the most vulnerable in society - those in poor accomodation, those trapped with abusive partners, those with mental conditions made worse by this, the suicides that will be caused etc.
My personal plan would be to end the lockdown by May at the latest and to make that clear now. To continue enforcing social distancing, banning large gatherings (sorry football fans) and keeping pubs closed. To make masks by the million and make wearing them in public a social norm. To recommend the quarantining of the elderly and the vulnerable and to offer them the necessary support.
Perhaps I am wrong, but I fear our government has taken the emotional rather than rational choice because to do otherwise is to be labelled a "career psychopath" at best, a butcher at worse.
I'm not saying the news channels should be turned over to the Ministry of Information, but there needs to be *much* more emphasis on reporting facts and official advice, rather than opinion and contrary oppositionism. Replacing Kay Burley with someone, anyone else, would be a good start.
And I'd add the universal political desire to buy time and hope something will turn up.
The trolley problem is a hard one, and usually you can say 'but that just doesn't happen in the real world'...
Then a Crisis breaks. People are being asked to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Stay in their home. With their stuff. And we're all going fucking crazy. Today is day 3 of week 2 - that glorious Saturday when we all* went for one last yomp in the countryside seems like an eternity ago.
What is clear to me is that there is a lot of fear out there about the virus. Many of the people in the 5 supermarkets I visited yesterday visibly didn't want to be there or near people. Whats also clear is the fear of the End of Civilisation. People fear for their jobs or for how they will pay their bills or for whether their business will still exist out the other side of this. The government have announced a load of schemes which Mean Well but have been poorly conceived from an implementation point of view and minimally resourced with all of the cuts to DWP and HMRC staff numbers hitting home.
In short we have two major opposing waves about to hit each other. Control of the virus. And loss of control of society. As the weeks go on with no end date to focus on the frayed nerves of people bored of their stuff and annoyed with their children/partners this is going to get bad and quickly.
Our society is essentially a confidence trick. Work. Consume. Reproduce. Pay taxes. Stress test why people work and consume and reproduce and all kinds of interesting things will happen, and if you are a government these are not good things. Death is a normal part of society. Mass breakdown is not. Hated as apparently he is, I can see what Cummings was arguing for...
US system is out of reach for many people and ludicrously expensive but as a result has a lot of redundancy in it which ours doesn't.
The trouble that the government had and still has in getting its incredibly simplistic messages across is a major challenge for the next step. If the great British public can't quite get their heads around, Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives" how do we explain anything more complicated?
But the reality is increasingly that if coffee shops, pubs and restaurants don't open in less than 12 weeks the vast majority will never open again despite open handed government support. We have to start earning money.
The worldmeter figures are extremely crude but according to them we have all of 135 people recovered, the worst ratio to deaths in the world. This is plainly rubbish. Tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, have now had this virus and are immune. We urgently need to find out which thousands so they and their compatriots who get infected and recover can go back to work. In short we need antigen tests and we need them now. This is the key to the next stage. Remember when people poured scorn on herd immunity? Short of a vaccine it is the only way out of this.