Nobody has really explained why more tests stops the virus spreading.
Everyone is locked down.
Sufficient testing capacity opens up the possibility of returning to track & trace post lockdown. It also would tell us more about the size of the problem.
Nobody has really explained why more tests stops the virus spreading.
Everyone is locked down.
Sufficient testing capacity opens up the possibility of returning to track & trace post lockdown. It also would tell us more about the size of the problem.
I'm stuck indoors , working from home.
My behaviour would not change if I knew I just caught virus due to a test today.
Does anybody feel that via the journalists questions we actually learn anything more? e.g. nobody for instance asked anything about the clinical trials that were being run, what sort of things are we trying, when will they report on findings, etc.
You can’t properly negotiate by conference call . When will this charade end . And how on earth can all the infrastructure be done with the restrictions and how are businesses supposed to do anything until those are eased .
Does anybody feel that via the journalists questions we actually learn anything more? e.g. nobody for instance asked anything about the clinical trials that were being run, what sort of things are we trying, when will they report on findings, etc.
I think I learnt less as part of my brain has turned to mush listening to them.
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last round
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.
For @isam I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars. Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is over 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?
The black bar is showing where the green curve (bottom) and red curve (top) will be next week.
Doesn’t that assume every covid-19 death is on top of those who would have died normally?
Genuinely great numbers out of Italy today. Just 3,039 new cases today, which is remarkable considering it's not a weekend. This is a 25% drop from the week ago number, and came alongside a new record low in terms of "percent positive". Just 9% of Italian tests were positive, against more than a third a few weeks ago.
In Lombardy, Italy's Ground Zero, there were 791 cases. That's down more than 75% from peak. For Italy as a whole, we're now about 55% below the record day.
Most importantly, we're almost at cross over. On a daily basis, the number of new cases is now almost equal to deaths plus recovered. By the end of this week, the number of Italians confirmed with CV-19 will be in decline.
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last round
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.
For @isam I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars. Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is over 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?
The black bar is showing where the green curve (bottom) and red curve (top) will be next week.
Doesn’t that assume every covid-19 death is on top of those who would have died normally?
What it will show is that the weekly death rate is far far higher than the 5-year average. I suspect the majority of that increase is due to deaths from coronavirus.
Interesting that they've got Theresa May to do some media to reassure people.
It makes sense to use her at a time like this. Once a PM always a PM. There's authority there. Interestingly, I think the same applies with the new Labour Leader. With Starmer. I doubt we will get a GNU but if we do I can see him heading it.
You can’t properly negotiate by conference call . When will this charade end . And how on earth can all the infrastructure be done with the restrictions and how are businesses supposed to do anything until those are eased .
I'd think it a parody, but my lockdown buddy just today was worried Boris being out of action would mean 'they' try to keep us in the EU/extend the transition period.
Nobody has really explained why more tests stops the virus spreading.
Everyone is locked down.
Everyone is not locked down -we have reduced contact but there is still contact and some jobs require people to work at their work place
Plus this will work through family units or those who share a house.
Its just like the fact people think everyone gets Christmas off when in fact millions of people are working. I would suspect several million people are still having to leave their homes to work every day at the moment. Then of course there are all the people having to go shopping.
Doesn’t that assume every covid-19 death is on top of those who would have died normally?
That's almost certainly roughly true in a given week at this time of year. Of course some of those people might have died in the next few months, or from flu next winter, so we might see a drop in total deaths later in the year (assuming we've managed to get on top of Covid-19).
Interesting that they've got Theresa May to do some media to reassure people.
It makes sense to use her at a time like this. Once a PM always a PM. There's authority there. Interestingly, I think the same applies with the new Labour Leader. With Starmer. I doubt we will get a GNU but if we do I can see him heading it.
Raab has smashed this. Confident and to the point. No shrill insincerity such as we get from Gove. He is doing very well, and personally speaking I normally can't stand the bloke!
Crisis is meat and drink for most politicians. Sound authoritative - defer to the experts when required and look confident.
Testing on its own can't stop the virus. Isolating the identified carrier can suppress further transmission.
Test & Trace.
I personally lack confidence in our ability to do this but others are more bullish.
The one conclusion to take away from Harry's befuddlement is that the (somewhat half-hearted) measures which already constitute a complete "lockdown" in his perception are still some distance away from properly isolating the carrier of an infectious disease.
Raab has smashed this. Confident and to the point. No shrill insincerity such as we get from Gove. He is doing very well, and personally speaking I normally can't stand the bloke!
Crisis is meat and drink for most politicians. Sound authoritative - defer to the experts when required and look confident.
Elementary politics.
Agree. In my earlier career I used to revel in disasters and cockup. Loved sorting them out. A senior sales guy thought I was bonkers. Couldn't understand it but that was because he was paid on success so he hated deals going pear shaped. I loved the challenge of sorting it out. Nobody was expecting a positive outcome so if I succeeded great, if not so be it. The sales guys were always dreading something go wrong (they were all usually very big projects).
Alright, so more realistically Attlee to Boris's ... truly sorry to have to bring up this name again ... Churchill.
The first couple of minutes of this One Show video are entertaining as Chris Evans skewers Boris on his Churchill book more effectively than Paxo or Neil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdbDOvmLDz0
I yield to no one in my disgust at the childish questions usually asked, but at least the BBC correspondent did a reasonable summery of the graphs. An Arts graduate as always but she has made an effort to learn some basic science.
The problem is the chorus of political correspondents only understand politics. Vicky Young pointed out what the questions would be about beforehand. Has Boris shit the bed? is there a split in the ranks? or can you guarantee (insert nonsensical question)?
Yes, Alok Sharma was disappointing on Sunday and was a disaster on an interview with Nick Ferrari on LBC a couple of weeks back.
I find it hard to believe a politician can't have enough confidence to stand up and talk to a prepared script with experts all around to help and little in the way of seriously hostile questioning.
How do they manage with Conservative Party association candidate interviews and selection?
Yes, Alok Sharma was disappointing on Sunday and was a disaster on an interview with Nick Ferrari on LBC a couple of weeks back.
I find it hard to believe a politician can't have enough confidence to stand up and talk to a prepared script with experts all around to help and little in the way of seriously hostile questioning.
How do they manage with Conservative Party association candidate interviews and selection?
I guess because dealing with the TV and media is harder. I remember a LD county councillor who stood for parliament who was very competent and knew her stuff being interviewed on the TV and just talked gibberish.
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last round
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.
For @isam I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars. Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is over 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?
The black bar is showing where the green curve (bottom) and red curve (top) will be next week.
Doesn’t that assume every covid-19 death is on top of those who would have died normally?
What it will show is that the weekly death rate is far far higher than the 5-year average. I suspect the majority of that increase is due to deaths from coronavirus.
Oh yes of course the next few weeks will be far far higher, and yes they’ll be from covid19. No doubt
Genuinely great numbers out of Italy today. Just 3,039 new cases today, which is remarkable considering it's not a weekend. This is a 25% drop from the week ago number, and came alongside a new record low in terms of "percent positive". Just 9% of Italian tests were positive, against more than a third a few weeks ago.
In Lombardy, Italy's Ground Zero, there were 791 cases. That's down more than 75% from peak. For Italy as a whole, we're now about 55% below the record day.
Most importantly, we're almost at cross over. On a daily basis, the number of new cases is now almost equal to deaths plus recovered. By the end of this week, the number of Italians confirmed with CV-19 will be in decline.
You can’t properly negotiate by conference call . When will this charade end . And how on earth can all the infrastructure be done with the restrictions and how are businesses supposed to do anything until those are eased .
You can actually negotiate quite a lot on a call. I've found the technology to be great - it's actually easier to see everyone is looking at the right bit of the text and so on. And I see why Frost is trying to keep things moving forward as far as he can.
The key is more when you get off the call and need senior sign-off on the big calls - the key compromises, areas where red lines are tested etc. That's where it becomes nearly impossible in the current situation - there's just so much senior energy going into virus, particularly in finance departments in different countries and EU, as the economic impact is huge. So I agree it will have to be delayed a bit. Only the most hardline Leaver would object, I suspect.
I think it's now reasonable to assume that proper negotiations will be back on track by the middle of this year. Essentially, four months or so will have been lost.
We do need to talk about whether a short extension is necessary. Because getting approval by all the various parliaments and regional bodies in the EU is going to take a couple of months.
It essentially only allows for (maybe) July, Aug, Sept for negotiations. And this is contingent on something approching normality being achieved by the beginning of July.
Looking into things, it seems he did a cartoon for the Evening Standard and was getting flak for the way he drew Ed Miliband's nose, for all the obvious reasons. He is pointing out that in his opinion the way he drew Ed Miliband's nose is pretty much what Ed Miliband's nose actually looks like.
I thought part of the art of being a cartoonist was being a good judge of mood and tone - they often have to balance a fine line about just how disrespectful to be, how dark a sense of humour is likely to be acceptable, and are well aware that otherwise you can end up doing something that seems "funny" to you but unfunny/weird/shocking/unacceptable to other people.
Judging from this Twitter exchange I would not class Christian Adams as the world's finest exponent of judging mood and tone...
Germany is doing well, but as Chris Witty pointed out, it's simplistic to isolate one particular factor when they are several possibilities, or even a combination.
Testing people for viral RNA doesn't cure them. It makes it easier to return medics to the front line, and in sparsely-stricken regions, you can concentrate on contact-tracing.
Partly that. Partly, maybe, "Vorsprung durch Disziplin".
Measures which the state introduces, but can only partly inforce, have been voluntarily preempted by the general population, taking individual precautions. This has occured in both countries, but people sometimes claim that Germans have a stronger proclivity for making and observing rules. That may have played a part.
If anybody is contemplating doing this "clap for Boris" tonight, please be aware that it is an Aaron Banks thing - i.e. it's a snarky troll to take the piss out of the "carers" one.
Bit like Philip Davies and his "International Men's Day".
So, please, no clapping for Boris. At 8 pm we just take a moment to silently wish him well in his battle against this horrid virus and then we go back to whatever we were doing.
The context for that (which is important to explain, I think) is a Twitter storm over Adams depicting Miliband as having an aquiline nose, which some are construing as antisemitic because this is a stereotypical characteristic of Jewish people, and could be seen as "code" for Jewish.
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last round
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.
For @isam I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars. Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?
No - the black bars, from top to bottom of the bar in question, show the extra deaths due to coronavirus. The ones where we already have the total deaths are attached to the line in question - showing where they have “pushed up” the line. The one from today is out on its own due to the deaths for the week ending this week not being available. The bottom of it is just placed approximately where the arc of the average 5 year deaths would be; the top is where it would push up that average to.
Germany is doing well, but as Chris Witty pointed out, it's simplistic to isolate one particular factor when they are several possibilities, or even a combination.
Testing people for viral RNA doesn't cure them. It makes it easier to return medics to the front line, and in sparsely-stricken regions, you can concentrate on contact-tracing.
The figure of ours that particularly sticks out is the "135" recovered. A tiny number and one which has not moved in a long time.
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last round
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.
For @isam I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars. Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is over 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?
The black bar is showing where the green curve (bottom) and red curve (top) will be next week.
Doesn’t that assume every covid-19 death is on top of those who would have died normally?
What it will show is that the weekly death rate is far far higher than the 5-year average. I suspect the majority of that increase is due to deaths from coronavirus.
Oh yes of course the next few weeks will be far far higher, and yes they’ll be from covid19. No doubt
Let's take a look at some data then. The graph stops at 27th March, when daily deaths 181, the only other date that daily deaths was over 100 was the day before, the 26th March.
Daily deaths deaths yesterday was low at 439, today it's 786. And I'm only taking the hospital deaths, the ONS publishes a higher number of Covid Deaths.
That is a huge excess of deaths that has to be offset by lower deaths from everything else for your scepticism to be well founded.
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
Germany is doing well, but as Chris Witty pointed out, it's simplistic to isolate one particular factor when they are several possibilities, or even a combination.
Testing people for viral RNA doesn't cure them. It makes it easier to return medics to the front line, and in sparsely-stricken regions, you can concentrate on contact-tracing.
The figure of ours that particularly sticks out is the "135" recovered. A tiny number and one which has not moved in a long time.
That's surely just misreporting, the true number will, of course, be much higher.
Why did betfair suspend the next prime minister and con leadership markets?
This is just the time when there is interest in these markets
Michael Paterson
To avoid the negative PR of betting on when Boris will die, no doubt. There is a question about whether they will need to void these markets completely, made more complicated if they've been partially settled (as Boris did not resign in the first quarter of this year).
The context for that (which is important to explain, I think) is a Twitter storm over Adams depicting Miliband as having an aquiline nose, which some are construing as antisemitic because this is a stereotypical characteristic of Jewish people, and could be seen as "code" for Jewish.
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.
Sounds like 'but their smiles do look like watermelons' to me. The 'point' Adams appears to be making seems to ignore a huge history of antisemitic caricature based specifically on physical features.
Maybe I've not being paying attention but I couldn't have told you what Miliband's nose looked like to save my life.
The context for that (which is important to explain, I think) is a Twitter storm over Adams depicting Miliband as having an aquiline nose, which some are construing as antisemitic because this is a stereotypical characteristic of Jewish people, and could be seen as "code" for Jewish.
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.
Sounds like 'but their smiles do look like watermelons' to me. The 'point' being made also seems to ignore a huge history of antisemitic caricature based specifically on physical features.
Maybe I've not being paying attention but I couldn't have told you what Miliband's nose looked like to save my life.
Trouble is, drawing Ed Miliband with a wrong nose so he doesn't look Jewish would also be seen as racist, like lightening photos of Black people. So I dunno.
The context for that (which is important to explain, I think) is a Twitter storm over Adams depicting Miliband as having an aquiline nose, which some are construing as antisemitic because this is a stereotypical characteristic of Jewish people, and could be seen as "code" for Jewish.
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.
While I agree that Twitter is not a helpful medium of communication for discussing complex and controversial issues, I would note that the way Adams handled it didn't help much either...
(For what it's worth Ed Miliband is, not just by Jewish legal definition or family heritage but also because he himself claims actively claims to be so, Jewish. He doesn't follow the Jewish religion, as you correctly point out, but being a Jew is about a lot more than that. Sentences like "I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist" always look a bit weird to me - after all, weren't his parents atheists too? - because there's an implicit suggestion in it that if you aren't religious somehow, or to some extent, cannot be Jewish. It reminds me a bit of when you see an obnoxious Hindu nationalist - who believes the cultural and religious aspects of Indianness are fundamentally intertwined - proclaim someone "can't be a proper Indian because they're Muslim" or similar.)
On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title: We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Hospital admissions up 2% in 24hrs, which suggests things are levelling off (although there are big regional variations).
I am intrigued by that dip ten days after the lockdown - for both London and the Midlands - which was then reversed.
Could it be that the frequency distribution of time of admission to hospital is bimodal, with one group typically being admitted about ten days after infection, and another about fifteen days or longer (as Boris Johnson was)?
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
The context for that (which is important to explain, I think) is a Twitter storm over Adams depicting Miliband as having an aquiline nose, which some are construing as antisemitic because this is a stereotypical characteristic of Jewish people, and could be seen as "code" for Jewish.
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.
While I agree that Twitter is not a helpful medium of communication for discussing complex and controversial issues, I would note that the way Adams handled it didn't help much either...
(For what it's worth Ed Miliband is, not just by Jewish legal definition or family heritage but also because he himself claims actively claims to be so, Jewish. He doesn't follow the Jewish religion, as you correctly point out, but being a Jew is about a lot more than that. Sentences like "I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist" always look a bit weird to me - after all, weren't his parents atheists too? - because there's an implicit suggestion in it that if you aren't religious somehow, or to some extent, cannot be Jewish. It reminds me a bit of when you see an obnoxious Hindu nationalist - who believes the cultural and religious aspects of Indianness are fundamentally intertwined - proclaim someone "can't be a proper Indian because they're Muslim" or similar.)
Yep, anyone who thinks that somebody can't be the target of antisemitism because they're not religiously Jewish has no idea what they're talking about
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
If anybody is contemplating doing this "clap for Boris" tonight, please be aware that it is an Aaron Banks thing - i.e. it's a snarky troll to take the piss out of the "carers" one.
Bit like Philip Davies and his "International Men's Day".
So, please, no clapping for Boris. At 8 pm we just take a moment to silently wish him well in his battle against this horrid virus and then we go back to whatever we were doing.
Purely because you were "complaining" about "Keith" Starmer earlier, I do feel duty-bound to point out that it's Arron, not Aaron. You may or may not care, of course.
Germany is doing well, but as Chris Witty pointed out, it's simplistic to isolate one particular factor when they are several possibilities, or even a combination.
Testing people for viral RNA doesn't cure them. It makes it easier to return medics to the front line, and in sparsely-stricken regions, you can concentrate on contact-tracing.
The figure of ours that particularly sticks out is the "135" recovered. A tiny number and one which has not moved in a long time.
That's surely just misreporting, the true number will, of course, be much higher.
If anybody is contemplating doing this "clap for Boris" tonight, please be aware that it is an Aaron Banks thing - i.e. it's a snarky troll to take the piss out of the "carers" one.
Bit like Philip Davies and his "International Men's Day".
So, please, no clapping for Boris. At 8 pm we just take a moment to silently wish him well in his battle against this horrid virus and then we go back to whatever we were doing.
I`d never take part in any "mass clapping". Very disturbing. And naff.
However.... if it irritates you, kinabalu, maybe ?????
Germany is doing well, but as Chris Witty pointed out, it's simplistic to isolate one particular factor when they are several possibilities, or even a combination.
Testing people for viral RNA doesn't cure them. It makes it easier to return medics to the front line, and in sparsely-stricken regions, you can concentrate on contact-tracing.
The figure of ours that particularly sticks out is the "135" recovered. A tiny number and one which has not moved in a long time.
That's surely just misreporting, the true number will, of course, be much higher.
Why has no journalist asked this simple question?
Pillocks.
Yes, of course. Especially as the pace of recovery should be an important parameter when deciding on the sequencing of the loosening of the lockdown measures.
Germany is doing well, but as Chris Witty pointed out, it's simplistic to isolate one particular factor when they are several possibilities, or even a combination.
Testing people for viral RNA doesn't cure them. It makes it easier to return medics to the front line, and in sparsely-stricken regions, you can concentrate on contact-tracing.
The figure of ours that particularly sticks out is the "135" recovered. A tiny number and one which has not moved in a long time.
That's surely just misreporting, the true number will, of course, be much higher.
Why has no journalist asked this simple question?
Pillocks.
To be fair I don't think the "135 recovered" is a number we are quoting, its a number a site we aren't maintaining are quoting and I don't think the journalists or government are referring to that site.
I also don't think that the government has a clue how many have recovered. Or are even trying to know that as a priority right now.
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
If anybody is contemplating doing this "clap for Boris" tonight, please be aware that it is an Aaron Banks thing - i.e. it's a snarky troll to take the piss out of the "carers" one.
Bit like Philip Davies and his "International Men's Day".
So, please, no clapping for Boris. At 8 pm we just take a moment to silently wish him well in his battle against this horrid virus and then we go back to whatever we were doing.
I`d never take part in any "mass clapping". Very disturbing. And naff.
However.... if it irritates you, kinabalu, maybe ?????
Guess you`ll never know.
"it is an Aaron Banks thing"
I thought he was saying this is all a big fuss and we should get back to work?
On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title: We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Nice find! Is there a direct link to the paper somewhere?
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
I did my ration of exercise today, OK 18 miles on a bike, maybe a bit long, but, my observations. Staying at home is breaking down, significantly more cars and people about, cars parked in areas with no urgent need other than to walk the dog or walk in a nice area, groups of youths on illegal motorbikes, groups of cyclists who do not appear to be a Family group, groups of runners etc.
I have given up my short drive to my nearby hills where I used to run with friends, where you would never see anyone, and now have to run in a more congested area where there is a minute increase in danger. Any way rant over, hope everyone is keeping safe, and hope BJ comes through.
I did my ration of exercise today, OK 18 miles on a bike, maybe a bit long, but, my observations. Staying at home is breaking down, significantly more cars and people about, cars parked in areas with no urgent need other than to walk the dog or walk in a nice area, groups of youths on illegal motorbikes, groups of cyclists who do not appear to be a Family group, groups of runners etc.
I have given up my short drive to my nearby hills where I used to run with friends, where you would never see anyone, and now have to run in a more congested area where there is a minute increase in danger. Any way rant over, hope everyone is keeping safe, and hope BJ comes through.
There is a problem wherein the news of a general plateauing and an increase in the general sunny weather taken together has the potential to make people feel too confident. The government should be as explicit as it can about the dangers of the confluence of these two things at least for the next couple of weeks, or perhaps much longer, until any pattern in the UK is conclusively established.
On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title: We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Nice find! Is there a direct link to the paper somewhere?
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
I can't find a direct link, but I guess keep watching Actuarial Post? If I see a link I'll PM it to you (if I remember).
I know a few people on the group, and may get involved myself if the day job clears up a bit (albeit it's not really my primary field). In the meantime, happy to continue to post links to stuff they publish if it looks to be of interest.
I did my ration of exercise today, OK 18 miles on a bike, maybe a bit long, but, my observations. Staying at home is breaking down, significantly more cars and people about, cars parked in areas with no urgent need other than to walk the dog or walk in a nice area, groups of youths on illegal motorbikes, groups of cyclists who do not appear to be a Family group, groups of runners etc.
I have given up my short drive to my nearby hills where I used to run with friends, where you would never see anyone, and now have to run in a more congested area where there is a minute increase in danger. Any way rant over, hope everyone is keeping safe, and hope BJ comes through.
The return of decent weather and the onset of Easter are factors. I can hear motorbikes travelling at speed up and down the much quieter North Circular Road and A13 which is usually a late Saturday night phenomenon.
It's been two weeks which has been for many two weeks of purgatory. Compared with catching the virus, I'll take purgatory all day every day.
I'm still far from convinced how we can begin to ease restrictions - those with the virus seem to be struggling to get over it and are presumably still infectious if they still have it.
Austria and Germany are talking bravely about a gradual return to normality but I'd rather not be at the cutting edge (or bleeding edge) of that - let's see how they fare before we try something similar.
That's not actually true, as @Charles will tell you.
There are coronavirus vaccines, but they're for animals (both dogs and cats, I believe).
A world inhabited only by dogs and cats? You're tempting me.
By the way, did everyone get that letter to every household from Boris? I never did, possibly because I moved last year.
If you're really bored you can catch me being interviewed on Facebook Live at 8 tonight, if it works I expect to be mainly doing strictly non-partisan things that you probably already know, and it's going to be mainly useful for Surrey residents..(I know how to work up your excitement.)
Looking into things, it seems he did a cartoon for the Evening Standard and was getting flak for the way he drew Ed Miliband's nose, for all the obvious reasons. He is pointing out that in his opinion the way he drew Ed Miliband's nose is pretty much what Ed Miliband's nose actually looks like.
I thought part of the art of being a cartoonist was being a good judge of mood and tone - they often have to balance a fine line about just how disrespectful to be, how dark a sense of humour is likely to be acceptable, and are well aware that otherwise you can end up doing something that seems "funny" to you but unfunny/weird/shocking/unacceptable to other people.
Judging from this Twitter exchange I would not class Christian Adams as the world's finest exponent of judging mood and tone...
Trouble is I just don't find Adams funny. He reminds me of Brant, the physical cartoonist in The Day Today.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
However, we’ve never thrown the kitchen sink at finding a cold vaccine, as we are now doing with corona. Fingers x’d
If not we will just to have to mass test and leave lockdown for the peak, we cannot lockdown indefinitely for years until a vaccine is found for a virus with a 3% death rate, if necessary just keep over 70s and those with pre existing health conditions indoors as much as possible
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
He's probably not much more useful than Trump but at least he's not as actively malicious and vindictive. That should count for someting, shouldn't it?
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
Quite a stretch from "never" to "at least 12 months"
I did my ration of exercise today, OK 18 miles on a bike, maybe a bit long, but, my observations. Staying at home is breaking down, significantly more cars and people about, cars parked in areas with no urgent need other than to walk the dog or walk in a nice area, groups of youths on illegal motorbikes, groups of cyclists who do not appear to be a Family group, groups of runners etc.
I have given up my short drive to my nearby hills where I used to run with friends, where you would never see anyone, and now have to run in a more congested area where there is a minute increase in danger. Any way rant over, hope everyone is keeping safe, and hope BJ comes through.
There is a problem wherein the news of a general plateauing and an increase in the general sunny weather taken together has the potential to make people feel too confident. The government should be as explicit as it can about the dangers of the confluence of these two things at least for the next couple of weeks, or perhaps much longer, until any pattern in the UK is conclusively established.
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
He's probably not much more useful than Trump but at least he's not as actively malicious and vindictive. That should count for someting, shouldn't it?
PBers are forgetting Americans vote on likeability and charisma when electing their president, not IQ points and articulacy on the whole with a few exceptions like Nixon (and he still lost to the more likeable JFK in 1960)
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twice
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.
The context for that (which is important to explain, I think) is a Twitter storm over Adams depicting Miliband as having an aquiline nose, which some are construing as antisemitic because this is a stereotypical characteristic of Jewish people, and could be seen as "code" for Jewish.
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.
I don't think there's really a debate to be had. What was he supposed to do, give him a different nose? That really would be racist.
Raab has smashed this. Confident and to the point. No shrill insincerity such as we get from Gove. He is doing very well, and personally speaking I normally can't stand the bloke!
Comments
Everyone is locked down.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/878518/FINAL_Press_Conference_slides_7_April.pdf
Hospital admissions up 2% in 24hrs, which suggests things are levelling off (although there are big regional variations).
It also would tell us more about the size of the problem.
My behaviour would not change if I knew I just caught virus due to a test today.
Plus this will work through family units or those who share a house.
Genuinely great numbers out of Italy today. Just 3,039 new cases today, which is remarkable considering it's not a weekend. This is a 25% drop from the week ago number, and came alongside a new record low in terms of "percent positive". Just 9% of Italian tests were positive, against more than a third a few weeks ago.
In Lombardy, Italy's Ground Zero, there were 791 cases. That's down more than 75% from peak. For Italy as a whole, we're now about 55% below the record day.
Most importantly, we're almost at cross over. On a daily basis, the number of new cases is now almost equal to deaths plus recovered. By the end of this week, the number of Italians confirmed with CV-19 will be in decline.
I personally lack confidence in our ability to do this but others are more bullish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdbDOvmLDz0
I yield to no one in my disgust at the childish questions usually asked, but at least the BBC correspondent did a reasonable summery of the graphs. An Arts graduate as always but she has made an effort to learn some basic science.
The problem is the chorus of political correspondents only understand politics. Vicky Young pointed out what the questions would be about beforehand. Has Boris shit the bed? is there a split in the ranks? or can you guarantee (insert nonsensical question)?
I find it hard to believe a politician can't have enough confidence to stand up and talk to a prepared script with experts all around to help and little in the way of seriously hostile questioning.
How do they manage with Conservative Party association candidate interviews and selection?
https://twitter.com/Adamstoon1/status/1247558328852643842?s=20
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
The key is more when you get off the call and need senior sign-off on the big calls - the key compromises, areas where red lines are tested etc. That's where it becomes nearly impossible in the current situation - there's just so much senior energy going into virus, particularly in finance departments in different countries and EU, as the economic impact is huge. So I agree it will have to be delayed a bit. Only the most hardline Leaver would object, I suspect.
And/or that, even if most of us might not change our behaviour as a result of a positive test result, health care workers definitely would?
More like advancing through being sensible!
We do need to talk about whether a short extension is necessary. Because getting approval by all the various parliaments and regional bodies in the EU is going to take a couple of months.
It essentially only allows for (maybe) July, Aug, Sept for negotiations. And this is contingent on something approching normality being achieved by the beginning of July.
Looking into things, it seems he did a cartoon for the Evening Standard and was getting flak for the way he drew Ed Miliband's nose, for all the obvious reasons. He is pointing out that in his opinion the way he drew Ed Miliband's nose is pretty much what Ed Miliband's nose actually looks like.
https://twitter.com/Adamstoon1/status/1247462909917233153
I thought part of the art of being a cartoonist was being a good judge of mood and tone - they often have to balance a fine line about just how disrespectful to be, how dark a sense of humour is likely to be acceptable, and are well aware that otherwise you can end up doing something that seems "funny" to you but unfunny/weird/shocking/unacceptable to other people.
Judging from this Twitter exchange I would not class Christian Adams as the world's finest exponent of judging mood and tone...
Testing people for viral RNA doesn't cure them. It makes it easier to return medics to the front line, and in sparsely-stricken regions, you can concentrate on contact-tracing.
Measures which the state introduces, but can only partly inforce, have been voluntarily preempted by the general population, taking individual precautions. This has occured in both countries, but people sometimes claim that Germans have a stronger proclivity for making and observing rules. That may have played a part.
Bit like Philip Davies and his "International Men's Day".
So, please, no clapping for Boris. At 8 pm we just take a moment to silently wish him well in his battle against this horrid virus and then we go back to whatever we were doing.
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.
The ones where we already have the total deaths are attached to the line in question - showing where they have “pushed up” the line. The one from today is out on its own due to the deaths for the week ending this week not being available. The bottom of it is just placed approximately where the arc of the average 5 year deaths would be; the top is where it would push up that average to.
This is just the time when there is interest in these markets
Michael Paterson
Daily deaths deaths yesterday was low at 439, today it's 786.
And I'm only taking the hospital deaths, the ONS publishes a higher number of Covid Deaths.
That is a huge excess of deaths that has to be offset by lower deaths from everything else for your scepticism to be well founded.
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
Maybe I've not being paying attention but I couldn't have told you what Miliband's nose looked like to save my life.
While I agree that Twitter is not a helpful medium of communication for discussing complex and controversial issues, I would note that the way Adams handled it didn't help much either...
(For what it's worth Ed Miliband is, not just by Jewish legal definition or family heritage but also because he himself claims actively claims to be so, Jewish. He doesn't follow the Jewish religion, as you correctly point out, but being a Jew is about a lot more than that. Sentences like "I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist" always look a bit weird to me - after all, weren't his parents atheists too? - because there's an implicit suggestion in it that if you aren't religious somehow, or to some extent, cannot be Jewish. It reminds me a bit of when you see an obnoxious Hindu nationalist - who believes the cultural and religious aspects of Indianness are fundamentally intertwined - proclaim someone "can't be a proper Indian because they're Muslim" or similar.)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8196621/Frontline-NHS-nurse-begs-Britons-abide-coronavirus-lockdown-stark-warning.html
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/covid-19-actuaries-response-group_covid-19-arg-death-row-bulletin-activity-6653226206785347584-SQnY
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title:
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common;
(b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Could it be that the frequency distribution of time of admission to hospital is bimodal, with one group typically being admitted about ten days after infection, and another about fifteen days or longer (as Boris Johnson was)?
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing programme has started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Pillocks.
However.... if it irritates you, kinabalu, maybe ?????
Guess you`ll never know.
I also don't think that the government has a clue how many have recovered. Or are even trying to know that as a priority right now.
Antibody tests are obviously a highly important tool to get hold of.
I thought he was saying this is all a big fuss and we should get back to work?
Here's that group's earlier piece on whether the famous Imperial College modelling was "fit for purpose". (PDF link)
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
Staying at home is breaking down, significantly more cars and people about, cars parked in areas with no urgent need other than to walk the dog or walk in a nice area, groups of youths on illegal motorbikes, groups of cyclists who do not appear to be a Family group, groups of runners etc.
I have given up my short drive to my nearby hills where I used to run with friends, where you would never see anyone, and now have to run in a more congested area where there is a minute increase in danger.
Any way rant over, hope everyone is keeping safe, and hope BJ comes through.
There are coronavirus vaccines, but they're for animals (both dogs and cats, I believe).
Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice!!!!
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
I know a few people on the group, and may get involved myself if the day job clears up a bit (albeit it's not really my primary field). In the meantime, happy to continue to post links to stuff they publish if it looks to be of interest.
It's been two weeks which has been for many two weeks of purgatory. Compared with catching the virus, I'll take purgatory all day every day.
I'm still far from convinced how we can begin to ease restrictions - those with the virus seem to be struggling to get over it and are presumably still infectious if they still have it.
Austria and Germany are talking bravely about a gradual return to normality but I'd rather not be at the cutting edge (or bleeding edge) of that - let's see how they fare before we try something similar.
By the way, did everyone get that letter to every household from Boris? I never did, possibly because I moved last year.
If you're really bored you can catch me being interviewed on Facebook Live at 8 tonight, if it works I expect to be mainly doing strictly non-partisan things that you probably already know, and it's going to be mainly useful for Surrey residents..(I know how to work up your excitement.)
https://www.facebook.com/swsurreylabour/videos/653587312106562/?vh=e&d=n
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615450/blood-plasma-taken-from-covid-19-survivors-might-help-patients-fight-it-off/