The UK currently has the highest confirmed case fatality rate in the world at over 13%.
Someone was saying on previous thread that there are 83 "not knowns" to every 1 known infection. If true, this would bring the UK death rate down to 0.16% (assuming all deaths are known).
If they are "not known" how can somebody know there are 83 of them?
Yeah! How can people have any idea how many things there are without actually counting every one of them?
My brain hurts!
Not every one of them obviously but they'd need to have counted a number of them. How did they do that?
Isn't the truth that absolutely no one knows how many actual infections there are out there?
On the 27th of March there were not 250 deaths released on the daily death count, there was 181 over the whole country not just over 250 in E&W only. It was the 25th not the 24th that had the anomalous drop due to change in reporting time period.
Swearing when discussing this is completely unnecessary. If you feel this strongly about it, get in touch with the bloke on Twitter, not that difficult to do really.
If you are offended by my swearing please stop posting graphs filled with bogus data and even more bogus 'trend'* lines
* Where trend line means he's hit Up on the Polynomial button enough times to get the shape of curve he wants.
I’m not offended, I’m embarrassed for you
I’ll post whatever I like, and if you have a problem with the content, the person who made it is so easily contactable it makes me wonder why you haven’t already done so.
You are making a choice to share information from someone who has been shown to be unreliable, clearly to do so to push an agenda, while embarrassingly claiming not to have an agenda. It's pathetic.
I don't think the gov't should publish an exit strategy, the papers will stick EXIT FROM LOCKDOWN up in big letters on their front pages and people will head round to friends for barbecques and so forth.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
He is growing on me. It is also nice to see a British Jew in such an important position after the last few years.
Technically I don't think he's Jewish. His father was but not his mother and Wikipedia says he was brought up C of E.
Yeah, I'm pretty free with people self-identifying by beliefs but unless he self-identifies then I wouldn't count him as Jewish. Not that it matters either way.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Hmm - the Guardian states: Vallance said the percentage of people across the world who have had coronavirus asymptomatically is likely to be “lower than 50, it could be around 30, but we don’t know for sure”.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
Whenever you see an article that is a "told you so, says expert, government are utterly crap", it is one of two names. Horton or Ashton. Both has axes to grind.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
I thought left libertarians self-identified as Anarchists?
Like the Paris Commune? Makes no sense to me tbh. Not in today's world. "Left" and "Libertarian" to my mind do not mix.
The defining characteristic of a Libertarian in my experience is someone who doesn't want to pay any tax.
"Libertarian" and "Statist" don`t match. Libertarianism is an (almost) anarchist position, arguing for as light-touch state interference in our lives as possible. The function of the state, they believe, should be restricted to very basic things, such as basic infrastructure and defence, and then to get out of the way. Libertarians are ultra-liberals on speed if you like.
The Spiked team - whom I hold in high regard, though I disagree with them almost as much as I agree - often offer a different take on things. They are massively humanist, championing democracy over all, and I think this is where their "left" identification comes from. It`s all about individuals versus the state.
The same Richard Horton who published Wakefield's MMR paper in the Lancet and left it up for 12 years - leading to many needless deaths.
That one?
Yup. He’s the 🔔🔚 who also defended and supported Roy Meadow.
And still says that Roy was mistreated IIRC
Meadow got innocent women banged up but that was for his innumerate statistics. As a clinician, he may have been first rate. The lesson should have been to employ statisticians rather than strike off one paediatrician. What use was that to anyone?
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
I think a lot of (probably larger) companies are helping their people in this way. I know one who has been bought a shedload of equipment to enable her to work from home.
I thought left libertarians self-identified as Anarchists?
Like the Paris Commune? Makes no sense to me tbh. Not in today's world. "Left" and "Libertarian" to my mind do not mix.
The defining characteristic of a Libertarian in my experience is someone who doesn't want to pay any tax.
There is quite a common left-libertarian position for people like Chomsky, though, who regard themselves as anarchists. Their concept of libertarianism tends to be to do with self-governed and self-directed groups of people deciding things, so that can be compatible with taxes and administration, in some senses.
The problem that the LM / Spiked, etc gang rather than libertarian anarchists have, is that they fully accept marxist determinism - the working class and class conflict are the engine of history, etc, but mix this bizarrely with vanguardist libertarianism. Their reasoning is that anything modernist and connected with technology and progress is good, so that even the more anti-social kind of conservative libertarians can be the last vanguard and engine of history if they fight green "backwardness", for instance. Totally crackers and internally inconsistent.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Hmm - the Guardian states: Vallance said the percentage of people across the world who have had coronavirus asymptomatically is likely to be “lower than 50, it could be around 30, but we don’t know for sure”.
Will have to listen later!
I don't understand why he is only "suspecting" these things. A few hundred random tests would give them good estimates of the percentage of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic infections. How can they plan anything without such basic information?
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
The company that I work for, like Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC are paying for things like office chairs to stop things like backache being a problem.
Yep as I said I am unsure, not necessarily opposed. But Lloyds and HSBC are private companies taking that money out of their profits etc. MPs are being paid out of public funds. In this case £6.5 million additional public money. And 10K is a lot of money
At the very least it is probably ill advised from a PR point of view.
On the 27th of March there were not 250 deaths released on the daily death count, there was 181 over the whole country not just over 250 in E&W only. It was the 25th not the 24th that had the anomalous drop due to change in reporting time period.
Swearing when discussing this is completely unnecessary. If you feel this strongly about it, get in touch with the bloke on Twitter, not that difficult to do really.
If you are offended by my swearing please stop posting graphs filled with bogus data and even more bogus 'trend'* lines
* Where trend line means he's hit Up on the Polynomial button enough times to get the shape of curve he wants.
I’m not offended, I’m embarrassed for you
I’ll post whatever I like, and if you have a problem with the content, the person who made it is so easily contactable it makes me wonder why you haven’t already done so.
You are making a choice to share information from someone who has been shown to be unreliable, clearly to do so to push an agenda, while embarrassingly claiming not to have an agenda. It's pathetic.
I’m amazed so many are so confident they know the definitive answer to this unprecedented problem. Now That’s What I Call Pathetic vol 5
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Hmm - the Guardian states: Vallance said the percentage of people across the world who have had coronavirus asymptomatically is likely to be “lower than 50, it could be around 30, but we don’t know for sure”.
Will have to listen later!
I don't understand why he is only "suspecting" these things. A few hundred random tests would give them good estimates of the percentage of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic infections. How can they plan anything without such basic information?
I thought left libertarians self-identified as Anarchists?
Like the Paris Commune? Makes no sense to me tbh. Not in today's world. "Left" and "Libertarian" to my mind do not mix.
The defining characteristic of a Libertarian in my experience is someone who doesn't want to pay any tax.
There is quite a common left-libertarian position for people like Chomsky, though, who regard themselves as anarchists. Their concept of libertarianism tends to be to do with self-governed and self-directed groups of people deciding things, so that can be compatible with taxes and administration, in some senses.
The problem that full blown marxist libertarians rather than libertarian anarchists have is that they fully accept marxist determinism - the working class and class conflict are the engine of history, etc, but mix this bizarrely with vanguardist libertarianism. Their reasoning is that anything modernist and connected with technology and progress is good, so that even the more anti-social kind of conservative libertarians can be the last vanguard and engine of history. Totally crackers and internally inconsistent.
Great post.
All ideologies are internally inconsistent when you lift the hood - so I wouldn`t hold that against them.
I particularly admire their resolute stance against identity politics and woke culture. Brendan O`Neill`s two books are superb. He`s a cracking writer.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
That's a pretty odd position I think. They should not blindly follow a set of actions if they have good reason to believe they should act otherwise, and if they are right that is great. But if it turned out they were wrong to do so applauding them for having their own minds would be a very strange reaction. It would hardly be a good thing to go your own way if it was down the wrong way of a one way street. We can hope that Sweden has made the right call, however.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Hmm - the Guardian states: Vallance said the percentage of people across the world who have had coronavirus asymptomatically is likely to be “lower than 50, it could be around 30, but we don’t know for sure”.
Will have to listen later!
I don't understand why he is only "suspecting" these things. A few hundred random tests would give them good estimates of the percentage of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic infections. How can they plan anything without such basic information?
Porton Down has 700+ ground truth samples.
I'm talking about random sampling of the general population to find the current number of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic cases.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
The company that I work for, like Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC are paying for things like office chairs to stop things like backache being a problem.
Yep as I said I am unsure, not necessarily opposed. But Lloyds and HSBC are private companies taking that money out of their profits etc. MPs are being paid out of public funds. In this case £6.5 million additional public money. And 10K is a lot of money
At the very least it is probably ill advised from a PR point of view.
They're not "getting £10k" - they can use up to that (receipted) for them and their staff to work from home - not all their staff will have laptops etc and at the moment their caseload has exploded.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
The company that I work for, like Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC are paying for things like office chairs to stop things like backache being a problem.
Yep as I said I am unsure, not necessarily opposed. But Lloyds and HSBC are private companies taking that money out of their profits etc. MPs are being paid out of public funds. In this case £6.5 million additional public money. And 10K is a lot of money
At the very least it is probably ill advised from a PR point of view.
I'd like MPs to be better paid, better staffed and better equipped. This magic £10,000 is a step in that direction but first, it is a panic measure if MPs offices were not prepared for remote working, and more importantly it is another small step isolating MPs from the rest of us. Most people do not go through life having the wheels greased for them. Some of them forget that.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
The company that I work for, like Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC are paying for things like office chairs to stop things like backache being a problem.
Yep as I said I am unsure, not necessarily opposed. But Lloyds and HSBC are private companies taking that money out of their profits etc. MPs are being paid out of public funds. In this case £6.5 million additional public money. And 10K is a lot of money
At the very least it is probably ill advised from a PR point of view.
It's not, MP workloads are currently far larger than normal (as people don't have anywhere else to turn for advice) and things need to be bought in a hurry.
And not all MPs will be spending the money as the twitter comment below shows.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
That's a pretty odd position I think. They should not blindly follow a set of actions if they have good reason to believe they should act otherwise, and if they are right that is great. But if it turned out they were wrong to do so applauding them for having their own minds would be a very strange reaction. It would hardly be a good thing to go your own way if it was down the wrong way of a one way street. We can hope that Sweden has made the right call, however.
They'll get herd immunity by not following the herd, and in the process they won't trash their economy. That's the trade-off. If they fail with the epidemic they will at least still have a functioning economy. Meanwhile the rest of the world ...
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
That's a pretty odd position I think. They should not blindly follow a set of actions if they have good reason to believe they should act otherwise, and if they are right that is great. But if it turned out they were wrong to do so applauding them for having their own minds would be a very strange reaction. It would hardly be a good thing to go your own way if it was down the wrong way of a one way street. We can hope that Sweden has made the right call, however.
They'll get herd immunity by not following the herd, and in the process they won't trash their economy. That's the trade-off. If they fail with the epidemic they will at least still have a functioning economy. Meanwhile the rest of the world ...
I remain confused at the idea that having one's own mind in itself is something to applaud.
Well at least there's some memory of the original estimates.
David Shukman, Science editor, BBC News.
Amid all the speculation about when and how the UK’s lockdown may be relaxed, it’s worth looking back at the original scientific advice that led to the measures in the first place.
It makes clear that nothing is likely change soon.
The government’s scientific advisory committee SAGE has always suggested that a 13-week programme of interventions will be needed.
And although that sounds like very precise timing, it all depends on how the British public respond.
The scientists made a fairly pessimistic assumption: that only 50% of households would observe the requirements.
So what might a timetable look like? Once the peak in daily deaths has been reached – possibly in the next week or so – even the best-case scenario suggests that it will take a month or two for the numbers dying to fall to low levels.
That gets us well into May and maybe to early June, and it’ll be a brave political decision to ease the restrictions any earlier if there’s a risk of a "second peak", a resurgence of the virus.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
Do we know how Sweden is getting on with regard to hospital capacity?
They've clearly introduced fewer restrictions than surrounding countries, which will help them both economically now and enable a faster bounce back afterwards - so long as they don't overwhelm their health services, which is the critical path in the UK and elsewhere.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
Most Swedes still do as they're told. More and more Swedes are beginning to pay attention to the numbers.
Fatalities per capita in Sweden are 8 times higher than in Finland, 4 times higher than in Norway, 3 times higher than in Germany, twice as high as in Denmark.
The same Richard Horton who published Wakefield's MMR paper in the Lancet and left it up for 12 years - leading to many needless deaths.
That one?
Yup. He’s the 🔔🔚 who also defended and supported Roy Meadow.
And still says that Roy was mistreated IIRC
Meadow got innocent women banged up but that was for his innumerate statistics. As a clinician, he may have been first rate. The lesson should have been to employ statisticians rather than strike off one paediatrician. What use was that to anyone?
The Roy Meadow problem was that his initial success was by breaking the rules. He then developed full on Whistleblowers Disease - the infected individual, having successfully applied rule breaking in one instance, starts applying it again and again, in the hope of repeating the earlier triumph.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
Most Swedes still do as they're told. More and more Swedes are beginning to pay attention to the numbers.
Fatalities per capita in Sweden are 8 times higher than in Finland, 4 times higher than in Norway, 3 times higher than in Germany, twice as high as in Denmark.
In Taiwan apparently life is back to normal.
Deaths? 5. That's for about the same population as all of Scandinavia.
I'd say that at the end of this Taiwan deserves country status.
On the 27th of March there were not 250 deaths released on the daily death count, there was 181 over the whole country not just over 250 in E&W only. It was the 25th not the 24th that had the anomalous drop due to change in reporting time period.
Swearing when discussing this is completely unnecessary. If you feel this strongly about it, get in touch with the bloke on Twitter, not that difficult to do really.
If you are offended by my swearing please stop posting graphs filled with bogus data and even more bogus 'trend'* lines
* Where trend line means he's hit Up on the Polynomial button enough times to get the shape of curve he wants.
I’m not offended, I’m embarrassed for you
I’ll post whatever I like, and if you have a problem with the content, the person who made it is so easily contactable it makes me wonder why you haven’t already done so.
You are making a choice to share information from someone who has been shown to be unreliable, clearly to do so to push an agenda, while embarrassingly claiming not to have an agenda. It's pathetic.
The tweeter is a Guido Fawkes acolyte. Easy to Google and, well...... let's just say, you can see why he would be trying to push the data in certain directions.
Genuinely not sure how I feel about this. MPs getting an additional 10K each for their offices to be transferred to home working. Seems wrong to me when no one else is being helped in this way.
The company that I work for, like Lloyds Banking Group and HSBC are paying for things like office chairs to stop things like backache being a problem.
Yep as I said I am unsure, not necessarily opposed. But Lloyds and HSBC are private companies taking that money out of their profits etc. MPs are being paid out of public funds. In this case £6.5 million additional public money. And 10K is a lot of money
At the very least it is probably ill advised from a PR point of view.
They're not "getting £10k" - they can use up to that (receipted) for them and their staff to work from home - not all their staff will have laptops etc and at the moment their caseload has exploded.
Yes, the reporting of this has been crap, and I'm not sure why it blew up today. The announcement from a few weeks ago was that MPs would have their credit limit increased by £10k on their "company" credit cards, in case they needed to cover expenses related to working from home for themselves and their staff.
What's important is that we need to hold the MPs to account for their spending, and make sure they're not all just buying new laptops and desks because they can.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Hmm - the Guardian states: Vallance said the percentage of people across the world who have had coronavirus asymptomatically is likely to be “lower than 50, it could be around 30, but we don’t know for sure”.
Will have to listen later!
I don't understand why he is only "suspecting" these things. A few hundred random tests would give them good estimates of the percentage of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic infections. How can they plan anything without such basic information?
I'm also struggling to parse the figures. If we have 60,000 diagnosed cases (most with more serious symptoms in hospital) and there are 10 times as many mild cases, that gives 600,000 total. If 30% of people have it asymptomatically, that gives 780,000 cases which is only just over 1% of the population.
On the other hand, if the symptomatic case mortality rate really is around 1% (a couple of independent estimates suggest this is about right) and there are 20,000 fatalities, that would mean 2,000,000 people have been infected symptomatically and another 600,000 asymptomatically.
Perhaps this suggests there are many symptomatic, but relatively mild, cases? That would, interestingly, give an infection mortality rate of about 0.6%, which is what was suspected initially.
But how this coheres with data from other countries on asymptomatic cases is harder to understand.
How the fuck has he managed to fit the blue line so it's curve manages to flatten out at the end?
Take off the latest day of data and it would have to be going stratospheric just like the red line.
Have you bought ‘total deaths’ on the spreads?
Bit narked about bogus numbers being shared about.
But yesterday you were pretending Stockholm was in lockdown, when it isn't, and you keep getting a hard on about our death rate catching up with Italy, and accusing me of implying it wouldn't, when I didn't.
That's nothing to do with what you describe as bogus numbers, you just seem to get internet wally aggressive with anything that doesn't predict the worst case scenario
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
That's a pretty odd position I think. They should not blindly follow a set of actions if they have good reason to believe they should act otherwise, and if they are right that is great. But if it turned out they were wrong to do so applauding them for having their own minds would be a very strange reaction. It would hardly be a good thing to go your own way if it was down the wrong way of a one way street. We can hope that Sweden has made the right call, however.
They'll get herd immunity by not following the herd, and in the process they won't trash their economy. That's the trade-off. If they fail with the epidemic they will at least still have a functioning economy. Meanwhile the rest of the world ...
They seem to be depending to an extent on a Swedish herd mentality (we do what our government asks of us for the greater good) to make it work. Not saying that's a bad or a good thing, but 'we go our own way as a nation 'cos we're all conformists' is a slightly odd combo.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
Most Swedes still do as they're told. More and more Swedes are beginning to pay attention to the numbers.
Fatalities per capita in Sweden are 8 times higher than in Finland, 4 times higher than in Norway, 3 times higher than in Germany, twice as high as in Denmark.
In Taiwan apparently life is back to normal.
Deaths? 5. That's for about the same population as all of Scandinavia.
I'd say that at the end of this Taiwan deserves country status.
That should have been forced through in 1989 by a concerted effort from the rest of the world.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
Most Swedes still do as they're told. More and more Swedes are beginning to pay attention to the numbers.
Fatalities per capita in Sweden are 8 times higher than in Finland, 4 times higher than in Norway, 3 times higher than in Germany, twice as high as in Denmark.
In Taiwan apparently life is back to normal.
Deaths? 5. That's for about the same population as all of Scandinavia.
I'd say that at the end of this Taiwan deserves country status.
Deserve doesn't count into it with geopolitics of course.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
That's a pretty odd position I think. They should not blindly follow a set of actions if they have good reason to believe they should act otherwise, and if they are right that is great. But if it turned out they were wrong to do so applauding them for having their own minds would be a very strange reaction. It would hardly be a good thing to go your own way if it was down the wrong way of a one way street. We can hope that Sweden has made the right call, however.
They'll get herd immunity by not following the herd, and in the process they won't trash their economy. That's the trade-off. If they fail with the epidemic they will at least still have a functioning economy. Meanwhile the rest of the world ...
They seem to be depending to an extent on a Swedish herd mentality (we do what our government asks of us for the greater good) to make it work. Not saying that's a bad or a good thing, but 'we go our own way as a nation 'cos we're all conformists' is a slightly odd combo.
Think of it a Scandinavian exceptionalism - there is definitively an idea in Norway and Sweden (at least) that their societies are better run than other nations. A big part of that is the belief that they are more prepared to come together on important social issues.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
That's a pretty odd position I think. They should not blindly follow a set of actions if they have good reason to believe they should act otherwise, and if they are right that is great. But if it turned out they were wrong to do so applauding them for having their own minds would be a very strange reaction. It would hardly be a good thing to go your own way if it was down the wrong way of a one way street. We can hope that Sweden has made the right call, however.
They'll get herd immunity by not following the herd, and in the process they won't trash their economy. That's the trade-off. If they fail with the epidemic they will at least still have a functioning economy. Meanwhile the rest of the world ...
They seem to be depending to an extent on a Swedish herd mentality (we do what our government asks of us for the greater good) to make it work. Not saying that's a bad or a good thing, but 'we go our own way as a nation 'cos we're all conformists' is a slightly odd combo.
Yes, internal conformity but external eccentricity seems to characterize it.
On the 27th of March there were not 250 deaths released on the daily death count, there was 181 over the whole country not just over 250 in E&W only. It was the 25th not the 24th that had the anomalous drop due to change in reporting time period.
Swearing when discussing this is completely unnecessary. If you feel this strongly about it, get in touch with the bloke on Twitter, not that difficult to do really.
If you are offended by my swearing please stop posting graphs filled with bogus data and even more bogus 'trend'* lines
* Where trend line means he's hit Up on the Polynomial button enough times to get the shape of curve he wants.
I’m not offended, I’m embarrassed for you
I’ll post whatever I like, and if you have a problem with the content, the person who made it is so easily contactable it makes me wonder why you haven’t already done so.
He's a no one on Twitter posting nonsense. He impinges on my Twitter experience not one jot.
However if people here, on PB.com continually post his made up garbage I will indeed point out that they have posted garbage from an account pushing an agenda.
Posting a tweet here isn't a neutral action, you are saying something when you do so. Posting a tweet filled with false data overlaid with garbage visualisation is quite a thing.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
Most Swedes still do as they're told. More and more Swedes are beginning to pay attention to the numbers.
Fatalities per capita in Sweden are 8 times higher than in Finland, 4 times higher than in Norway, 3 times higher than in Germany, twice as high as in Denmark.
In Taiwan apparently life is back to normal.
Deaths? 5. That's for about the same population as all of Scandinavia.
I'd say that at the end of this Taiwan deserves country status.
Deserve doesn't count into it with geopolitics of course.
I hadn't realised before this crisis that China controlled who could or couldn't have country status..
Yes, the left-libertarians / anarchists who still have quite a presence in Spain and Greece, and who Orwell much preferred to the Stalinists. They were essentially destroyed by both the more orthodox Marxists and the western powers. The Kurdish faction in Syria runs along these lines. Quite different from the more eccentric Living Marxism / Spikedonline gang, though, as mentioned below.
Nobody knows if an extended lockdown will prove to be a success or a horrible mistake.
There is a distasteful virus fascism creeping in on PB whereby anyone who submits anything other than sustained isolation as a strategy is attacked as a real world Professor Pangloss.
As someone who works for an MP - not only has this increase to the office budget been horrendously misreported (which is causing problems for staffers, because we're already inundated with serious casework for people stuck overseas, people who have their businesses going under, people who are running out of food, etc, and now we have to deal with people phoning us to shout about MPs having their snouts in the trough), it's also badly needed because there are major costs associated with running a Parliamentary office that either aren't commonly applicable to other jobs, or costs that in any other job would be met by the employer.
For example, some days I will print hundreds of letters to respond to a local campaign. In the Parliamentary office that is relatively straightforward because we already have a printer, ink, envelopes and headed paper. I didn't have any of that at home, so I've bought a printer, ink, envelopes etc to keep things ticking over, and I'll get that money back out of the office budget.
The past few weeks have been incredibly stressful and it is disappointing that the press have chosen this moment to push a misleading story that, if they get what they want and the office budgets are cut, is only going to inconvenience staffers trying to help vulnerable people at a difficult time.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
Most Swedes still do as they're told. More and more Swedes are beginning to pay attention to the numbers.
Fatalities per capita in Sweden are 8 times higher than in Finland, 4 times higher than in Norway, 3 times higher than in Germany, twice as high as in Denmark.
In Taiwan apparently life is back to normal.
Deaths? 5. That's for about the same population as all of Scandinavia.
I'd say that at the end of this Taiwan deserves country status.
Deserve doesn't count into it with geopolitics of course.
I hadn't realised before this crisis that China controlled who could or couldn't have country status..
"The ROC is no longer a member of the UN, having been replaced by the PRC in 1971. Taiwan is claimed by the PRC, which refuses diplomatic relations with countries that recognise the ROC. Taiwan maintains official ties with 14 out of 193 UN member states and the Holy See.[23][24] International organisations in which the PRC participates either refuse to grant membership to Taiwan or allow it to participate only on a non-state basis. Taiwan is a member of the World Trade Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation and Asian Development Bank under various names. Nearby countries and countries with large economies maintain unofficial ties with Taiwan through representative offices and institutions that function as de facto embassies and consulates."
How the fuck has he managed to fit the blue line so it's curve manages to flatten out at the end?
Take off the latest day of data and it would have to be going stratospheric just like the red line.
Have you bought ‘total deaths’ on the spreads?
Bit narked about bogus numbers being shared about.
But yesterday you were pretending Stockholm was in lockdown, when it isn't, and you keep getting a hard on about our death rate catching up with Italy, and accusing me of implying it wouldn't, when I didn't.
That's nothing to do with what you describe as bogus numbers, you just seem to get internet wally aggressive with anything that doesn't predict the worst case scenario
I didn't say it was in Lockdown, I said it was in defacto lock down. I was pointing out the picture illustrating the Hitchens piece was a stock photo not a contemporary image.
I'm getting naked at numbers that are actually false and confirmably false with 30 seconds of checking.
I've repeatedly said I think we will be on the mild end of any projection.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Hmm - the Guardian states: Vallance said the percentage of people across the world who have had coronavirus asymptomatically is likely to be “lower than 50, it could be around 30, but we don’t know for sure”.
Will have to listen later!
I don't understand why he is only "suspecting" these things. A few hundred random tests would give them good estimates of the percentage of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic infections. How can they plan anything without such basic information?
I'm also struggling to parse the figures. If we have 60,000 diagnosed cases (most with more serious symptoms in hospital) and there are 10 times as many mild cases, that gives 600,000 total. If 30% of people have it asymptomatically, that gives 780,000 cases which is only just over 1% of the population.
On the other hand, if the symptomatic case mortality rate really is around 1% (a couple of independent estimates suggest this is about right) and there are 20,000 fatalities, that would mean 2,000,000 people have been infected symptomatically and another 600,000 asymptomatically.
Perhaps this suggests there are many symptomatic, but relatively mild, cases? That would, interestingly, give an infection mortality rate of about 0.6%, which is what was suspected initially.
But how this coheres with data from other countries on asymptomatic cases is harder to understand.
For what it's worth, my guesses for the UK are:
Case fatality rate (symptomatic) 2% (taking into account our older population) Percentage asymptomatic 75% So infection fatality rate 0.5% But the apparent fatality rate rises from only 0.1% early on when cases are rising rapidly.
I'm not quite sure where we are on the early to late scale, but on the basis of the number of deaths something around 10% infected seems about right. Obviously it partly depends on how effective the lockdown has been.
Do the Italian figures today show that a lockdown works ?
Define 'lockdown', and define 'works'. Social distancing is effective in reducing transmission, but no so-called lockdown could ever result in 100% prevention of new cases, nor is it intended to.
How the fuck has he managed to fit the blue line so it's curve manages to flatten out at the end?
Take off the latest day of data and it would have to be going stratospheric just like the red line.
Have you bought ‘total deaths’ on the spreads?
Bit narked about bogus numbers being shared about.
But yesterday you were pretending Stockholm was in lockdown, when it isn't, and you keep getting a hard on about our death rate catching up with Italy, and accusing me of implying it wouldn't, when I didn't.
That's nothing to do with what you describe as bogus numbers, you just seem to get internet wally aggressive with anything that doesn't predict the worst case scenario
I didn't say it was in Lockdown, I said it was in defacto lock down. I was pointing out the picture illustrating the Hitchens piece was a stock photo not a contemporary image.
I'm getting naked at numbers that are actually false and confirmably false with 30 seconds of checking.
I've repeatedly said I think we will be on the mild end of any projection.
Nobody knows if an extended lockdown will prove to be a success or a horrible mistake.
There is a distasteful virus fascism creeping in on PB whereby anyone who submits anything other than sustained isolation as a strategy is attacked as a real world Professor Pangloss.
Indeed but it's not unreasonable to point out the potential risks of a premature and poorly coordinated end to the lockdown process.
The other side of this so called "virus fascism" is those who seem to think the economic health of the country is the only thing that matters. I'd argue health before wealth all day every day.
Where I do agree with Contrarian from earlier is we must not neglect those with serious health conditions other than Covid-19. Those who urgently need surgery for example should be able to undergo those procedures at other medical facilities apart from those dealing with Covid-19 patients. This is something local councils and the NHS have been working on and kudos to those private owners who have provided suitable venues freely and quickly ad to those who have worked round the clock to get them functioning.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Hmm - the Guardian states: Vallance said the percentage of people across the world who have had coronavirus asymptomatically is likely to be “lower than 50, it could be around 30, but we don’t know for sure”.
Will have to listen later!
I don't understand why he is only "suspecting" these things. A few hundred random tests would give them good estimates of the percentage of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic infections. How can they plan anything without such basic information?
Oxford Uni's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine interesting as ever:
Readers of the blog will be aware that we have little trust in the current reported COVID data. Everywhere we look we cannot get a handle on the essential facts or at times we get 2 completely different answers to the same question. The military historian Sir Basil Liddle Hart would have called this “the fog of a pandemic” or perhaps the “fog of information overload”.
So, we thought we would try to answer an important question: what is the proportion of people with SARS-COV-2 who are asymptomatic? ...
What did we learn (see the table for the analysis)
- That between 5% and 80% of people testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 may be asymptomatic - That symptom-based screening will miss cases, perhaps a lot of them - That some asymptomatic cases will become symptomatic over the next week (sometimes known as “pre-symptomatics”) - That children and young adults can be asymptomatic
We also learnt that there is not a single reliable study to determine the number of asymptotics. It is likely we will only learn the true extent once population based antibody testing is undertaken. ... Sir Basil’s “fog” is continuing to cover the topic and prevent us from seeing what lies on the other side of the hill.
Apologies for reposting this from yesterday, but relevant again and I fear not everyone interested will have seen it! As per @FrancisUrquhart hopefully we'll get some interesting news from Porton Down...
I'm getting naked at numbers that are actually false and confirmably false with 30 seconds of checking.
?
The graph isam posted with the wacky trend line that showed a number of people were brought back to life by the Corona virus at the start of March. It's numbers do not match the source it says it takes them from.
I'm getting naked at numbers that are actually false and confirmably false with 30 seconds of checking.
?
The graph isam posted with the wacky trend line that showed a number people were brought back to life by the Corona virus at the start of March. It's number do not match the source it says it takes them from.
Nobody knows if an extended lockdown will prove to be a success or a horrible mistake.
There is a distasteful virus fascism creeping in on PB whereby anyone who submits anything other than sustained isolation as a strategy is attacked as a real world Professor Pangloss.
Indeed but it's not unreasonable to point out the potential risks of a premature and poorly coordinated end to the lockdown process.
The other side of this so called "virus fascism" is those who seem to think the economic health of the country is the only thing that matters. I'd argue health before wealth all day every day.
Where I do agree with Contrarian from earlier is we must not neglect those with serious health conditions other than Covid-19. Those who urgently need surgery for example should be able to undergo those procedures at other medical facilities apart from those dealing with Covid-19 patients. This is something local councils and the NHS have been working on and kudos to those private owners who have provided suitable venues freely and quickly ad to those who have worked round the clock to get them functioning.
And some hospitals are lying largely idle waiting for the onslaught that isn't (yet) coming. Not saying they have made the wrong call, but maybe if it's a quick operation, in an area with little Corona, they could whip some people through?
Do the Italian figures today show that a lockdown works ?
Define 'lockdown', and define 'works'. Social distancing is effective in reducing transmission, but no so-called lockdown could ever result in 100% prevention of new cases, nor is it intended to.
The answer is yes, of course, the figures aren’t exactly difficult to find, I’m sure Andrea could say more but I believe the longest locked down areas are also showing the greatest improvement.
That tweet is really poorly phrased (I wasn't able to listen to the press conference). Did Patrick Vallance state that 30% of the cases were asymptomatic (i.e., 70% have symptoms) or that 30% of the entire population might be infected asymptomatically? These have very different interpretations...
I think it must mean 30% of infections are asymptomatic and less than 10% of the population has been infected.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
Hmm - the Guardian states: Vallance said the percentage of people across the world who have had coronavirus asymptomatically is likely to be “lower than 50, it could be around 30, but we don’t know for sure”.
Will have to listen later!
I don't understand why he is only "suspecting" these things. A few hundred random tests would give them good estimates of the percentage of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic infections. How can they plan anything without such basic information?
Porton Down has 700+ ground truth samples.
I'm talking about random sampling of the general population to find the current number of active cases and the percentage of asymptomatic cases.
It is a random sample of the general population, which they are tracking the progress of. My understanding they are sampling these people at regular intervals starting way back in January, and have been tracking them every since.
It is how they know are able to accurately evaluate the anti-body kits and why they are failing.
I'm getting naked at numbers that are actually false and confirmably false with 30 seconds of checking.
?
The graph isam posted with the wacky trend line that showed a number of people were brought back to life by the Corona virus at the start of March. It's numbers do not match the source it says it takes them from.
I just wondered why you felt the need to get naked.
Why are you quoting The Lancet on this when it has repeatedly demonstrated that it has taken an ideological position on lockdown and will bend facts to fit it?
It would be roughly the equivalent of quoting David Irving on the Holocaust.
Dan Carden (Financial Secretary) Pat McFadden (Economic Secretary) Wes Streeting (Exchequer Secretary)
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Wayne David (Middle East and North Africa) Stephen Doughty (Africa – joint with DFID) Stephen Kinnock (Asia and Pacific) Catherine West (Europe & Americas)
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Liz Kendall (Social Care) Justin Madders (Public Health and prevention) Alex Norris (Public Health and patient safety)
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Solicitor General Ellie Reeves
Deputy Chief Whip: Alan Campbell Pairing Whip: Mark Tami Senior Whip: Jessica Morden
I'm getting naked at numbers that are actually false and confirmably false with 30 seconds of checking.
?
The graph isam posted with the wacky trend line that showed a number of people were brought back to life by the Corona virus at the start of March. It's numbers do not match the source it says it takes them from.
Are you saying it needs to be stripped to the bare essentials?
Nobody knows if an extended lockdown will prove to be a success or a horrible mistake.
There is a distasteful virus fascism creeping in on PB whereby anyone who submits anything other than sustained isolation as a strategy is attacked as a real world Professor Pangloss.
Indeed but it's not unreasonable to point out the potential risks of a premature and poorly coordinated end to the lockdown process.
The other side of this so called "virus fascism" is those who seem to think the economic health of the country is the only thing that matters. I'd argue health before wealth all day every day.
Where I do agree with Contrarian from earlier is we must not neglect those with serious health conditions other than Covid-19. Those who urgently need surgery for example should be able to undergo those procedures at other medical facilities apart from those dealing with Covid-19 patients. This is something local councils and the NHS have been working on and kudos to those private owners who have provided suitable venues freely and quickly ad to those who have worked round the clock to get them functioning.
We need also to think about getting dentists back to work. Ironically that profession was used to using PPE in routine practice. Maybe chiropodists as well or we might end up with a lot of elderly people in particular rendered immobile by relatively minor foot and nail conditions.
How the fuck has he managed to fit the blue line so it's curve manages to flatten out at the end?
Take off the latest day of data and it would have to be going stratospheric just like the red line.
Have you bought ‘total deaths’ on the spreads?
Bit narked about bogus numbers being shared about.
But yesterday you were pretending Stockholm was in lockdown, when it isn't, and you keep getting a hard on about our death rate catching up with Italy, and accusing me of implying it wouldn't, when I didn't.
That's nothing to do with what you describe as bogus numbers, you just seem to get internet wally aggressive with anything that doesn't predict the worst case scenario
I didn't say it was in Lockdown, I said it was in defacto lock down. I was pointing out the picture illustrating the Hitchens piece was a stock photo not a contemporary image.
I'm getting naked at numbers that are actually false and confirmably false with 30 seconds of checking.
I've repeatedly said I think we will be on the mild end of any projection.
As someone who works for an MP - not only has this increase to the office budget been horrendously misreported (which is causing problems for staffers, because we're already inundated with serious casework for people stuck overseas, people who have their businesses going under, people who are running out of food, etc, and now we have to deal with people phoning us to shout about MPs having their snouts in the trough), it's also badly needed because there are major costs associated with running a Parliamentary office that either aren't commonly applicable to other jobs, or costs that in any other job would be met by the employer.
For example, some days I will print hundreds of letters to respond to a local campaign. In the Parliamentary office that is relatively straightforward because we already have a printer, ink, envelopes and headed paper. I didn't have any of that at home, so I've bought a printer, ink, envelopes etc to keep things ticking over, and I'll get that money back out of the office budget.
The past few weeks have been incredibly stressful and it is disappointing that the press have chosen this moment to push a misleading story that, if they get what they want and the office budgets are cut, is only going to inconvenience staffers trying to help vulnerable people at a difficult time.
The WP piece and the tweet seem to be larded with heavy irony. I for one think the Swedes should be applauded for having their own minds on this.
That's a pretty odd position I think. They should not blindly follow a set of actions if they have good reason to believe they should act otherwise, and if they are right that is great. But if it turned out they were wrong to do so applauding them for having their own minds would be a very strange reaction. It would hardly be a good thing to go your own way if it was down the wrong way of a one way street. We can hope that Sweden has made the right call, however.
They'll get herd immunity by not following the herd, and in the process they won't trash their economy. That's the trade-off. If they fail with the epidemic they will at least still have a functioning economy. Meanwhile the rest of the world ...
They seem to be depending to an extent on a Swedish herd mentality (we do what our government asks of us for the greater good) to make it work. Not saying that's a bad or a good thing, but 'we go our own way as a nation 'cos we're all conformists' is a slightly odd combo.
Think of it a Scandinavian exceptionalism - there is definitively an idea in Norway and Sweden (at least) that their societies are better run than other nations. A big part of that is the belief that they are more prepared to come together on important social issues.
The Danes base their entire worldview on the idea that only in Denmark are things done to the right standard and that this is a result of the unique danish community model - annoyingly they do do a lot of stuff really really well so it’s not all smug self-satisfaction (but a lot of it is also based on a strangely deep seated naiivety about the harsh realities of much of the world)
Comments
How many tests (not people tested) were performed today ?
Are we over 15k yet ?
The defining characteristic of a Libertarian in my experience is someone who doesn't want to pay any tax.
The 30% figure is a lot lower than other estimates of asymptomatic infections, and it would be interesting to know what his "suspicion" is based on.
https://mcusercontent.com/5c1bd78521a0f65af80876eca/files/cfb4143a-6a9b-4439-9fdf-94b2626318bc/IPSA_Coronavirus_Guidance_version_19_03_2020.pdf
Will have to listen later!
The Spiked team - whom I hold in high regard, though I disagree with them almost as much as I agree - often offer a different take on things. They are massively humanist, championing democracy over all, and I think this is where their "left" identification comes from. It`s all about individuals versus the state.
Pastry Chef Attempts to Make Gourmet Cadbury Creme Eggs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QqnhDI7VFA
The problem that the LM / Spiked, etc gang rather than libertarian anarchists have, is that they fully accept marxist determinism - the working class and class conflict are the engine of history, etc, but mix this bizarrely with vanguardist libertarianism. Their reasoning is that anything modernist and connected with technology and progress is good, so that even the more anti-social kind of conservative libertarians can be the last vanguard and engine of history if they fight green "backwardness", for instance. Totally crackers and internally inconsistent.
At the very least it is probably ill advised from a PR point of view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Days
All ideologies are internally inconsistent when you lift the hood - so I wouldn`t hold that against them.
I particularly admire their resolute stance against identity politics and woke culture. Brendan O`Neill`s two books are superb. He`s a cracking writer.
And not all MPs will be spending the money as the twitter comment below shows.
David Shukman, Science editor, BBC News.
Amid all the speculation about when and how the UK’s lockdown may be relaxed, it’s worth looking back at the original scientific advice that led to the measures in the first place.
It makes clear that nothing is likely change soon.
The government’s scientific advisory committee SAGE has always suggested that a 13-week programme of interventions will be needed.
And although that sounds like very precise timing, it all depends on how the British public respond.
The scientists made a fairly pessimistic assumption: that only 50% of households would observe the requirements.
So what might a timetable look like? Once the peak in daily deaths has been reached – possibly in the next week or so – even the best-case scenario suggests that it will take a month or two for the numbers dying to fall to low levels.
That gets us well into May and maybe to early June, and it’ll be a brave political decision to ease the restrictions any earlier if there’s a risk of a "second peak", a resurgence of the virus.
Some MPs are really quite poor financially. (Many more very poor generally).
If there is a demonstrable need for that funding then that's fine. A very slight increase in the rope budget might also be wise.
They've clearly introduced fewer restrictions than surrounding countries, which will help them both economically now and enable a faster bounce back afterwards - so long as they don't overwhelm their health services, which is the critical path in the UK and elsewhere.
Fatalities per capita in Sweden are 8 times higher than in Finland, 4 times higher than in Norway, 3 times higher than in Germany, twice as high as in Denmark.
Deaths? 5. That's for about the same population as all of Scandinavia.
I'd say that at the end of this Taiwan deserves country status.
What's important is that we need to hold the MPs to account for their spending, and make sure they're not all just buying new laptops and desks because they can.
On the other hand, if the symptomatic case mortality rate really is around 1% (a couple of independent estimates suggest this is about right) and there are 20,000 fatalities, that would mean 2,000,000 people have been infected symptomatically and another 600,000 asymptomatically.
Perhaps this suggests there are many symptomatic, but relatively mild, cases? That would, interestingly, give an infection mortality rate of about 0.6%, which is what was suspected initially.
But how this coheres with data from other countries on asymptomatic cases is harder to understand.
That's nothing to do with what you describe as bogus numbers, you just seem to get internet wally aggressive with anything that doesn't predict the worst case scenario
Libertarian Youth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Youth
From 2017: “Candidate to lead the WHO accused of covering up epidemics”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/health/candidate-who-director-general-ethiopia-cholera-outbreaks.html
https://www.euromomo.eu/
However if people here, on PB.com continually post his made up garbage I will indeed point out that they have posted garbage from an account pushing an agenda.
Posting a tweet here isn't a neutral action, you are saying something when you do so. Posting a tweet filled with false data overlaid with garbage visualisation is quite a thing.
I hadn't realised before this crisis that China controlled who could or couldn't have country status..
Nobody knows if an extended lockdown will prove to be a success or a horrible mistake.
There is a distasteful virus fascism creeping in on PB whereby anyone who submits anything other than sustained isolation as a strategy is attacked as a real world Professor Pangloss.
For example, some days I will print hundreds of letters to respond to a local campaign. In the Parliamentary office that is relatively straightforward because we already have a printer, ink, envelopes and headed paper. I didn't have any of that at home, so I've bought a printer, ink, envelopes etc to keep things ticking over, and I'll get that money back out of the office budget.
The past few weeks have been incredibly stressful and it is disappointing that the press have chosen this moment to push a misleading story that, if they get what they want and the office budgets are cut, is only going to inconvenience staffers trying to help vulnerable people at a difficult time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan
I'm getting naked at numbers that are actually false and confirmably false with 30 seconds of checking.
I've repeatedly said I think we will be on the mild end of any projection.
Case fatality rate (symptomatic) 2% (taking into account our older population)
Percentage asymptomatic 75%
So infection fatality rate 0.5%
But the apparent fatality rate rises from only 0.1% early on when cases are rising rapidly.
I'm not quite sure where we are on the early to late scale, but on the basis of the number of deaths something around 10% infected seems about right. Obviously it partly depends on how effective the lockdown has been.
The other side of this so called "virus fascism" is those who seem to think the economic health of the country is the only thing that matters. I'd argue health before wealth all day every day.
Where I do agree with Contrarian from earlier is we must not neglect those with serious health conditions other than Covid-19. Those who urgently need surgery for example should be able to undergo those procedures at other medical facilities apart from those dealing with Covid-19 patients. This is something local councils and the NHS have been working on and kudos to those private owners who have provided suitable venues freely and quickly ad to those who have worked round the clock to get them functioning.
Oxford Uni's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine interesting as ever:
Readers of the blog will be aware that we have little trust in the current reported COVID data. Everywhere we look we cannot get a handle on the essential facts or at times we get 2 completely different answers to the same question. The military historian Sir Basil Liddle Hart would have called this “the fog of a pandemic” or perhaps the “fog of information overload”.
So, we thought we would try to answer an important question: what is the proportion of people with SARS-COV-2 who are asymptomatic?
...
What did we learn (see the table for the analysis)
- That between 5% and 80% of people testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 may be asymptomatic
- That symptom-based screening will miss cases, perhaps a lot of them
- That some asymptomatic cases will become symptomatic over the next week (sometimes known as “pre-symptomatics”)
- That children and young adults can be asymptomatic
We also learnt that there is not a single reliable study to determine the number of asymptotics. It is likely we will only learn the true extent once population based antibody testing is undertaken.
...
Sir Basil’s “fog” is continuing to cover the topic and prevent us from seeing what lies on the other side of the hill.
Apologies for reposting this from yesterday, but relevant again and I fear not everyone interested will have seen it! As per @FrancisUrquhart hopefully we'll get some interesting news from Porton Down...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
Lockdowns work, but they take time to work.
It is how they know are able to accurately evaluate the anti-body kits and why they are failing.
It would be roughly the equivalent of quoting David Irving on the Holocaust.
Treasury
Dan Carden (Financial Secretary)
Pat McFadden (Economic Secretary)
Wes Streeting (Exchequer Secretary)
Foreign Office
Wayne David (Middle East and North Africa)
Stephen Doughty (Africa – joint with DFID)
Stephen Kinnock (Asia and Pacific)
Catherine West (Europe & Americas)
Home Office
Bambos Charalambous (Crime reduction and courts)
Sarah Jones (Policing and the Fire Service)
Holly Lynch (Immigration)
Conor McGinn (Security)
Jess Phillips (Domestic Violence and Safeguarding)
Cabinet Office
Paul Blomfield (Brexit and EU negotiations, joint with Int Trade)
Helen Hayes (Cabinet Office)
Justice
Lyn Brown (Prisons and Probation)
Alex Cunningham (Courts and sentencing)
Peter Kyle (Victims and Youth Justice)
Karl Turner (Legal Aid)
Defence
Sharon Hodgson (Veterans)
Stephen Morgan (Armed Forces)
Khalid Mahmood (Procurement)
Health
Liz Kendall (Social Care)
Justin Madders (Public Health and prevention)
Alex Norris (Public Health and patient safety)
Business etc
Chi Onwurah (Science, Research & Digital – joint with DCMS)
Matthew Pennycook (Climate change)
Lucy Powell (Business and Consumers)
Alan Whitehead (Green New Deal and Energy)
Work and Pension
Jack Dromey (Pensions)
Vicky Foxcroft (Disability)
Kate Green (Child Poverty Strategy)
Seema Malhotra (Employment)
International Trade
Paul Blomfield (Joint with CDL)
Bill Esterson
Gareth Thomas
Education
Margaret Greenwood (Schools)
Emma Hardy (FE & Universities)
Toby Perkins (Apprenticeships & life-long learning)
Tulip Siddiq (Children & Early Years)
Digital Culture Sport
Tracy Brabin (Cultural Industries)
Rachel Maskell (Voluntary Sector & Charities)
Chris Matheson (Media)
Alison McGovern (Sport)
Chi Onwurah (Digital, joint with BEIS)
Alex Sobel (Tourism & Heritage)
Environment
Steph Peacock (Flooding)
Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Natural Environment & Air Quality)
Daniel Zeichner (Food, Farming and Fisheries)
Communities and Local government
Mike Amesbury (Housing and Planning)
Janet Daby (Faiths)
Kate Hollern (Local Government)
Naz Shah (Community Cohesion)
Transport
Tan Dhesi (Railways)
Mike Kane (Regional Transport)
Kerry McCarthy (Green transport and aviation)
Matt Rodda (Buses)
International Development
Stephen Doughty (Joint with FCO)
Anna McMorrin
Yasmin Qureshi
Northern Ireland
Karin Smyth
Wales
Gerald Jones
Scotland
Chris Elmore (joint with whips office)
Women and equalities
Gill Furness
Employer rights and protections
Imran Hussain
Solicitor General
Ellie Reeves
Deputy Chief Whip: Alan Campbell
Pairing Whip: Mark Tami
Senior Whip: Jessica Morden