You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
There was that comparison between deaths from Covid-19 and deaths from pneumonia in different ethnic groups. The differences were far more pronounced for Covid-19, indicating that it goes beyond BAME people likely to be poorer, etc.
I do wonder whether those of us with ancestors who lived in temperate regions may have developed some additional tolerance to the adverse effects of the type of viruses that are prevalent in these climates, just as they developed pale skin in order to maintain vitamin D levels despite low levels of sunlight.
As I pointed out the other day, this is going to be a very big issue - and will worsen the longer the lockdown is in place. As Peston says in a key sentence: "We've all acquired precautionary habits that will prove hard to break".
For example, there will be a push to get schools reopened - the problem will be getting the teachers back not the children. If a teacher is being paid 100% (state) 80-100% (private) of salary why would that teacher want to return to school and take risks rather than remain in isolation for longer?
You can stop the furlough scheme.
When that happens it will be very political. The right moment will be tough.
My guess is the lockdown will start to ease at end of May and at that point the furlough scheme will continue but wont be open to all businesses any more. It could be rationed by sector or businesses might have to show they would go bust/make redundancies without the scheme. Possibly a less generous scheme continues for those ineligible for the 80%.
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
There was that comparison between deaths from Covid-19 and deaths from pneumonia in different ethnic groups. The differences were far more pronounced for Covid-19, indicating that it goes beyond BAME people likely to be poorer, etc.
I do wonder whether those of us with ancestors who lived in temperate regions may have developed some additional tolerance to the adverse effects of the type of viruses that are prevalent in these climates, just as they developed pale skin in order to maintain vitamin D levels despite low levels of sunlight.
Perhaps some data on intergenerational co-habitation and or adherence to the lockdown may also be a factor.
As I pointed out the other day, this is going to be a very big issue - and will worsen the longer the lockdown is in place. As Peston says in a key sentence: "We've all acquired precautionary habits that will prove hard to break".
For example, there will be a push to get schools reopened - the problem will be getting the teachers back not the children. If a teacher is being paid 100% (state) 80-100% (private) of salary why would that teacher want to return to school and take risks rather than remain in isolation for longer?
Simple answer, test everyone who is going into the school and those that they are in immediate contact with. The school makes any track and trace app compulsory and anyone not doing so will be suspended. PPE made available to all staff and social distancing enforced for all pupils and staff. That would be enough, I think.
Where do we get the tests for 10-20m people? How often will they be repeated? If a teacher is in PPE why arent the kids? So we will also need 10m sets of PPE, train them and deliver fresh PPE regularly.
Simple? Really?
The one thing that is in major short supply in the UK is not only PPE but also a basic understanding of the complexity and technical nature of the manufacture and supply chain of medical products. As someone who has been involved in the healthcare industry for most of my life I find some of the comments on here vary between being amusing and downright infuriating. That said, such levels of ignorance are understandable when we have governments ministers suggesting JCB make ventilators! Next up it is James Dyson who, it was wrongly claimed would be able to make them in weeks. Who next? Anyone spotting a pattern here? Tim Martin? Can he make ventilators, or maybe PPE? How much time is being wasted providing PR for Brexiteers and Tory donors?
Do you think Dyson claimed it for PR? Or because he thought he could do it? Ive no idea, am normally pretty cynical, but it hadnt occured to me that he knew it wasnt but going to happen but claimed it anyway.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
I think he probably will choose Harris, but I'm not totally convinced by the logic.
Biden is VERY strongly placed with black voters already. A key reason neither Harris nor Booker got traction is that, despite being black, they didn't make a compelling case to black voters to peel away from Biden given his close association with Obama. Harris unsettled him on bussing... but ultimately it wasn't enough and faded away.
It is true that turnout matters, but Biden doesn't have a problem that Harris or Abrams address - it'd instead play to an existing strength.
Biden has more issues with Hispanic voters, which would speak to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, or Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada.
If I were him, though, I'd go for Amy Klobuchar. This is primarily because his biggest problem is probably his age - simply in actuarial terms, a 78 year old might very well not last four years in good health, let alone eight. Klobuchar is a two-term Senator who been tested on the national campaign trail, and came out of it with he stock decidedly higher. Other than a foreign policy wobble over Mexico (and all candidates have a wobble at some point), she's been solidly on top of her brief and is a very sturdy debater. She's not that exciting a VP choice. But an old man doesn't need exciting - he needs a pick who is ready to be President in a heartbeat.
Whitmer as Michigan governor, a must win Trump 2016 swing state, is who I would pick
I'm much more cautious on Whitmer.
She's been a Governor for one year, and was state legislature prior to that. Will people see that as "heartbeat from the Presidency" material? Possibly (Buttigieg was as serious candidate for the nomination as Klobuchar on less), but it's not a weighty CV and people will need persuading.
She's perceived to have done well in this crisis, but didn't have great approval ratings prior to that. She won the Governorship in a good year for the Democrats against a lacklustre GOP candidate, so hasn't really been through the national spotlight or debate with big beasts.
Feels like flavour of the month more than a pick for November.
I'd also note that VP candidates don't have a fantastic record of swinging their own state. It's a plus to have a rust belt candidate, but doesn't guarantee Michigan, let alone neighbours.
If Biden holds the Hillary states and adds Pennsylvania where he grew up and Michigan the EC is 269 to 269 and the House awards him the Presidency.
This is quite something twitter.com/SP_Duckworth/status/1250036384200634368?s=20
The article does rather reinforce the question I have had for a while now. Our NHS appears to have done a remarkable job expanding capacity and not becoming overloaded / crashed like Italy, Spain or NY.
From the media footage, there is no signs of the chaos, busy yes, but not beds in hallways, sick people sleeping on coats on floors and doctors working 18hrs a day 7 days a week and having to sleep in their offices, because of being totally overwhelmed.
But....the number of people dying is on par with all these. I wonder why?
Perhaps Brits are less fit on average than Swedes and hence more likely to die if they get Coronavirus, even with adequate medical treatment?
More likely Sweden has a far lower population density than the UK does
You've got to correct your thinking here @HYUFD. It's not about population density per se, it's degree of urbanisation that is important.
Sweden 23 people/km2; UK 274 (For comparison US = 34). But...
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
There was that comparison between deaths from Covid-19 and deaths from pneumonia in different ethnic groups. The differences were far more pronounced for Covid-19, indicating that it goes beyond BAME people likely to be poorer, etc.
I do wonder whether those of us with ancestors who lived in temperate regions may have developed some additional tolerance to the adverse effects of the type of viruses that are prevalent in these climates, just as they developed pale skin in order to maintain vitamin D levels despite low levels of sunlight.
Perhaps some data on intergenerational co-habitation and or adherence to the lockdown may also be a factor.
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
The reason ICU capacity isn’t being breached is because many people are too ill by the time they to get to hospital and die quickly.
Anyone wonder why the amount of hospitalizations is so low proportionately in the UK compared to other countries and yet the proportion of deaths to hospitalization is much higher .
As I pointed out the other day, this is going to be a very big issue - and will worsen the longer the lockdown is in place. As Peston says in a key sentence: "We've all acquired precautionary habits that will prove hard to break".
For example, there will be a push to get schools reopened - the problem will be getting the teachers back not the children. If a teacher is being paid 100% (state) 80-100% (private) of salary why would that teacher want to return to school and take risks rather than remain in isolation for longer?
Simple answer, test everyone who is going into the school and those that they are in immediate contact with. The school makes any track and trace app compulsory and anyone not doing so will be suspended. PPE made available to all staff and social distancing enforced for all pupils and staff. That would be enough, I think.
Where do we get the tests for 10-20m people? How often will they be repeated? If a teacher is in PPE why arent the kids? So we will also need 10m sets of PPE, train them and deliver fresh PPE regularly.
Simple? Really?
Until there is mass testing, tracking and tracing and/or a vaccine, then 'duty of care' comes before anything else. Schools cannot do this and open whilst it is plausible that it will infect students, parents and staff. Sort out the testing and such, provide PPE and it becames more plausible. Independent schools, for example, could be in for massive legal bills if we don't provide this sort of thing.
Testing, tracking and tracing (compulsory) is the name of the game, here.
It has always been plausible for students, parents and staff to be infected with a deadly disease and it always will be.
Risks have to be balanced. Do we deny a generation of students 3 years education if that is how long a vaccine takes? I would consider that a far greater risk than a slow release of lockdown with imperfect mitigation.
The balance of risk at the moment is clearly in favour of not putting students, staff and parents at risk. Usually the duty of care is between student and staff but a pandemic widens that. I gave you my answer for the current situation. As we are apparently going to be told to wear masks anyway then to have PPE delivered to schools is just applying that. Same with social distancing. If social distancing rules change in general they will change in schools as well.
What is education? We are running a full online timetable, with the same lessons, marking, reporting and so on. If you mean socialisation then that's not the remit of education, as home schoolers will know.
I get that some want to use schools as guinea pigs but you are going to find that it's a very bad choice for the reasons already stated and more. I was reading a good NYT article yesterday and they were addressing the same question, with schools there off until September. They have the Summer Camp tradition and young staff alongside young students sounds a perfect fit for this situation. Maybe government could use school premises over July and August to do something similar.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
Aren't overcrowded housing and poorer diets subsets of poverty?
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
I think we know why already: they're more likely to have conditions such as diabetes, obesity, etc. They tend to live in high density areas like London and Birmingham. Inter-generational households are probably more common as well, which is one of the factors believed to have caused so many cases in Italy. In terms of the crisis the most fortunate areas to live are probably places like Orkney, Shetland, Scilly Isles, Anglesey, Highlands of Scotland, etc, and very few live in those types of remote communities.
I think he probably will choose Harris, but I'm not totally convinced by the logic.
Biden is VERY strongly placed with black voters already. A key reason neither Harris nor Booker got traction is that, despite being black, they didn't make a compelling case to black voters to peel away from Biden given his close association with Obama. Harris unsettled him on bussing... but ultimately it wasn't enough and faded away.
It is true that turnout matters, but Biden doesn't have a problem that Harris or Abrams address - it'd instead play to an existing strength.
Biden has more issues with Hispanic voters, which would speak to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, or Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada.
If I were him, though, I'd go for Amy Klobuchar. This is primarily because his biggest problem is probably his age - simply in actuarial terms, a 78 year old might very well not last four years in good health, let alone eight. Klobuchar is a two-term Senator who been tested on the national campaign trail, and came out of it with he stock decidedly higher. Other than a foreign policy wobble over Mexico (and all candidates have a wobble at some point), she's been solidly on top of her brief and is a very sturdy debater. She's not that exciting a VP choice. But an old man doesn't need exciting - he needs a pick who is ready to be President in a heartbeat.
Whitmer as Michigan governor, a must win Trump 2016 swing state, is who I would pick
I'm much more cautious on Whitmer.
She's been a Governor for one year, and was state legislature prior to that. Will people see that as "heartbeat from the Presidency" material? Possibly (Buttigieg was as serious candidate for the nomination as Klobuchar on less), but it's not a weighty CV and people will need persuading.
She's perceived to have done well in this crisis, but didn't have great approval ratings prior to that. She won the Governorship in a good year for the Democrats against a lacklustre GOP candidate, so hasn't really been through the national spotlight or debate with big beasts.
Feels like flavour of the month more than a pick for November.
I'd also note that VP candidates don't have a fantastic record of swinging their own state. It's a plus to have a rust belt candidate, but doesn't guarantee Michigan, let alone neighbours.
If Biden holds the Hillary states and adds Pennsylvania where he grew up and Michigan the EC is 269 to 269 and the House awards him the Presidency.
Where is the money going that’s being raised ‘for the NHS’? Is it just going into the overall accounts? Money for NHS isn’t an issue shouldn’t it go to defendants of NHS staff who have died?
The money is going to the government. Thats always how these things work out - we raise cash for something that government should be funding, our money replaces government money, so in effect we allow the government to keep the money.
All for "charity"
An understandable argument, but not entirely true. There are a number of facilities that some hospitals have access to that are provided by charities and private funding. It cannot be argued that all those facilities would still automatically be available to a particular hospital at the tax payers expense (hint: the tax payer, NOT government), if there were no charitable activity. Not all hospitals are equal, some are much more equal than others.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
Aren't overcrowded housing and poorer diets subsets of poverty?
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
There was that comparison between deaths from Covid-19 and deaths from pneumonia in different ethnic groups. The differences were far more pronounced for Covid-19, indicating that it goes beyond BAME people likely to be poorer, etc.
I do wonder whether those of us with ancestors who lived in temperate regions may have developed some additional tolerance to the adverse effects of the type of viruses that are prevalent in these climates, just as they developed pale skin in order to maintain vitamin D levels despite low levels of sunlight.
Perhaps some data on intergenerational co-habitation and or adherence to the lockdown may also be a factor.
Isn't this just the oddest virus. The Kenny Dalglish situation summed it up for me. Here we have a 69 year old man admitted to hospital for treatment of an infection which required intravenous antibiotics, therefore his immune system must have been low. He tested positive for coronavirus yet he had absolutely no symptoms and has been discharged from hospital.
I think he probably will choose Harris, but I'm not totally convinced by the logic.
Biden is VERY strongly placed with black voters already. A key reason neither Harris nor Booker got traction is that, despite being black, they didn't make a compelling case to black voters to peel away from Biden given his close association with Obama. Harris unsettled him on bussing... but ultimately it wasn't enough and faded away.
It is true that turnout matters, but Biden doesn't have a problem that Harris or Abrams address - it'd instead play to an existing strength.
Biden has more issues with Hispanic voters, which would speak to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, or Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada.
If I were him, though, I'd go for Amy Klobuchar. This is primarily because his biggest problem is probably his age - simply in actuarial terms, a 78 year old might very well not last four years in good health, let alone eight. Klobuchar is a two-term Senator who been tested on the national campaign trail, and came out of it with he stock decidedly higher. Other than a foreign policy wobble over Mexico (and all candidates have a wobble at some point), she's been solidly on top of her brief and is a very sturdy debater. She's not that exciting a VP choice. But an old man doesn't need exciting - he needs a pick who is ready to be President in a heartbeat.
Whitmer as Michigan governor, a must win Trump 2016 swing state, is who I would pick
I'm much more cautious on Whitmer.
She's been a Governor for one year, and was state legislature prior to that. Will people see that as "heartbeat from the Presidency" material? Possibly (Buttigieg was as serious candidate for the nomination as Klobuchar on less), but it's not a weighty CV and people will need persuading.
She's perceived to have done well in this crisis, but didn't have great approval ratings prior to that. She won the Governorship in a good year for the Democrats against a lacklustre GOP candidate, so hasn't really been through the national spotlight or debate with big beasts.
Feels like flavour of the month more than a pick for November.
I'd also note that VP candidates don't have a fantastic record of swinging their own state. It's a plus to have a rust belt candidate, but doesn't guarantee Michigan, let alone neighbours.
If Biden holds the Hillary states and adds Pennsylvania where he grew up and Michigan the EC is 269 to 269 and the House awards him the Presidency.
It is a gamble he needs to make
It really isn't.
Well fine, let him pick Harris, win California like Hillary again by miles and lose the rustbelt swing states, the EC and the Presidency again
Slight point of order....I might be wrong, but I believe the % of front line staff from BAME is much higher. That 17% figure includes things like admin etc. I think the Guardian said it is closer to 40%.
Also, the London proportions are probably more indicative at this stage than the national figures. I suspect there's concentrations of both BAME staff and deaths in London.
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
If it turns out to be the case that white people are less at risk from covid-19, it is a moral and political dilemma of biblical proportions for governments across the world. They would have to treat people differently, in many different ways, based on skin colour.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
As I pointed out the other day, this is going to be a very big issue - and will worsen the longer the lockdown is in place. As Peston says in a key sentence: "We've all acquired precautionary habits that will prove hard to break".
For example, there will be a push to get schools reopened - the problem will be getting the teachers back not the children. If a teacher is being paid 100% (state) 80-100% (private) of salary why would that teacher want to return to school and take risks rather than remain in isolation for longer?
Simple answer, test everyone who is going into the school and those that they are in immediate contact with. The school makes any track and trace app compulsory and anyone not doing so will be suspended. PPE made available to all staff and social distancing enforced for all pupils and staff. That would be enough, I think.
Where do we get the tests for 10-20m people? How often will they be repeated? If a teacher is in PPE why arent the kids? So we will also need 10m sets of PPE, train them and deliver fresh PPE regularly.
Simple? Really?
The one thing that is in major short supply in the UK is not only PPE but also a basic understanding of the complexity and technical nature of the manufacture and supply chain of medical products. As someone who has been involved in the healthcare industry for most of my life I find some of the comments on here vary between being amusing and downright infuriating. That said, such levels of ignorance are understandable when we have governments ministers suggesting JCB make ventilators! Next up it is James Dyson who, it was wrongly claimed would be able to make them in weeks. Who next? Anyone spotting a pattern here? Tim Martin? Can he make ventilators, or maybe PPE? How much time is being wasted providing PR for Brexiteers and Tory donors?
Do you think Dyson claimed it for PR? Or because he thought he could do it? Ive no idea, am normally pretty cynical, but it hadnt occured to me that he knew it wasnt but going to happen but claimed it anyway.
TBF to Dyson, its still only 'weeks' (4, since the call for industry support) and ventilators have been made.
The reason ICU capacity isn’t being breached is because many people are too ill by the time they to get to hospital and die quickly.
Anyone wonder why the amount of hospitalizations is so low proportionately in the UK compared to other countries and yet the proportion of deaths to hospitalization is much higher .
A further 744 people have died in hospital in England in the last 24 hours,
No - 744 deaths have been notified. They did not all happen in last 24 hrs.
We need the daily breakdown figures.
That's the Grauardian for you...I deliberately copy and pasted it, to see who would pick up on that :-)
Looks pretty flat.
When we add in the other nations, it will be over 800, so 100 up on the last two days worth of figures. I would presume we are still seeing the effects of a long bank holiday on reporting.
Tomorrow or Thursday is when we will see if it is going to shoot up to 900+ again or if perhaps things are levelling off.
The government didn`t expect lockdown to be observed so well, and it intended more people to carry on working than has proved to be the case. That, plus the excess NHS capacity, argues for an easing of lockdown. That is, if you agree that the purpose of lockdown was to stop the NHS from "falling over" whilst building up as much immunity in the population as possible.
The other argument, of course, is that the government should be containing the virus as much as possible, whatever this takes. But those advocating this approach fail to appreciate that the virus will still be present when we come out of lockdown eventually and fewer will be immune under this approach, and the economy and our freedoms will have been trashed even further.
The quicker the lockdown is ended then the less has to be spent on furlough schemes.
And Universal Credit etc.
Schools back after the May bank holiday would be a good start - keep the wrinklies in their hutch for while.
Wrong. Do it too soon and you end up spending more and scarring the economy as the disruption ends up lasting longer.
As I pointed out the other day, this is going to be a very big issue - and will worsen the longer the lockdown is in place. As Peston says in a key sentence: "We've all acquired precautionary habits that will prove hard to break".
For example, there will be a push to get schools reopened - the problem will be getting the teachers back not the children. If a teacher is being paid 100% (state) 80-100% (private) of salary why would that teacher want to return to school and take risks rather than remain in isolation for longer?
Simple answer, test everyone who is going into the school and those that they are in immediate contact with. The school makes any track and trace app compulsory and anyone not doing so will be suspended. PPE made available to all staff and social distancing enforced for all pupils and staff. That would be enough, I think.
Where do we get the tests for 10-20m people? How often will they be repeated? If a teacher is in PPE why arent the kids? So we will also need 10m sets of PPE, train them and deliver fresh PPE regularly.
Simple? Really?
The one thing that is in major short supply in the UK is not only PPE but also a basic understanding of the complexity and technical nature of the manufacture and supply chain of medical products. As someone who has been involved in the healthcare industry for most of my life I find some of the comments on here vary between being amusing and downright infuriating. That said, such levels of ignorance are understandable when we have governments ministers suggesting JCB make ventilators! Next up it is James Dyson who, it was wrongly claimed would be able to make them in weeks. Who next? Anyone spotting a pattern here? Tim Martin? Can he make ventilators, or maybe PPE? How much time is being wasted providing PR for Brexiteers and Tory donors?
Do you think Dyson claimed it for PR? Or because he thought he could do it? Ive no idea, am normally pretty cynical, but it hadnt occured to me that he knew it wasnt but going to happen but claimed it anyway.
TBF to Dyson, its still only 'weeks' (4, since the call for industry support) and ventilators have been made.
The background to the story is that the government changed the spec, based on new medical advice, after the initial production run(s) were started.
It is not very surprising that a technical artefact made to one specification doesn't pass another.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
To be honest I thought it would be that. It makes sense. But I was corrected by someone who posted out that the middle class BAMEs are also more affected
This is quite something twitter.com/SP_Duckworth/status/1250036384200634368?s=20
The article does rather reinforce the question I have had for a while now. Our NHS appears to have done a remarkable job expanding capacity and not becoming overloaded / crashed like Italy, Spain or NY.
From the media footage, there is no signs of the chaos, busy yes, but not beds in hallways, sick people sleeping on coats on floors and doctors working 18hrs a day 7 days a week and having to sleep in their offices, because of being totally overwhelmed.
But....the number of people dying is on par with all these. I wonder why?
Sweden is, still, an interesting anomaly
With no lockdown they have a considerably worse situation than Finland, Norway etc. BUT there are not doing spectacularly worse. There is no breakdown in health care, no tsunami of deaths, even if the toll is grim.
From what I hear from Swedish colleagues, it seems that many/most people are voluntarily observing restrictions there: no going out to restaurants/bars even though they're open.
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
For an existing example of apparently differing risk across groups.
It is unlikely that NHS consultants (for example) could be considered poor or down trodden by management.
Quite.
If I had to hazard a guess as to one unifying explanation (if such a thing exists) it would be religiosity.
It hits orthodox Jews and Catholic Filipinos, equally, but is more sparing of the secular natives.
It was rcs, I believe, who called it Dawkins Disease. A very good name.
It could be religiosity but if it hits Jews and Muslims, could circumcision be the critical factor? Unlikely I grant you but what do we know about Catholic Filipino willies? Or indeed spurious correlations?
Meanwhile it seems that the FTSE, looking across the channel at what's going on there, doesn't hugely like the likely extra three weeks lockdown, while Yurp is tentatively in favour of an end to it. The US meanwhile just doesn't like down days.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
To be honest I thought it would be that. It makes sense. But I was corrected by someone who posted out that the middle class BAMEs are also more affected
NHS doctors is a group that won't tend towards poverty, over crowded houses, poor diet choices etc. for example. Yet the skew in the numbers is very apparent.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
Aren't overcrowded housing and poorer diets subsets of poverty?
Overcrowded housing might be more affected by inequality rather than poverty - there's plenty of educated young renting a room for example.
Poor diets are affected by poverty but not necessarily financial poverty - there's no shortage of people who go to grotty takeaways rather than spend less and cook themselves.
PPE is a fiasco all over the world, for the simple reason that demand has increased by orders of magnitude and supply hasn't yet caught up. This really isn't a surprise. Much of the criticism of the government is pretty silly TBH - for example the complain that civil servants haven't yet got back to small companies who offered to help make PPE. Each company which manufactures these items for the first time is going to need a lot of hand-holding by experts to ensure they meet medical requirements; of course the civil servants (many of whom are working from home in difficult conditions) will be prioritising offers from big companies who can manufacture tens of thousands a week rather than small companies offering to make hundreds a week.
On Alastair's point, surely the point is that going through an EU-wide procurement process doesn't create any extra PPE, but it does add an extra layer of bureaucracy. It is by no means obvious that pooled procurement is better.
Jesus testing is getting even lower. I know a bank holiday and all that, but miles off. The positive % rate remains very high, which isn't good either.
A further 744 people have died in hospital in England in the last 24 hours,
No - 744 deaths have been notified. They did not all happen in last 24 hrs.
We need the daily breakdown figures.
That's the Grauardian for you...I deliberately copy and pasted it, to see who would pick up on that :-)
Looks pretty flat.
When we add in the other nations, it will be over 800, so 100 up on the last two days worth of figures. I would presume we are still seeing the effects of a long bank holiday on reporting.
Tomorrow or Thursday is when we will see if it is going to shoot up to 900+ again or if perhaps things are levelling off.
The tail is a bit longer this time - reporting delays over the bank holiday - which will fill out the gap between 8 April "peak" and now.
This is quite something twitter.com/SP_Duckworth/status/1250036384200634368?s=20
The article does rather reinforce the question I have had for a while now. Our NHS appears to have done a remarkable job expanding capacity and not becoming overloaded / crashed like Italy, Spain or NY.
From the media footage, there is no signs of the chaos, busy yes, but not beds in hallways, sick people sleeping on coats on floors and doctors working 18hrs a day 7 days a week and having to sleep in their offices, because of being totally overwhelmed.
But....the number of people dying is on par with all these. I wonder why?
Sweden is, still, an interesting anomaly
With no lockdown they have a considerably worse situation than Finland, Norway etc. BUT there are not doing spectacularly worse. There is no breakdown in health care, no tsunami of deaths, even if the toll is grim.
From what I hear from Swedish colleagues, it seems that many/most people are voluntarily observing restrictions there: no going out to restaurants/bars even though they're open.
I did that for about a fortnight before our lockdown, and will do so when it’s over too. The people in busy pubs in the dying days and rebirth of freedom are not the best company to keep I’d say.
The government didn`t expect lockdown to be observed so well, and it intended more people to carry on working than has proved to be the case. That, plus the excess NHS capacity, argues for an easing of lockdown. That is, if you agree that the purpose of lockdown was to stop the NHS from "falling over" whilst building up as much immunity in the population as possible.
The other argument, of course, is that the government should be containing the virus as much as possible, whatever this takes. But those advocating this approach fail to appreciate that the virus will still be present when we come out of lockdown eventually and fewer will be immune under this approach, and the economy and our freedoms will have been trashed even further.
The quicker the lockdown is ended then the less has to be spent on furlough schemes.
And Universal Credit etc.
Schools back after the May bank holiday would be a good start - keep the wrinklies in their hutch for while.
Wrong. Do it too soon and you end up spending more and scarring the economy as the disruption ends up lasting longer.
IF NHS capacity is being built up then we should be able to cope with a second surge.
PPE is a fiasco all over the world, for the simple reason that demand has increased by orders of magnitude and supply hasn't yet caught up. This really isn't a surprise. Much of the criticism of the government is pretty silly TBH - for example the complain that civil servants haven't yet got back to small companies who offered to help make PPE. Each company which manufactures these items for the first time is going to need a lot of hand-holding by experts to ensure they meet medical requirements; of course the civil servants (many of whom are working from home in difficult conditions) will be prioritising offers from big companies who can manufacture tens of thousands a week rather than small companies offering to make hundreds a week.
On Alastair's point, surely the point is that going through an EU-wide procurement process doesn't create any extra PPE, but it does add an extra layer of bureaucracy. It is by no means obvious that pooled procurement is better.
Sure it doesn't help that the British company that is a very large producer of PPE has its factories in China and the Chinese government sequestered all their stock and production.
I can't see future government being comfortable with such a scenario. How we more forward is a big question, so that for crucial supplies from base chemicals to drugs, we aren't beholden to such a foreign power.
The reason ICU capacity isn’t being breached is because many people are too ill by the time they to get to hospital and die quickly.
Anyone wonder why the amount of hospitalizations is so low proportionately in the UK compared to other countries and yet the proportion of deaths to hospitalization is much higher .
Source?
You can see the data , it speaks for itself . For example France has a third more hospitalizations but slightly less hospital deaths.
And if your condition worsens you ring an ambulance not a service like 111. Too many people are leaving it too late in the UK to seek medical help .
And even if they do get through to 111 are they being given the right advice.
As I pointed out the other day, this is going to be a very big issue - and will worsen the longer the lockdown is in place. As Peston says in a key sentence: "We've all acquired precautionary habits that will prove hard to break".
For example, there will be a push to get schools reopened - the problem will be getting the teachers back not the children. If a teacher is being paid 100% (state) 80-100% (private) of salary why would that teacher want to return to school and take risks rather than remain in isolation for longer?
Simple answer, test everyone who is going into the school and those that they are in immediate contact with. The school makes any track and trace app compulsory and anyone not doing so will be suspended. PPE made available to all staff and social distancing enforced for all pupils and staff. That would be enough, I think.
Where do we get the tests for 10-20m people? How often will they be repeated? If a teacher is in PPE why arent the kids? So we will also need 10m sets of PPE, train them and deliver fresh PPE regularly.
Simple? Really?
The one thing that is in major short supply in the UK is not only PPE but also a basic understanding of the complexity and technical nature of the manufacture and supply chain of medical products. As someone who has been involved in the healthcare industry for most of my life I find some of the comments on here vary between being amusing and downright infuriating. That said, such levels of ignorance are understandable when we have governments ministers suggesting JCB make ventilators! Next up it is James Dyson who, it was wrongly claimed would be able to make them in weeks. Who next? Anyone spotting a pattern here? Tim Martin? Can he make ventilators, or maybe PPE? How much time is being wasted providing PR for Brexiteers and Tory donors?
Do you think Dyson claimed it for PR? Or because he thought he could do it? Ive no idea, am normally pretty cynical, but it hadnt occured to me that he knew it wasnt but going to happen but claimed it anyway.
I don't think he did it only for PR, but I suspect he didn't mind if he benefitted from that, and I personally don't have a problem with that.
What I find offensive is that time is wasted on these stunts. One is reminded of the crazy counter productive efforts made by Mao Tse Tung to divert production to steel production. It really is time that government ministers stopped asking their cronies, and started asking people that actually understand how these things are made and how they can use our excellent contract manufacturing industry to partner with companies outside UK under licence.
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
If it turns out to be the case that white people are less at risk from covid-19, it is a moral and political dilemma of biblical proportions for governments across the world. They would have to treat people differently, in many different ways, based on skin colour.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
Yup. If I were oooh - scratches head - a mad Chinese politician creating a Satan Bug to provoke carnage and chaos in the West, I would make the virus discriminate by ethnicity, in favour of whites, thus adding a race war to the mix.
What if you were oooh - strokes chin - a horror/dystopian fiction writer. What could you make of it?
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
To be honest I thought it would be that. It makes sense. But I was corrected by someone who posted out that the middle class BAMEs are also more affected
NHS doctors is a group that won't tend towards poverty, over crowded houses, poor diet choices etc. for example. Yet the skew in the numbers is very apparent.
Yeah but they’re getting the virus in their face a dozen times a day.
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
If it turns out to be the case that white people are less at risk from covid-19, it is a moral and political dilemma of biblical proportions for governments across the world. They would have to treat people differently, in many different ways, based on skin colour.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
In most places white people are healthier than other groups because they're wealthier and wealthy people are usually more healthy, (and will therefore be less affected by the virus). The exception would be Japan, Taiwan, etc. You could probably find some places in the United States where white people are not the most healthy group compared to say East Asians.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
To be honest I thought it would be that. It makes sense. But I was corrected by someone who posted out that the middle class BAMEs are also more affected
NHS doctors is a group that won't tend towards poverty, over crowded houses, poor diet choices etc. for example. Yet the skew in the numbers is very apparent.
Yeah but they’re getting the virus in their face a dozen times a day.
The question is why *BAME doctors* are being disproportionally effected. Which they are.
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
For an existing example of apparently differing risk across groups.
It is unlikely that NHS consultants (for example) could be considered poor or down trodden by management.
Quite.
If I had to hazard a guess as to one unifying explanation (if such a thing exists) it would be religiosity.
It hits orthodox Jews and Catholic Filipinos, equally, but is more sparing of the secular natives.
It was rcs, I believe, who called it Dawkins Disease. A very good name.
It could be religiosity but if it hits Jews and Muslims, could circumcision be the critical factor? Unlikely I grant you but what do we know about Catholic Filipino willies? Or indeed spurious correlations?
It is far from spurious. The ghastly outbreak in Iran started in the sacred city of Qom, and was exacerbated when the authorities refused to close the shrines, where people kissed "icons"
It seems blatantly obvious that those who much more religiously observant are at a high risk. Going to sit with 100+ other people all in very confined space for significant amounts of a time and often as part of those rituals you share communal objects, wash in shared areas etc.
South Korea big outbreak, the whacky cult. Iran. Northern Italy with big catholic following. Jews in the UK massively over-represented.
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
If it turns out to be the case that white people are less at risk from covid-19, it is a moral and political dilemma of biblical proportions for governments across the world. They would have to treat people differently, in many different ways, based on skin colour.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
Yup. If I were oooh - scratches head - a mad Chinese politician creating a Satan Bug to provoke carnage and chaos in the West, I would make the virus discriminate by ethnicity, in favour of whites, thus adding a race war to the mix.
What if you were oooh - strokes chin - a horror/dystopian fiction writer. What could you make of it?
I would add a further layer - the whole plan is created by an evil genius, who had multiple on-line identities. He cunningly manipulates a wide range of contacts around the world to form his plan. Each one, innocent and unaware of what they are taking part in.
Get the epidemic under control so you can implement other less crude ways of minimising cases and deaths.
Buy you time to prepare for those other ways.
The length and severity of lockdown is in large measure an indication of failure by ours and other governments to control the epidemic and to prepare. Governments won't admit that, of course.
I think he probably will choose Harris, but I'm not totally convinced by the logic.
Biden is VERY strongly placed with black voters already. A key reason neither Harris nor Booker got traction is that, despite being black, they didn't make a compelling case to black voters to peel away from Biden given his close association with Obama. Harris unsettled him on bussing... but ultimately it wasn't enough and faded away.
It is true that turnout matters, but Biden doesn't have a problem that Harris or Abrams address - it'd instead play to an existing strength.
Biden has more issues with Hispanic voters, which would speak to Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, or Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada.
If I were him, though, I'd go for Amy Klobuchar. This is primarily because his biggest problem is probably his age - simply in actuarial terms, a 78 year old might very well not last four years in good health, let alone eight. Klobuchar is a two-term Senator who been tested on the national campaign trail, and came out of it with he stock decidedly higher. Other than a foreign policy wobble over Mexico (and all candidates have a wobble at some point), she's been solidly on top of her brief and is a very sturdy debater. She's not that exciting a VP choice. But an old man doesn't need exciting - he needs a pick who is ready to be President in a heartbeat.
Whitmer as Michigan governor, a must win Trump 2016 swing state, is who I would pick
I'm much more cautious on Whitmer.
She's been a Governor for one year, and was state legislature prior to that. Will people see that as "heartbeat from the Presidency" material? Possibly (Buttigieg was as serious candidate for the nomination as Klobuchar on less), but it's not a weighty CV and people will need persuading.
She's perceived to have done well in this crisis, but didn't have great approval ratings prior to that. She won the Governorship in a good year for the Democrats against a lacklustre GOP candidate, so hasn't really been through the national spotlight or debate with big beasts.
Feels like flavour of the month more than a pick for November.
I'd also note that VP candidates don't have a fantastic record of swinging their own state. It's a plus to have a rust belt candidate, but doesn't guarantee Michigan, let alone neighbours.
If Biden holds the Hillary states and adds Pennsylvania where he grew up and Michigan the EC is 269 to 269 and the House awards him the Presidency.
It is a gamble he needs to make
It really isn't.
Well fine, let him pick Harris, win California like Hillary again by miles and lose the rustbelt swing states, the EC and the Presidency again
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
For an existing example of apparently differing risk across groups.
It is unlikely that NHS consultants (for example) could be considered poor or down trodden by management.
Quite.
If I had to hazard a guess as to one unifying explanation (if such a thing exists) it would be religiosity.
It hits orthodox Jews and Catholic Filipinos, equally, but is more sparing of the secular natives.
It was rcs, I believe, who called it Dawkins Disease. A very good name.
It could be religiosity but if it hits Jews and Muslims, could circumcision be the critical factor? Unlikely I grant you but what do we know about Catholic Filipino willies? Or indeed spurious correlations?
It is far from spurious. The ghastly outbreak in Iran started in the sacred city of Qom, and was exacerbated when the authorities refused to close the shrines, where people kissed "icons"
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
I think we know why already: they're more likely to have conditions such as diabetes, obesity, etc. They tend to live in high density areas like London and Birmingham. Inter-generational households are probably more common as well, which is one of the factors believed to have caused so many cases in Italy. In terms of the crisis the most fortunate areas to live are probably places like Orkney, Shetland, Scilly Isles, Anglesey, Highlands of Scotland, etc, and very few live in those types of remote communities.
Shetland at least isn't remote - it's very much part of the modern oil industry nexus and Sumburgh is a very busy airport. This could explain why it has one of the highest rates of infection in Scotland (per capita) yet Orkney has a tenth, if this site is remotely correct
Given the absolute numbers, however, it may (also?) be an stochastic founder effect (in the technical ecological sense).
More generally the fear is of someone inporting the disease into an area where the local health services can't cope. In Barra, at the direct local equivalent of NHS Louisa Jordan in Glasgow is - literally - the church hall. And because there are so few people the existing services are very limited even for food and so on.
It doesn't take a lot to overwhelm them without warning, especially if second homers break the regulations and try to move in, ditto renters. It could all come unstuck very quickly if you are unlucky where you are living.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
To be honest I thought it would be that. It makes sense. But I was corrected by someone who posted out that the middle class BAMEs are also more affected
NHS doctors is a group that won't tend towards poverty, over crowded houses, poor diet choices etc. for example. Yet the skew in the numbers is very apparent.
Yeah but they’re getting the virus in their face a dozen times a day.
As are white doctors. But the BAME doctors are dying in much greater numbers. The first ten doctorly deaths were all BAME
Not to minimize the deaths of these individuals, but the thinking displayed in tweet is classic probabilistic fallacy. If I told you I flipped 10 heads, does that mean my coin is unfair / weighted?
The government didn`t expect lockdown to be observed so well, and it intended more people to carry on working than has proved to be the case. That, plus the excess NHS capacity, argues for an easing of lockdown. That is, if you agree that the purpose of lockdown was to stop the NHS from "falling over" whilst building up as much immunity in the population as possible.
The other argument, of course, is that the government should be containing the virus as much as possible, whatever this takes. But those advocating this approach fail to appreciate that the virus will still be present when we come out of lockdown eventually and fewer will be immune under this approach, and the economy and our freedoms will have been trashed even further.
The quicker the lockdown is ended then the less has to be spent on furlough schemes.
And Universal Credit etc.
Schools back after the May bank holiday would be a good start - keep the wrinklies in their hutch for while.
Wrong. Do it too soon and you end up spending more and scarring the economy as the disruption ends up lasting longer.
IF NHS capacity is being built up then we should be able to cope with a second surge.
A further 744 people have died in hospital in England in the last 24 hours, bringing the total deaths in hospital in England to 11,005.
Patients were aged between 34 and 102 years old. 58 of the 744 patients (aged between 38 and 96 years old) had no known underlying health condition.
Rate still running at ~800 per day, after adjusting for reporting lag. Not getting better, but not getting any worse either.
No obvious trends in the regional reporting breakdown. Early reporting development still relatively stable; no material signs of any changes due to the bank holiday weekend (although might be something to come tomorrow, I guess).
8 April starting to look less like an outlier, possibly because the later reporting has sped up a bit in the last week (ie fewer late notifications coming in).
This is quite something twitter.com/SP_Duckworth/status/1250036384200634368?s=20
The article does rather reinforce the question I have had for a while now. Our NHS appears to have done a remarkable job expanding capacity and not becoming overloaded / crashed like Italy, Spain or NY.
From the media footage, there is no signs of the chaos, busy yes, but not beds in hallways, sick people sleeping on coats on floors and doctors working 18hrs a day 7 days a week and having to sleep in their offices, because of being totally overwhelmed.
But....the number of people dying is on par with all these. I wonder why?
My guess is that, when the dust settles and we review the handling, a few issues will come out.
1. The UK was relatively slow to lock down. I understand some of the reasons for that (long haul, fatigue risk, economy) but an internal debate over herd immunity also delayed it - it was sub-optimal.
2. We've not done well on testing, which is unhelpful on spread. I suspect (and it's only a suspicion) we have quite a high infection rate relative to others.
3. The benefit of the NHS is enough command and control to give a genuinely national service (so less problem than Italy with insufficient resource for local clusters). But there are also drawbacks - historical resourcing means I suspect there are overall fewer staff per patient and we're slower to put into intensive care (i.e. the average resource received is slightly lower but the range is less - almost everyone has decent but not amazing care). Some procurement decisions early on were also problematic in this respect.
4. I think the media shield us from some of the worst news to avoid panic. It's rather different showing scenes at an Italian hospital in terms of fear, to be blunt. The health service has coped pretty well compared with similar countries, but probably not quite as well as current news reports indicate.
5. Possibly we have more underlying at-risk groups - relatively poor general health compared with southern Europe, and an older population than NY. But I'm far from sure on that.
There's another possible explanation - perhaps it makes makes little difference whether or not there is enough ICU capacity, because putting patients in ICU doesn't actually much reduce the number who end up dying.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
To be honest I thought it would be that. It makes sense. But I was corrected by someone who posted out that the middle class BAMEs are also more affected
NHS doctors is a group that won't tend towards poverty, over crowded houses, poor diet choices etc. for example. Yet the skew in the numbers is very apparent.
Yeah but they’re getting the virus in their face a dozen times a day.
The question is why *BAME doctors* are being disproportionally effected. Which they are.
Get the epidemic under control so you can implement other less crude ways of minimising cases and deaths.
Buy you time to prepare for those other ways.
The length and severity of lockdown is in large measure an indication of failure by ours and other governments to control the epidemic and to prepare. Governments won't admit that, of course.
Isn't that slightly circular? How would the government have controlled the epidemic without a lockdown?
Well UW have updated their nonsense model, now they think the range of possible outcomes is 14k to 50k dead, with a mean projected deaths will be 23,791. That still looks wrong...We are already on 12,000, no way we only see another 2,000 deaths in the next 2-3 months.
And their error bars for todays death toll was anywhere between ~250 and 4000+....4000+...they really need to turn that model off, it is pumping out total horseshit.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
To be honest I thought it would be that. It makes sense. But I was corrected by someone who posted out that the middle class BAMEs are also more affected
NHS doctors is a group that won't tend towards poverty, over crowded houses, poor diet choices etc. for example. Yet the skew in the numbers is very apparent.
Yeah but they’re getting the virus in their face a dozen times a day.
As are white doctors. But the BAME doctors are dying in much greater numbers. The first ten doctorly deaths were all BAME
An enquiry now serves no useful purpose that I can see and is unlikely to be as informative as one later when more comprehensive data is available and there is less pressure on available time. Labour politicking?
If Biden holds the Hillary states and adds Pennsylvania where he grew up and Michigan the EC is 269 to 269 and the House awards him the Presidency.
It is a gamble he needs to make
Where's your evidence that the state of the VP candidate makes a big difference?
Looking at recent elections:
2016 - Pence (Indiana) and Kaine (Virginia) both "carried" their state, but neither was seriously in play (Virginia is often close-ish, and was again, but has trended Democrat for many years).
2012 - Ryan (Wisconsin) and Biden (Delaware) - Delaware was never in play anyway, and Ryan didn't make Wisconsin seriously competitive.
2008 - Palin (Alaska) and Biden (Delaware) - neither were ever even remotely swing states.
2004 - Cheney (Wyoming) and Edwards (North Carolina) - Wyoming is rock solid, and Edwards failed to bring North Carolina into play.
2000 - Cheney (Wyoming) and Lieberman (Connecticut) - neither were swing states. And Gore didn't carry his own state (Tennessee).
You have to go back to 1960 to see the textbook example of the VP carrying a crucial state - Johnson in Texas. But Texas was fairly blue back then (although it had backed Eisenhower). Indeed, Humphrey carried it in 1968 with a Minnesota/Maine ticket, and while losing to Nixon nationally.
You're looking at a VP pick far too narrowly by geography. What Johnson brought to the Kennedy ticket was much more than a state - he brought age, experience, toughness, Protestantism. There's a certain mythology over Texas in 1960 - but it was only the 10th closest margin in the country (by %). There's a good chance Kennedy would have won it anyway, but would he have carried Illinois?
What Biden needs to do is address a bigger weakness in his campaign which is that he's an old man and so needs a VP pick who commands total confidence as a potential President (he's also "old skool" so needs a woman on the ticket - but he's already confirmed that).
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
If it turns out to be the case that white people are less at risk from covid-19, it is a moral and political dilemma of biblical proportions for governments across the world. They would have to treat people differently, in many different ways, based on skin colour.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
Yup. If I were oooh - scratches head - a mad Chinese politician creating a Satan Bug to provoke carnage and chaos in the West, I would make the virus discriminate by ethnicity, in favour of whites, thus adding a race war to the mix.
Personall I think that different age groups should be treated differently in the lockdown. It seems so obvious by the age of victim that the old and frail need more protection from it than the young and healthy. Saying that on here has provoked angry responses - imagine if there were a racial factor!
This is quite something twitter.com/SP_Duckworth/status/1250036384200634368?s=20
The article does rather reinforce the question I have had for a while now. Our NHS appears to have done a remarkable job expanding capacity and not becoming overloaded / crashed like Italy, Spain or NY.
From the media footage, there is no signs of the chaos, busy yes, but not beds in hallways, sick people sleeping on coats on floors and doctors working 18hrs a day 7 days a week and having to sleep in their offices, because of being totally overwhelmed.
But....the number of people dying is on par with all these. I wonder why?
My guess is that, when the dust settles and we review the handling, a few issues will come out.
1. The UK was relatively slow to lock down. I understand some of the reasons for that (long haul, fatigue risk, economy) but an internal debate over herd immunity also delayed it - it was sub-optimal.
2. We've not done well on testing, which is unhelpful on spread. I suspect (and it's only a suspicion) we have quite a high infection rate relative to others.
3. The benefit of the NHS is enough command and control to give a genuinely national service (so less problem than Italy with insufficient resource for local clusters). But there are also drawbacks - historical resourcing means I suspect there are overall fewer staff per patient and we're slower to put into intensive care (i.e. the average resource received is slightly lower but the range is less - almost everyone has decent but not amazing care). Some procurement decisions early on were also problematic in this respect.
4. I think the media shield us from some of the worst news to avoid panic. It's rather different showing scenes at an Italian hospital in terms of fear, to be blunt. The health service has coped pretty well compared with similar countries, but probably not quite as well as current news reports indicate.
5. Possibly we have more underlying at-risk groups - relatively poor general health compared with southern Europe, and an older population than NY. But I'm far from sure on that.
There's another possible explanation - perhaps it makes makes little difference whether or not there is enough ICU capacity, because putting patients in ICU doesn't actually much reduce the number who end up dying.
Possibly the opposite. That other countries have a higher survival rate in ICU than the UK does. Or that more people come out the other side of ICU than in the UK - either because of a better survival rate or more people go into the ICU system in the first place.
The government didn`t expect lockdown to be observed so well, and it intended more people to carry on working than has proved to be the case. That, plus the excess NHS capacity, argues for an easing of lockdown. That is, if you agree that the purpose of lockdown was to stop the NHS from "falling over" whilst building up as much immunity in the population as possible.
The other argument, of course, is that the government should be containing the virus as much as possible, whatever this takes. But those advocating this approach fail to appreciate that the virus will still be present when we come out of lockdown eventually and fewer will be immune under this approach, and the economy and our freedoms will have been trashed even further.
The quicker the lockdown is ended then the less has to be spent on furlough schemes.
And Universal Credit etc.
Schools back after the May bank holiday would be a good start - keep the wrinklies in their hutch for while.
Wrong. Do it too soon and you end up spending more and scarring the economy as the disruption ends up lasting longer.
IF NHS capacity is being built up then we should be able to cope with a second surge.
That's why we are all at home, right?
How big a surge? If we have a second surge and don't reduce the infectivity number below 1, it goes exponential. People really seem to have difficulty grasping exponential growth. We've pretty much choked off the exponential growth we had when we locked down on 23rd March (by which date we were experiencing 54 deaths per day). If we hadn't, it'd be (obviously) worse.
We've dealt with this surge by heroic methods. If we let it rip in a second surge then no, the build up of NHS capacity won't be enough.
To save you some time, I can tell you that the reporting delay has been generally stable for some time. Possibly later reporting has gotten better in the last week or so - ie there are fewer notifications coming in after a week or more. About 15% of deaths are typically notified on the next day, 50% within two days, and 90% within a week.
Also "Francis" already knows this, because "he's" the one who alerted me to the dataset in the first place...
To save you some time, I can tell you that the reporting delay has been generally stable for some time. Possibly later reporting has gotten better in the last week or so - ie there are fewer notifications coming in after a week or more. About 15% of deaths are typically notified on the next day, 50% within two days, and 90% within a week.
Also "Francis" already knows this, because "he's" the one who alerted me to the dataset in the first place...
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
If it turns out to be the case that white people are less at risk from covid-19, it is a moral and political dilemma of biblical proportions for governments across the world. They would have to treat people differently, in many different ways, based on skin colour.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
Yup. If I were oooh - scratches head - a mad Chinese politician creating a Satan Bug to provoke carnage and chaos in the West, I would make the virus discriminate by ethnicity, in favour of whites, thus adding a race war to the mix.
What if you were oooh - strokes chin - a horror/dystopian fiction writer. What could you make of it?
This horror-show looks like a gift to writers, but I am not at all sure it is.
Partly it's because the reality far outdoes any believable fiction, eg the PM of GB nearly dying, but recovering on Easter Sunday? Any editor would strike that out on grounds of credibility.
More importantly, I don't think readers like to read about plague.
I was having this debate with some creative-type friends on Whatsapp the other day: where is all the great plague fiction? Given what a compelling and momentous subject it, and how it can change worlds, it should inspire as much great writing as war (which inspires so much)
But it doesn't.
After much head scratching, seeking great fiction which is about the plague, these friends could only come up with
Camus's The Plague The Book of Exodus (!?) and maybe Defoe (but that's really journalism)
It's a tiny amount.
My theory is that people don't want to anticipate the horrors of plague beforehand (just like governments) and after the plague is done, they want to forget everything about plagues as soon as poss.
Get the epidemic under control so you can implement other less crude ways of minimising cases and deaths.
Buy you time to prepare for those other ways.
The length and severity of lockdown is in large measure an indication of failure by ours and other governments to control the epidemic and to prepare. Governments won't admit that, of course.
As Sweden seems to be demonstrating to the would, (only time will fully tell) if sensible advise was given early enough, then a forceful lock-down would not have been necessary. IMO
Get the epidemic under control so you can implement other less crude ways of minimising cases and deaths.
Buy you time to prepare for those other ways.
The length and severity of lockdown is in large measure an indication of failure by ours and other governments to control the epidemic and to prepare. Governments won't admit that, of course.
Your opening line there is almost a Tim Vine joke about origami!
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
If it turns out to be the case that white people are less at risk from covid-19, it is a moral and political dilemma of biblical proportions for governments across the world. They would have to treat people differently, in many different ways, based on skin colour.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
Yup. If I were oooh - scratches head - a mad Chinese politician creating a Satan Bug to provoke carnage and chaos in the West, I would make the virus discriminate by ethnicity, in favour of whites, thus adding a race war to the mix.
What if you were oooh - strokes chin - a horror/dystopian fiction writer. What could you make of it?
This horror-show looks like a gift to writers, but I am not at all sure it is.
Partly it's because the reality far outdoes any believable fiction, eg the PM of GB nearly dying, but recovering on Easter Sunday? Any editor would strike that out on grounds of credibility.
More importantly, I don't think readers like to read about plague.
I was having this debate with some creative-type friends on Whatsapp the other day: where is all the great plague fiction? Given what a compelling and momentous subject it, and how it can change worlds, it should inspire as much great writing as war (which inspires so much)
But it doesn't.
After much head scratching, seeking great fiction which is about the plague, these friends could only come up with
Camus's The Plague The Book of Exodus (!?) and maybe Defoe (but that's really journalism)
It's a tiny amount.
My theory is that people don't want to anticipate the horrors of plague beforehand (just like governments) and after the plague is done, they want to forget everything about plagues as soon as poss.
That is indeed one of the points that has been made about the influenza outbreak of 1918-1919 - very little literature about it too, and yet compare the Great War - lots of great books.
I'm mildly surprised to find that J. G. Ballard didn't write a plague novel - his oeuvre seems so relevant today.
And was Camus's novel not more of an allegory of enemy occupation anyway?
You could argue this is a class thing - BAME patients are likely to be poorer - but it isn't. The richer BAME surgeons and doctors are also dying in disproportionate numbers.
You could argue this is a genetic thing - if this was just happening to people of, say, African origin. But it isn't. It is hitting BAME patients from all ethnicities - Middle east, south Asian, Latin American.
It is very strange and I have yet to see a satisfying explanation. Maybe there isn't one, and it is just a cruel combination of factors.
If it turns out to be the case that white people are less at risk from covid-19, it is a moral and political dilemma of biblical proportions for governments across the world. They would have to treat people differently, in many different ways, based on skin colour.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
Yup. If I were oooh - scratches head - a mad Chinese politician creating a Satan Bug to provoke carnage and chaos in the West, I would make the virus discriminate by ethnicity, in favour of whites, thus adding a race war to the mix.
What if you were oooh - strokes chin - a horror/dystopian fiction writer. What could you make of it?
This horror-show looks like a gift to writers, but I am not at all sure it is.
Partly it's because the reality far outdoes any believable fiction, eg the PM of GB nearly dying, but recovering on Easter Sunday? Any editor would strike that out on grounds of credibility.
More importantly, I don't think readers like to read about plague.
I was having this debate with some creative-type friends on Whatsapp the other day: where is all the great plague fiction? Given what a compelling and momentous subject it, and how it can change worlds, it should inspire as much great writing as war (which inspires so much)
But it doesn't.
After much head scratching, seeking great fiction which is about the plague, these friends could only come up with
Camus's The Plague The Book of Exodus (!?) and maybe Defoe (but that's really journalism)
It's a tiny amount.
My theory is that people don't want to anticipate the horrors of plague beforehand (just like governments) and after the plague is done, they want to forget everything about plagues as soon as poss.
Doesn't Atwood's Maddaddam trilogy involve a plague or similar to get them to where they are in the novels?
One of the overlooked aspects of the pandemic, for those of us who fly, is that it has probably hastened the end of the 747 as a passenger airplane, though it will continue to carry much of the world's air freight, and is the final nail in the coffin of the A380, which is going out of production anyway. A few airlines - Emirates for example - who fly exclusively long haul, will keep them, but otherwise it's pretty much sayonara.
This is quite something twitter.com/SP_Duckworth/status/1250036384200634368?s=20
The article does rather reinforce the question I have had for a while now. Our NHS appears to have done a remarkable job expanding capacity and not becoming overloaded / crashed like Italy, Spain or NY.
From the media footage, there is no signs of the chaos, busy yes, but not beds in hallways, sick people sleeping on coats on floors and doctors working 18hrs a day 7 days a week and having to sleep in their offices, because of being totally overwhelmed.
But....the number of people dying is on par with all these. I wonder why?
Sweden is, still, an interesting anomaly
With no lockdown they have a considerably worse situation than Finland, Norway etc. BUT there are not doing spectacularly worse. There is no breakdown in health care, no tsunami of deaths, even if the toll is grim.
From what I hear from Swedish colleagues, it seems that many/most people are voluntarily observing restrictions there: no going out to restaurants/bars even though they're open.
To be fair, I'd imagine there is an Easter weekend effect there, because deaths have been very low for the last two days.
But the total death toll is now far higher than in Norway, despite the two countries having had very similar numbers in mid-March.
The government didn`t expect lockdown to be observed so well, and it intended more people to carry on working than has proved to be the case. That, plus the excess NHS capacity, argues for an easing of lockdown. That is, if you agree that the purpose of lockdown was to stop the NHS from "falling over" whilst building up as much immunity in the population as possible.
The other argument, of course, is that the government should be containing the virus as much as possible, whatever this takes. But those advocating this approach fail to appreciate that the virus will still be present when we come out of lockdown eventually and fewer will be immune under this approach, and the economy and our freedoms will have been trashed even further.
The quicker the lockdown is ended then the less has to be spent on furlough schemes.
And Universal Credit etc.
Schools back after the May bank holiday would be a good start - keep the wrinklies in their hutch for while.
Wrong. Do it too soon and you end up spending more and scarring the economy as the disruption ends up lasting longer.
IF NHS capacity is being built up then we should be able to cope with a second surge.
That's why we are all at home, right?
How big a surge? If we have a second surge and don't reduce the infectivity number below 1, it goes exponential. People really seem to have difficulty grasping exponential growth. We've pretty much choked off the exponential growth we had when we locked down on 23rd March (by which date we were experiencing 54 deaths per day). If we hadn't, it'd be (obviously) worse.
We've dealt with this surge by heroic methods. If we let it rip in a second surge then no, the build up of NHS capacity won't be enough.
As an example: before the lockdown, our hospitalisation rate (and death rate) were more or less doubling every three days.
Say we increase NHS capacity so that it has four times as much capacity as needed at a surge of the current level.
Have a second surge to the same level before lockdown and we can cope. Wait three extra days to lockdown, and we can still cope. Wait six days and we saturate. Wait nine days and we don't have half as much capacity as we need.
Wait four weeks and we'd not have even 1% of the capacity we'd need.
Looking at the US, I'm astounded that you can lay Michelle Obama for 22 on Betfair for Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate.
If she wanted to be the Presidential candidate all she had to was put her hand up, so it does seem unlikely she now wants to be VP?
I suspect it is because it's though if she was asked, she would answer the call for her party, her country. And there is a material risk that she may yet be asked. Biden currently looks like he is crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, with a piano on his back.
This is quite something twitter.com/SP_Duckworth/status/1250036384200634368?s=20
The article does rather reinforce the question I have had for a while now. Our NHS appears to have done a remarkable job expanding capacity and not becoming overloaded / crashed like Italy, Spain or NY.
From the media footage, there is no signs of the chaos, busy yes, but not beds in hallways, sick people sleeping on coats on floors and doctors working 18hrs a day 7 days a week and having to sleep in their offices, because of being totally overwhelmed.
But....the number of people dying is on par with all these. I wonder why?
My guess is that, when the dust settles and we review the handling, a few issues will come out.
1. The UK was relatively slow to lock down. I understand some of the reasons for that (long haul, fatigue risk, economy) but an internal debate over herd immunity also delayed it - it was sub-optimal.
2. We've not done well on testing, which is unhelpful on spread. I suspect (and it's only a suspicion) we have quite a high infection rate relative to others.
3. The benefit of the NHS is enough command and control to give a genuinely national service (so less problem than Italy with insufficient resource for local clusters). But there are also drawbacks - historical resourcing means I suspect there are overall fewer staff per patient and we're slower to put into intensive care (i.e. the average resource received is slightly lower but the range is less - almost everyone has decent but not amazing care). Some procurement decisions early on were also problematic in this respect.
4. I think the media shield us from some of the worst news to avoid panic. It's rather different showing scenes at an Italian hospital in terms of fear, to be blunt. The health service has coped pretty well compared with similar countries, but probably not quite as well as current news reports indicate.
5. Possibly we have more underlying at-risk groups - relatively poor general health compared with southern Europe, and an older population than NY. But I'm far from sure on that.
There's another possible explanation - perhaps it makes makes little difference whether or not there is enough ICU capacity, because putting patients in ICU doesn't actually much reduce the number who end up dying.
Possibly the opposite. That other countries have a higher survival rate in ICU than the UK does. Or that more people come out the other side of ICU than in the UK - either because of a better survival rate or more people go into the ICU system in the first place.
Interesting article from the CEO of Germany's biggest ventilator manufacturer:
"It’s not about [how demanding the device is], but about the person who is attached to it. You have to be able to evaluate the person’s state and know how to precisely adjust the device to first save the person's life and then ensure that they quickly grow healthy again. This requires years of experience"
We're focused on the equipment but it's the staff that are the critical resource. That's from a manufacturer of that equipment.
There does look like there is something worth investigating in regards higher BAME deaths. I fear it will turn into a the usual suspects jumping on their hobby horses, with the right making claims about immigrants living in overcrowded housing, poorer diet choices, etc and the left saying its all down to poverty, racism, etc.
To be honest I thought it would be that. It makes sense. But I was corrected by someone who posted out that the middle class BAMEs are also more affected
NHS doctors is a group that won't tend towards poverty, over crowded houses, poor diet choices etc. for example. Yet the skew in the numbers is very apparent.
Yeah but they’re getting the virus in their face a dozen times a day.
As are white doctors. But the BAME doctors are dying in much greater numbers. The first ten doctorly deaths were all BAME
Not to minimize the deaths of these individuals, but the thinking displayed in tweet is classic probabilistic fallacy. If I told you I flipped 10 heads, does that mean my coin is unfair / weighted?
Well, how many coin tosses would you need before you'd consider whether it was a weighted coin? And how many to conclude it is (or isn't)?
Isn't this just Bayesian inference? It may or may not turn out that BAME medics are more at risk (for some reason) but it's not a logical fallacy.
The data from the last few days is almost certainly distorted by the impact of the bank holiday weekend.The government does not seem to think that the pandemic has yet peaked. On such matters, I'm inclined to believe them.
Comments
I do wonder whether those of us with ancestors who lived in temperate regions may have developed some additional tolerance to the adverse effects of the type of viruses that are prevalent in these climates, just as they developed pale skin in order to maintain vitamin D levels despite low levels of sunlight.
It is a gamble he needs to make
Sweden 23 people/km2; UK 274 (For comparison US = 34). But...
Sweden 87.4% urbanised; UK 83.4%. (US 82.3%)
Anyone wonder why the amount of hospitalizations is so low proportionately in the UK compared to other countries and yet the proportion of deaths to hospitalization is much higher .
Patients were aged between 34 and 102 years old. 58 of the 744 patients (aged between 38 and 96 years old) had no known underlying health condition.
What is education? We are running a full online timetable, with the same lessons, marking, reporting and so on. If you mean socialisation then that's not the remit of education, as home schoolers will know.
I get that some want to use schools as guinea pigs but you are going to find that it's a very bad choice for the reasons already stated and more. I was reading a good NYT article yesterday and they were addressing the same question, with schools there off until September. They have the Summer Camp tradition and young staff alongside young students sounds a perfect fit for this situation. Maybe government could use school premises over July and August to do something similar.
Soldier A (screaming, after a blast): I've lost my leg, I've lost my leg.
Soldier B: No you haven't, it's over here.
We need the daily breakdown figures.
How many weeks are we into this and they are still writing this crap.
If someone wrote this as a screenplay, the film would be too controversial to be made.
Tomorrow or Thursday is when we will see if it is going to shoot up to 900+ again or if perhaps things are levelling off.
Do it too soon and you end up spending more and scarring the economy as the disruption ends up lasting longer.
It is not very surprising that a technical artefact made to one specification doesn't pass another.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/plane-fares-could-double-lockdown1
Also, if he hadn't noticed, they might be a tad busy with all hands on deck fighting a global pandemic.
Poor diets are affected by poverty but not necessarily financial poverty - there's no shortage of people who go to grotty takeaways rather than spend less and cook themselves.
On Alastair's point, surely the point is that going through an EU-wide procurement process doesn't create any extra PPE, but it does add an extra layer of bureaucracy. It is by no means obvious that pooled procurement is better.
Someone can dig up a cumulative graph I'm sure
That's why we are all at home, right?
I can't see future government being comfortable with such a scenario. How we more forward is a big question, so that for crucial supplies from base chemicals to drugs, we aren't beholden to such a foreign power.
And if your condition worsens you ring an ambulance not a service like 111. Too many people are leaving it too late in the UK to seek medical help .
And even if they do get through to 111 are they being given the right advice.
What I find offensive is that time is wasted on these stunts. One is reminded of the crazy counter productive efforts made by Mao Tse Tung to divert production to steel production. It really is time that government ministers stopped asking their cronies, and started asking people that actually understand how these things are made and how they can use our excellent contract manufacturing industry to partner with companies outside UK under licence.
South Korea big outbreak, the whacky cult. Iran. Northern Italy with big catholic following. Jews in the UK massively over-represented.
- Get the epidemic under control so you can implement other less crude ways of minimising cases and deaths.
- Buy you time to prepare for those other ways.
The length and severity of lockdown is in large measure an indication of failure by ours and other governments to control the epidemic and to prepare. Governments won't admit that, of course.https://www.travellingtabby.com/scotland-coronavirus-tracker
Given the absolute numbers, however, it may (also?) be an stochastic founder effect (in the technical ecological sense).
More generally the fear is of someone inporting the disease into an area where the local health services can't cope. In Barra, at the direct local equivalent of NHS Louisa Jordan in Glasgow is - literally - the church hall. And because there are so few people the existing services are very limited even for food and so on.
It doesn't take a lot to overwhelm them without warning, especially if second homers break the regulations and try to move in, ditto renters. It could all come unstuck very quickly if you are unlucky where you are living.
No obvious trends in the regional reporting breakdown. Early reporting development still relatively stable; no material signs of any changes due to the bank holiday weekend (although might be something to come tomorrow, I guess).
8 April starting to look less like an outlier, possibly because the later reporting has sped up a bit in the last week (ie fewer late notifications coming in).
Two to the power of 10 is 1,024.
So it's a one in a thousand (roughly) chance that this is coincidence, given the roughly 50% proportion of NHS workers who aren't white.
And their error bars for todays death toll was anywhere between ~250 and 4000+....4000+...they really need to turn that model off, it is pumping out total horseshit.
Looking at recent elections:
2016 - Pence (Indiana) and Kaine (Virginia) both "carried" their state, but neither was seriously in play (Virginia is often close-ish, and was again, but has trended Democrat for many years).
2012 - Ryan (Wisconsin) and Biden (Delaware) - Delaware was never in play anyway, and Ryan didn't make Wisconsin seriously competitive.
2008 - Palin (Alaska) and Biden (Delaware) - neither were ever even remotely swing states.
2004 - Cheney (Wyoming) and Edwards (North Carolina) - Wyoming is rock solid, and Edwards failed to bring North Carolina into play.
2000 - Cheney (Wyoming) and Lieberman (Connecticut) - neither were swing states. And Gore didn't carry his own state (Tennessee).
You have to go back to 1960 to see the textbook example of the VP carrying a crucial state - Johnson in Texas. But Texas was fairly blue back then (although it had backed Eisenhower). Indeed, Humphrey carried it in 1968 with a Minnesota/Maine ticket, and while losing to Nixon nationally.
You're looking at a VP pick far too narrowly by geography. What Johnson brought to the Kennedy ticket was much more than a state - he brought age, experience, toughness, Protestantism. There's a certain mythology over Texas in 1960 - but it was only the 10th closest margin in the country (by %). There's a good chance Kennedy would have won it anyway, but would he have carried Illinois?
What Biden needs to do is address a bigger weakness in his campaign which is that he's an old man and so needs a VP pick who commands total confidence as a potential President (he's also "old skool" so needs a woman on the ticket - but he's already confirmed that).
If we have a second surge and don't reduce the infectivity number below 1, it goes exponential.
People really seem to have difficulty grasping exponential growth. We've pretty much choked off the exponential growth we had when we locked down on 23rd March (by which date we were experiencing 54 deaths per day).
If we hadn't, it'd be (obviously) worse.
We've dealt with this surge by heroic methods. If we let it rip in a second surge then no, the build up of NHS capacity won't be enough.
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/
To save you some time, I can tell you that the reporting delay has been generally stable for some time. Possibly later reporting has gotten better in the last week or so - ie there are fewer notifications coming in after a week or more. About 15% of deaths are typically notified on the next day, 50% within two days, and 90% within a week.
Also "Francis" already knows this, because "he's" the one who alerted me to the dataset in the first place...
https://twitter.com/cricketwyvern/status/1250058129485815808?s=20
I'm mildly surprised to find that J. G. Ballard didn't write a plague novel - his oeuvre seems so relevant today.
And was Camus's novel not more of an allegory of enemy occupation anyway?
But the total death toll is now far higher than in Norway, despite the two countries having had very similar numbers in mid-March.
Say we increase NHS capacity so that it has four times as much capacity as needed at a surge of the current level.
Have a second surge to the same level before lockdown and we can cope. Wait three extra days to lockdown, and we can still cope. Wait six days and we saturate. Wait nine days and we don't have half as much capacity as we need.
Wait four weeks and we'd not have even 1% of the capacity we'd need.
And an elephant atop the piano.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-ventilator-manufacturer-absolutely-mission-impossible-a-549d1e18-8c21-45f1-846f-cf5ca254b008
This quote caught my eye:
"It’s not about [how demanding the device is], but about the person who is attached to it. You have to be able to evaluate the person’s state and know how to precisely adjust the device to first save the person's life and then ensure that they quickly grow healthy again. This requires years of experience"
We're focused on the equipment but it's the staff that are the critical resource. That's from a manufacturer of that equipment.
Isn't this just Bayesian inference? It may or may not turn out that BAME medics are more at risk (for some reason) but it's not a logical fallacy.