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)
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
I think people are drawing the wrong conclusions from Sweden. If they can implement lockdown by consent rather than by diktat you get to the same result. In practice it seems they can get part of the way by consent.
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.
It's so poor it's comic.
As of today they are predicting 21,310 first wave deaths in total for Italy (nudged up from their prediction of roughly 20,000 yesterday)
As of yesterday the total ACTUAL deaths in Italy were 20,465. So the UoW are predicting that coronavirus will kill several hundred more Italians in the next few hours...... and then stop. Completely stop. No more deaths.
It is embarrassingly wrong. I wonder if there is just a computer spunking out these daft numbers and no human ever checks.
I worry about just what exactly the people creating this model are thinking. Not just massively incorrect input data and death totals that have already basically been reached in the real world, but at the core of their model.
Their range of prediction for a total for tomorrow are significantly wider than for the forthcoming days or weeks down the road. That is the inverse of what you should be getting. Given all the data to date, you should be able to produce a reasonable prediction for tomorrow, it is further into the future where your confidence should be far less.
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.
Isn't that the point which Boris was making about the nurses looking after him, that they stayed monitoring and adjusting the equipment for him.
The OBR forecasts just published make good reading for Sunak.
35% shrinkage in GDP in 2Q
2m extra unemployed.
and just the GBP218bn in extra debt this year.
That GBP218bn will hang like an albatross around this government neck. It will ensure they can do nothing for the rest of this parliament but try to steal money from conservative voters when they are not looking.
Well, its their call!
No. They create a separate facility in the Bank of England to monetise the debt (it's not unbearable in the context of the £2.5 trillion M4 supply in the UK as of October 19).
Over time it would be ideal to sterilise that additional supply. In my view the easiest way to do that would be to create a specific "Coronavirus Recovery Contribution", payable over 10 years. I'd base that on property as it's easy to attach a specific liability to it and a reasonable proxy for wealth.
Savills says the value of residential housing is £7.3 trillion. So let's say that you ask people to pay 3% of the value of their house at a rate of 0.3% per year (0.1% = £73bn). If you don't have the cash it can be rolled up for 10 years with an interest rate equal to the 10 year government bond rate.
To put it in perspective, that means someone with an average UK house (£233K) is being asked to contribute £700 per year or £7,000 upfront. The average Londoner would be asked to pay about £2,000 per year or £20,000 over 10 years. The average house owner in Kensington and Chelsea (£2m) would be paying £6,000 per year or £60,000 over 10 years.
At the end of 2030 the Corona debt is fully sterilised.
Would this be just for those in work? I can’t see how most pensioners could contribute anything when their income is compared to the value of their house.
So they roll up for the 10 years set against the value of their property. After that they would need to realise assets to pay it off
It would not be a good look if relatively wealthy pensioners (by virtual of the fact they own their house - I haven't dug out the stats but I suspect most will be mortgage free at this point) are perceived as not making a contribution to national recovery.
Poor pensioners, though, would be in dire trouble. Maybe if they could sign away a percentage of the property instead, to be realised on their death or if they sell it.
By definition a pensioner owning a house is not "poor".
Moreover, let's assume that they are, and have just turned 65. Why are they not realising assets to improve their quality of life? 3% of the value of the house is not a huge amount.
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.
Anyone could forecast a range of 14k to 50k. It's a useless prediction.
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.
Some highlights from that tweet - things are pretty close to collapse by the sound of it
13 April The Swedish strategy will “probably end in a historical massacre” says Head Doctor at a major hospital in Sweden.
9 April Swedish Police now preparing for riots as more patients will be refused care.
5 April REVEALED: Critical shortage of important medicines in Sweden now.
4 April Swedish hospitals are at a breaking point now – will have to end the intensive care treatment for a large number of Intensive Care Patients.
A leaked internal newsletter to the staff at Karolinska Hospital (Sweden’s best hospital) reveals that the intensive care units are now in a critical stage, where they no longer will be able to give care to a large number of patients.
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.
Isn't that the point which Boris was making about the nurses looking after him, that they stayed monitoring and adjusting the equipment for him.
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 figures quite a lot in Edgar Allan Poe.
It does seem to figure much more in writing for TV and cinema. Although more in the zombie end of the market, which - so far - hasn't figured as a Covid-19 outcome.
Mr. Eadric, I'm mildly surprised there isn't a Grey Death book (zombie apocalypse meets 14th century England).
Mr Dancer, you should write one yourself.
He's already cracked the title.
I always find that if I have a title I'm compelled to write a blogpost around it. It's always the hardest bit so I'm not going to let a good one go to waste.
Mr. Meeks, a kind suggestion, and I occasionally consider it, but I don't really have the time.
It's very difficult to make money writing fiction. Even 'successful' writers often make less than £10,000 in a year from it. The likes of Tom Knox are very much the exception to the rule.
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?
Yes, it is the most asinine politicking. Given that this pattern is echoed across the world (BAME people dying in greater numbers) they might end up accusing the coronavirus of being a bigot. Or maybe God?
There could be several conclusions. There may be nothing going on. It may be to do with the actual work BAME medics are doing. It may be regional (more BAME medics in particularly affected areas) There may be a physiological reason why infection rates are greater. There may be a physiological reason why death rates are higher.
And it's perfectly possible there could be a material change to approach depending on outcome. Some of the above would suggest no action. But others may suggest more frequent testing for BAME medics, or giving them more duties involving hospital wards NOT dealing directly with coronavirus, or protecting a subset of BAME medics over 55 or whatever.
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?
Slightly. Countries that implemented measures early and effectively are coming out of lockdown earlier, presumably with less damage. Denmark is an example of that. That's why I said the length and severity of lockdown is partly an indication of failure, not that lockdown was implemented at all.
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!
Selectivity always causes problems at the margins, here with policing issues presumably.
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.
And an elephant atop the piano.
I'm not sure it matters much who Biden picks for VP. If Trump is judged to have handled the pandemic well, and if the economy shows signs of life then he will win. That's why the Democrats and the media are endlessly going on about how badly Trump is handling things and how he should have done more sooner, thus saving lives etc.
Mr. Eadric, I'm mildly surprised there isn't a Grey Death book (zombie apocalypse meets 14th century England).
Mr Dancer, you should write one yourself.
He's already cracked the title.
I always find that if I have a title I'm compelled to write a blogpost around it. It's always the hardest bit so I'm not going to let a good one go to waste.
Someone once posted a hilarious Terminator meets Jane Austin story on-line.
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.
Isn't that the point which Boris was making about the nurses looking after him, that they stayed monitoring and adjusting the equipment for him.
I don't know this for sure, but it is likely that countries with five times the number of ICU beds (Germany - see the article) will also have a much larger number of experienced staff. The UK can ramp up the equipment - less important - but not so much the staff, that are the vital resource here,
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?
Yes, it is the most asinine politicking. Given that this pattern is echoed across the world (BAME people dying in greater numbers) they might end up accusing the coronavirus of being a bigot. Or maybe God?
I've posted earlier on here that CV19 is definitely Green and didn't the Green Goddess make an appearance a few days 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.
Isn't that the point which Boris was making about the nurses looking after him, that they stayed monitoring and adjusting the equipment for him.
So they roll up for the 10 years set against the value of their property. After that they would need to realise assets to pay it off
It would not be a good look if relatively wealthy pensioners (by virtual of the fact they own their house - I haven't dug out the stats but I suspect most will be mortgage free at this point) are perceived as not making a contribution to national recovery.
Poor pensioners, though, would be in dire trouble. Maybe if they could sign away a percentage of the property instead, to be realised on their death or if they sell it.
By definition a pensioner owning a house is not "poor".
Moreover, let's assume that they are, and have just turned 65. Why are they not realising assets to improve their quality of life? 3% of the value of the house is not a huge amount.
Did not expect to have you arguing for increase taxation of property! I entirely agree that pensioners having to give 3% less of their house to their children is not unreasonable.
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.
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (time travel to English Black Death).
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.
Isn't that the point which Boris was making about the nurses looking after him, that they stayed monitoring and adjusting the equipment for him.
I don't know this for sure, but it is likely that countries with five times the number of ICU beds (Germany - see the article) will also have a much larger number of experienced staff. The UK can ramp up the equipment - less important - but not so much the staff, that are the vital resource here,
"Germany has plenty of hospital beds in its intensive care units. What it doesn't have is enough personnel."
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!
Of course, that was precisely what the government was stupid enough to think it could do initially, with the nonsense about "cocooning" the elderly while the virus made its way through the rest of the population.
It was so obvious that wouldn't work. You have only to look at what's happening now in care homes, even with 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.
It's so poor it's comic.
As of today they are predicting 21,310 first wave deaths in total for Italy (nudged up from their prediction of roughly 20,000 yesterday)
As of yesterday the total ACTUAL deaths in Italy were 20,465. So the UoW are predicting that coronavirus will kill several hundred more Italians in the next few hours...... and then stop. Completely stop. No more deaths.
It is embarrassingly wrong. I wonder if there is just a computer spunking out these daft numbers and no human ever checks.
I worry about just what exactly the people creating this model are thinking. Not just massively incorrect input data and death totals that have already basically been reached in the real world, but at the core of their model.
Their range of prediction for a total for tomorrow are significantly wider than for the forthcoming days or weeks down the road. That is the inverse of what you should be getting. Given all the data to date, you should be able to produce a reasonable prediction for tomorrow, it is further into the future where your confidence should be far less.
Even more worrying, this UoW model is apparently regarded as very authoritative in America, and is used by the US government.
And even a blind layman with Alzheimer's can see it is rubbish.
Well we went with Ferguson's model...that one he doesn't actually know what all the code does, because he wrote it 13 years ago and didn't document it properly....and got swine flu totally wrong.
Luckily, we now have a lot of people working on fresh takes on that, but might only be useful for future waves.
Having done reading around a lot of this, I was quite shocked how backward a lot of this work is compared to bleeding edge modelling in other areas. I guess a failure of multi-disciplinary interaction and the fact that people banging on about global pandemics were seen a little bit like those at Hyde Park Corner screaming about the end of the world is nigh. While the techy community are much more interested in thing like self-driving cars and in terms of health using ML / AI for diagnostic analysis of MRI / X-Rays for things like cancer.
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.
The introduction to thw Decameron has a superb description of how people in Florence coped with the Black Death of 1348.
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!
Of course, that was precisely what the government was stupid enough to think it could do initially, with the nonsense about "cocooning" the elderly while the virus made its way through the rest of the population.
It was so obvious that wouldn't work. You have only to look at what's happening now in care homes, even with a lockdown.
Most elderly people don't live in care homes. So, no, it's not obvious at all. In fact it's likely to be what the UK, and other countries, end up doing.
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.
Perhaps it's just a question of underlying conditions.
e.g. East Africans (I think) disproportionately suffer from sickle cell anaemia, while people from the Indian sub-continent have higher incidence of diabetes. There are also differences in cardiology as a whole with African Americans (there are drugs that work for AAs but not for white/hispanic americans)
There has been some interesting preliminary research that is starting to theorise that there are in fact two different types of serious "responses". One that is like your typical ARDs and one that in layman's terms more akin to those that have suffered terrible altitude sickness.
Sticking people with the later "type" on a ventilator results in worsen of their condition.
Obama will apparently endorse Biden sometime today - CNN and Fox News
I presume he is going to be a lot more pro-active in this campaign than Clinton's. Both because of his closeness to Biden and the fact that last time they all clearly thought Hillary would walk it, so no need to be over-reaching.
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!
Of course, that was precisely what the government was stupid enough to think it could do initially, with the nonsense about "cocooning" the elderly while the virus made its way through the rest of the population.
It was so obvious that wouldn't work. You have only to look at what's happening now in care homes, even with a lockdown.
"That was what the government thought it could do initially, with "cocooning" the elderly while the virus made its way through the rest of the population.
What a more pleasant environment that would be for everyone
There has been some interesting preliminary research that is starting to theorise that there are in fact two different types of serious "responses". One that is like your typical ARDs and one that in layman's terms more akin to those that have suffered terrible altitude sickness.
Sticking people with the later "type" on a ventilator results in worsen of their condition.
I am not convinced by that. 90% of the deaths are occurring outside ICU, so in non ventilated patients.
But as I understand it, they aren't saying you are going to be fine with no treatment. Quite the opposite. More that the treatment needs to be very different and just sticking somebody on the standard treatment pathway, which ultimately leads to a ventilator at a certain stage may well worsen it in that second "type".
The other thing I believe we have seen, CPAP machines early on seem to significantly reduce chances of having to go near a ventilator.
Talk of airlines doubling fares as passengers would have to socially distance on board, so fewer seats used... what happens for full flights booked pre lockdown/virus?
@eadric Death In Venice is structured around a cholera epidemic.
More of a plot device than a subject, however?
Incidentally I am reading Camus now. It's a fine fine book. I know it is an allegory of Nazi occupation but it is also a very acute description of a plague outbreak -the denial leading up, the strange horrors during, the bizarre human reactions.
And all told in a delicately quiet style, contrasting with the enormities it analyses
It's a great book, even though I had to read it in sixth form French.
The OBR forecasts just published make good reading for Sunak.
35% shrinkage in GDP in 2Q
2m extra unemployed.
and just the GBP218bn in extra debt this year.
That GBP218bn will hang like an albatross around this government neck. It will ensure they can do nothing for the rest of this parliament but try to steal money from conservative voters when they are not looking.
Well, its their call!
No. They create a separate facility in the Bank of England to monetise the debt (it's not unbearable in the context of the £2.5 trillion M4 supply in the UK as of October 19).
Over time it would be ideal to sterilise that additional supply. In my view the easiest way to do that would be to create a specific "Coronavirus Recovery Contribution", payable over 10 years. I'd base that on property as it's easy to attach a specific liability to it and a reasonable proxy for wealth.
Savills says the value of residential housing is £7.3 trillion. So let's say that you ask people to pay 3% of the value of their house at a rate of 0.3% per year (0.1% = £73bn). If you don't have the cash it can be rolled up for 10 years with an interest rate equal to the 10 year government bond rate.
To put it in perspective, that means someone with an average UK house (£233K) is being asked to contribute £700 per year or £7,000 upfront. The average Londoner would be asked to pay about £2,000 per year or £20,000 over 10 years. The average house owner in Kensington and Chelsea (£2m) would be paying £6,000 per year or £60,000 over 10 years.
At the end of 2030 the Corona debt is fully sterilised.
That 0.3% per annum is a hell of a lot more swallowable than the 1% you previously suggested. When you're multiplying by such high property values, each decimal point makes a big difference.
I'd also hope that any such tax applied only to the net equity, not to the gross total of equity plus mortgage, as I've seen some lefties suggest.
Should be the value of the house, otherwise you incentivise excessive use of debt. Tax contributions should be independent of financing structure generally.
(The number is lower vs 1% because the debt figure here is £218bn vs the £500bn I'd plucked out of the air before. Additionally, I'd assumed value of housing was £5trn but Savills had a much higher number)
More generally we should shift taxation from things like employment and transaction taxes to wealth based taxes. Property is the easiest form of wealth to tax - I'd be in favour of a 1% annual tax anyway *provided* that it is used to reduce more damaging taxes/reduce the deficit
Talk of airlines doubling fares as passengers would have to socially distance on board, so fewer seats used... what happens for full flights booked pre lockdown/virus?
They put on 2 planes? There's no shortage. But I imagine that there will be a fair number of no shows one way and another so they might not need to.
@eadric Death In Venice is structured around a cholera epidemic.
More of a plot device than a subject, however?
Incidentally I am reading Camus now. It's a fine fine book. I know it is an allegory of Nazi occupation but it is also a very acute description of a plague outbreak -the denial leading up, the strange horrors during, the bizarre human reactions.
And all told in a delicately quiet style, contrasting with the enormities it analyses
Mann did also write The Magic Mountain - which may or may not qualify as pulmonary TB is (usually) a slow disease, though it was called the White Plague after all.
I think we can stick Ticketmaster on the bastard list. Apparently they have changed their TOS, no refunds unless a show is cancelled. If it is simply indefinitely postponed pending some as yet unknown rescheduled date, you can't get your money back.
The OBR forecasts just published make good reading for Sunak.
35% shrinkage in GDP in 2Q
2m extra unemployed.
and just the GBP218bn in extra debt this year.
That GBP218bn will hang like an albatross around this government neck. It will ensure they can do nothing for the rest of this parliament but try to steal money from conservative voters when they are not looking.
Well, its their call!
No. They create a separate facility in the Bank of England to monetise the debt (it's not unbearable in the context of the £2.5 trillion M4 supply in the UK as of October 19).
Over time it would be ideal to sterilise that additional supply. In my view the easiest way to do that would be to create a specific "Coronavirus Recovery Contribution", payable over 10 years. I'd base that on property as it's easy to attach a specific liability to it and a reasonable proxy for wealth.
Savills says the value of residential housing is £7.3 trillion. So let's say that you ask people to pay 3% of the value of their house at a rate of 0.3% per year (0.1% = £73bn). If you don't have the cash it can be rolled up for 10 years with an interest rate equal to the 10 year government bond rate.
To put it in perspective, that means someone with an average UK house (£233K) is being asked to contribute £700 per year or £7,000 upfront. The average Londoner would be asked to pay about £2,000 per year or £20,000 over 10 years. The average house owner in Kensington and Chelsea (£2m) would be paying £6,000 per year or £60,000 over 10 years.
At the end of 2030 the Corona debt is fully sterilised.
That 0.3% per annum is a hell of a lot more swallowable than the 1% you previously suggested. When you're multiplying by such high property values, each decimal point makes a big difference.
I'd also hope that any such tax applied only to the net equity, not to the gross total of equity plus mortgage, as I've seen some lefties suggest.
Should be the value of the house, otherwise you incentivise excessive use of debt. Tax contributions should be independent of financing structure generally.
Yes, taxing equity would just encourage people to take out the biggest mortgage possible and create all sorts of perverse incentives.
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!
Of course, that was precisely what the government was stupid enough to think it could do initially, with the nonsense about "cocooning" the elderly while the virus made its way through the rest of the population.
It was so obvious that wouldn't work. You have only to look at what's happening now in care homes, even with a lockdown.
Most elderly people don't live in care homes. So, no, it's not obvious at all. In fact it's likely to be what the UK, and other countries, end up doing.
Cacooning is a fair description of what many (all?) of the elderly are doing around us. Not entirely cut off from the outside world - but being helped out by those of us who are slightly more out and about than they are (but still highly risk averse). We are looking after their needs, supplying them with weekend newspapers, DVDs and other diversions, the occassional meal or treat from Fortnums dropped off - but they are all under effective house arrest.
Who knows how long they can keep this up before they go the full Assange and start smearing their shit on the walls? As many of them have been through the war or at least post-war rationing, I suspect most of them will cope better than folk half their age. They understand the alternative is risking a rather horrible, lonely death. Staying home with a Sudoku under those conditions is barely a hardship.
Should be the value of the house, otherwise you incentivise excessive use of debt. Tax contributions should be independent of financing structure generally.
(The number is lower vs 1% because the debt figure here is £218bn vs the £500bn I'd plucked out of the air before. Additionally, I'd assumed value of housing was £5trn but Savills had a much higher number)
More generally we should shift taxation from things like employment and transaction taxes to wealth based taxes. Property is the easiest form of wealth to tax - I'd be in favour of a 1% annual tax anyway *provided* that it is used to reduce more damaging taxes/reduce the deficit
It's a good plan, Charles. I'm happy to throw my weight behind it.
I think we can stick Ticketmaster on the bastard list. Apparently they have changed their TOS, no refunds unless a show is cancelled. If it is simply indefinitely postponed pending some as yet unknown rescheduled date, you can't get your money back.
This is why I buy tickets on my credit card.
I've given up on seeing Scooter on the 23rd of May.
I think we can stick Ticketmaster on the bastard list. Apparently they have changed their TOS, no refunds unless a show is cancelled. If it is simply indefinitely postponed pending some as yet unknown rescheduled date, you can't get your money back.
They obviously have a reason to discourage people from using their service, but it's not immediately apparent what that reason might be.
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!
Of course, that was precisely what the government was stupid enough to think it could do initially, with the nonsense about "cocooning" the elderly while the virus made its way through the rest of the population.
It was so obvious that wouldn't work. You have only to look at what's happening now in care homes, even with a lockdown.
Most elderly people don't live in care homes. So, no, it's not obvious at all. In fact it's likely to be what the UK, and other countries, end up doing.
Well, if you can't cocoon the huge number of elderly people who rely on care from younger people - either in a residential setting or in their own homes - how can such a policy work, unless you are assuming those people are just going to be sacrificed?
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.
And an elephant atop the piano.
I'm not sure it matters much who Biden picks for VP. If Trump is judged to have handled the pandemic well, and if the economy shows signs of life then he will win. That's why the Democrats and the media are endlessly going on about how badly Trump is handling things and how he should have done more sooner, thus saving lives etc.
I presume he is going to be a lot more pro-active in this campaign than Clinton's. Both because of his closeness to Biden and the fact that last time they all clearly thought Hillary would walk it, so no need to be over-reaching.
The whole thing is sickening and has inevitably been blown up by The National (or "McPravda" as it is unaffectionately known.)
The idea that the UK Govt or "the English" are deliberately discriminating against the poor beleaguered Scots is, of course, nonsense but feeds straight into the grievance narrative which seems to be so important to some strains of Scottish nationalism. It is completely contemptible but sadly it is a political fact of life that we have to deal with.
I think we can stick Ticketmaster on the bastard list. Apparently they have changed their TOS, no refunds unless a show is cancelled. If it is simply indefinitely postponed pending some as yet unknown rescheduled date, you can't get your money back.
This is why I buy tickets on my credit card.
I've given up on seeing Scooter on the 23rd of May.
I can't imagine ANY of the Muppets will be out by then.....
I think we can stick Ticketmaster on the bastard list. Apparently they have changed their TOS, no refunds unless a show is cancelled. If it is simply indefinitely postponed pending some as yet unknown rescheduled date, you can't get your money back.
They obviously have a reason to discourage people from using their service, but it's not immediately apparent what that reason might be.
Turns out it is the policy in America, the UK policy is largely unchanged.
Moron makes offensive joke about deadly disease shock.
Gallows humour is a phenomenon the world over in any and every circumstance.
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.
I always preferred:
Earl of Uxbridge: I lost my leg at Waterloo, don't you know
Young boy: Which platform?
(I know that he was actually the Marquess of Anglesey by the time Waterloo station was built... but the reference is to the reported conversation between Wellington and Uxbridge at the time:
Uxbridge: "By God, sir, I've lost my leg!" Wellington: "By God, sir, so you have!")
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
Even with a lockdown we seem to have more irresponsible idiots than Sweden has without one. You cannot simply assume that Brits would have behaved the way Swedes have if there had not been a lockdown.
Cacooning is a fair description of what many (all?) of the elderly are doing around us. Not entirely cut off from the outside world - but being helped out by those of us who are slightly more out and about than they are (but still highly risk averse). We are looking after their needs, supplying them with weekend newspapers, DVDs and other diversions, the occassional meal or treat from Fortnums dropped off - but they are all under effective house arrest.
Who knows how long they can keep this up before they go the full Assange and start smearing their shit on the walls? As many of them have been through the war or at least post-war rationing, I suspect most of them will cope better than folk half their age. They understand the alternative is risking a rather horrible, lonely death. Staying home with a Sudoku under those conditions is barely a hardship.
Yes, and of course it's not a binary thing. Those with a somewhat elevated risk profile (say a healthy 68 year old) might avoid restaurants and bars (and nightclubs!) but do a little shopping and other lower-risk activities, whereas a 75-year old with some underlying health issues might observe a stricter form of isolation.
The OBR forecasts just published make good reading for Sunak.
35% shrinkage in GDP in 2Q
2m extra unemployed.
and just the GBP218bn in extra debt this year.
That GBP218bn will hang like an albatross around this government neck. It will ensure they can do nothing for the rest of this parliament but try to steal money from conservative voters when they are not looking.
Well, its their call!
No. They create a separate facility in the Bank of England to monetise the debt (it's not unbearable in the context of the £2.5 trillion M4 supply in the UK as of October 19).
Over time it would be ideal to sterilise that additional supply. In my view the easiest way to do that would be to create a specific "Coronavirus Recovery Contribution", payable over 10 years. I'd base that on property as it's easy to attach a specific liability to it and a reasonable proxy for wealth.
Savills says the value of residential housing is £7.3 trillion. So let's say that you ask people to pay 3% of the value of their house at a rate of 0.3% per year (0.1% = £73bn). If you don't have the cash it can be rolled up for 10 years with an interest rate equal to the 10 year government bond rate.
To put it in perspective, that means someone with an average UK house (£233K) is being asked to contribute £700 per year or £7,000 upfront. The average Londoner would be asked to pay about £2,000 per year or £20,000 over 10 years. The average house owner in Kensington and Chelsea (£2m) would be paying £6,000 per year or £60,000 over 10 years.
At the end of 2030 the Corona debt is fully sterilised.
Would this be just for those in work? I can’t see how most pensioners could contribute anything when their income is compared to the value of their house.
So they roll up for the 10 years set against the value of their property. After that they would need to realise assets to pay it off
It would not be a good look if relatively wealthy pensioners (by virtual of the fact they own their house - I haven't dug out the stats but I suspect most will be mortgage free at this point) are perceived as not making a contribution to national recovery.
Poor pensioners, though, would be in dire trouble. Maybe if they could sign away a percentage of the property instead, to be realised on their death or if they sell it.
By definition a pensioner owning a house is not "poor".
Moreover, let's assume that they are, and have just turned 65. Why are they not realising assets to improve their quality of life? 3% of the value of the house is not a huge amount.
For many reasons, mainly that 'realising assets' is just not feasible for many. Great for the middle classes but not for a working class pensioner who has a home and a state pension and nothing else (like my parents). What are they supposed to do, sell and rent? There aren't many cheaper areas than where they already are for a start and they also need to stay close to where their support network is. What's wrong with paying on death? They probably don't have much more than ten/fifteen years left in any case.
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
Even with a lockdown we seem to have more irresponsible idiots than Sweden has without one. You cannot simply assume that Brits would have behaved the way Swedes have if there had not been a lockdown.
Why are left-wingers today always so authoritarian, having no trust in the public to do the right thing? It's a big mystery. There used to be a lot of left-wing libertarians around but they've mostly disappeared.
The OBR forecasts just published make good reading for Sunak.
35% shrinkage in GDP in 2Q
2m extra unemployed.
and just the GBP218bn in extra debt this year.
That GBP218bn will hang like an albatross around this government neck. It will ensure they can do nothing for the rest of this parliament but try to steal money from conservative voters when they are not looking.
Well, its their call!
No. They create a separate facility in the Bank of England to monetise the debt (it's not unbearable in the context of the £2.5 trillion M4 supply in the UK as of October 19).
Over time it would be ideal to sterilise that additional supply. In my view the easiest way to do that would be to create a specific "Coronavirus Recovery Contribution", payable over 10 years. I'd base that on property as it's easy to attach a specific liability to it and a reasonable proxy for wealth.
Savills says the value of residential housing is £7.3 trillion. So let's say that you ask people to pay 3% of the value of their house at a rate of 0.3% per year (0.1% = £73bn). If you don't have the cash it can be rolled up for 10 years with an interest rate equal to the 10 year government bond rate.
To put it in perspective, that means someone with an average UK house (£233K) is being asked to contribute £700 per year or £7,000 upfront. The average Londoner would be asked to pay about £2,000 per year or £20,000 over 10 years. The average house owner in Kensington and Chelsea (£2m) would be paying £6,000 per year or £60,000 over 10 years.
At the end of 2030 the Corona debt is fully sterilised.
That 0.3% per annum is a hell of a lot more swallowable than the 1% you previously suggested. When you're multiplying by such high property values, each decimal point makes a big difference.
I'd also hope that any such tax applied only to the net equity, not to the gross total of equity plus mortgage, as I've seen some lefties suggest.
Should be the value of the house, otherwise you incentivise excessive use of debt. Tax contributions should be independent of financing structure generally.
(The number is lower vs 1% because the debt figure here is £218bn vs the £500bn I'd plucked out of the air before. Additionally, I'd assumed value of housing was £5trn but Savills had a much higher number)
More generally we should shift taxation from things like employment and transaction taxes to wealth based taxes. Property is the easiest form of wealth to tax - I'd be in favour of a 1% annual tax anyway *provided* that it is used to reduce more damaging taxes/reduce the deficit
Like many people who are well off retired I am asset rich but do not have a high income as I don't need one. I have never benefited from a DB pension. Most of my asset value is in the house I live in which I will sell when I no longer need it and when I need cash and downsize and move to a smaller house.
I can't afford 1% of the property value a year or anything like it! That will apply to a lot of people.
I personally don't understand why CGT does not apply to the main residence. It has the benefit of only being charged when assets are materialised and will reduce house prices which would be a good thing. Unfortunately there would have to be some tapering as the change in house prices overnight might be dramatic.
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.
No-one actually ordered the 747-8 for a passenger rôle, did they?
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.
So you think that Maclaren FI, Penlon (a medical gas engineering company) and others shouldn't have got involved?
The whole point was trying multiple pathways of people with relevant skills to seek ways to expand capacity beyond what Smiths could just do on their own.
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.
The introduction to thw Decameron has a superb description of how people in Florence coped with the Black Death of 1348.
But the actual book after that is a huge diversion from the Plague itself - deliberately so, of course.
I mean great books that actually use plague as a subject. There are very few classic titles (compare to the thousands that deal with war)
I don't know if I'd consider it a classic, but "Station Eleven" buy Emily St John Mandel is the best that I can think of for an apocalyptic plague, its aftermath, and the relatively trifling concerns of what went before.
Plus also features the character of an old white guy who works in the Arts and is concerned with his virility - so right up your street, I think.
Well, if you can't cocoon the huge number of elderly people who rely on care from younger people - either in a residential setting or in their own homes - how can such a policy work, unless you are assuming those people are just going to be sacrificed?
When you say 'sacrificed', you must mean that there is some alternative choice which you think this evil government would deliberately not be making. I am sure that the entire world would love to know what it is, because not a single government on this earth has a better idea than selective lockdown combined with improved mitigation (changes in methods of providing care, better PPE and testing) so far.
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?
Crichton's Andromeda Strain? Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice & Salt
There was a book I remember reading years ago about someone digging up Spanish flu victims on Svalberg to make a biological weapon
So they roll up for the 10 years set against the value of their property. After that they would need to realise assets to pay it off
It would not be a good look if relatively wealthy pensioners (by virtual of the fact they own their house - I haven't dug out the stats but I suspect most will be mortgage free at this point) are perceived as not making a contribution to national recovery.
Poor pensioners, though, would be in dire trouble. Maybe if they could sign away a percentage of the property instead, to be realised on their death or if they sell it.
By definition a pensioner owning a house is not "poor".
Moreover, let's assume that they are, and have just turned 65. Why are they not realising assets to improve their quality of life? 3% of the value of the house is not a huge amount.
Did not expect to have you arguing for increase taxation of property! I entirely agree that pensioners having to give 3% less of their house to their children is not unreasonable.
I've argued for it for years! It's a much less economically damaging tax than others.
I think we can stick Ticketmaster on the bastard list. Apparently they have changed their TOS, no refunds unless a show is cancelled. If it is simply indefinitely postponed pending some as yet unknown rescheduled date, you can't get your money back.
The OBR forecasts just published make good reading for Sunak.
35% shrinkage in GDP in 2Q
2m extra unemployed.
and just the GBP218bn in extra debt this year.
That GBP218bn will hang like an albatross around this government neck. It will ensure they can do nothing for the rest of this parliament but try to steal money from conservative voters when they are not looking.
Well, its their call!
No. They create a separate facility in the Bank of England to monetise the debt (it's not unbearable in the context of the £2.5 trillion M4 supply in the UK as of October 19).
Over time it would be ideal to sterilise that additional supply. In my view the easiest way to do that would be to create a specific "Coronavirus Recovery Contribution", payable over 10 years. I'd base that on property as it's easy to attach a specific liability to it and a reasonable proxy for wealth.
Savills says the value of residential housing is £7.3 trillion. So let's say that you ask people to pay 3% of the value of their house at a rate of 0.3% per year (0.1% = £73bn). If you don't have the cash it can be rolled up for 10 years with an interest rate equal to the 10 year government bond rate.
To put it in perspective, that means someone with an average UK house (£233K) is being asked to contribute £700 per year or £7,000 upfront. The average Londoner would be asked to pay about £2,000 per year or £20,000 over 10 years. The average house owner in Kensington and Chelsea (£2m) would be paying £6,000 per year or £60,000 over 10 years.
At the end of 2030 the Corona debt is fully sterilised.
Would this be just for those in work? I can’t see how most pensioners could contribute anything when their income is compared to the value of their house.
So they roll up for the 10 years set against the value of their property. After that they would need to realise assets to pay it off
It would not be a good look if relatively wealthy pensioners (by virtual of the fact they own their house - I haven't dug out the stats but I suspect most will be mortgage free at this point) are perceived as not making a contribution to national recovery.
Poor pensioners, though, would be in dire trouble. Maybe if they could sign away a percentage of the property instead, to be realised on their death or if they sell it.
By definition a pensioner owning a house is not "poor".
Moreover, let's assume that they are, and have just turned 65. Why are they not realising assets to improve their quality of life? 3% of the value of the house is not a huge amount.
For many reasons, mainly that 'realising assets' is just not feasible for many. Great for the middle classes but not for a working class pensioner who has a home and a state pension and nothing else (like my parents). What are they supposed to do, sell and rent? There aren't many cheaper areas than where they already are for a start and they also need to stay close to where their support network is. What's wrong with paying on death? They probably don't have much more than ten/fifteen years left in any case.
Sell and move somewhere smaller?
In the case of the average home you are talking about £7k over 10 years.
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?
Ballard wrote a short story called Intensive Care Unit. Will Self read a small piece this morning on R4 about social distancing.
The OBR forecasts just published make good reading for Sunak.
35% shrinkage in GDP in 2Q
2m extra unemployed.
and just the GBP218bn in extra debt this year.
That GBP218bn will hang like an albatross around this government neck. It will ensure they can do nothing for the rest of this parliament but try to steal money from conservative voters when they are not looking.
Well, its their call!
No. They create a separate facility in the Bank of England to monetise the debt (it's not unbearable in the context of the £2.5 trillion M4 supply in the UK as of October 19).
Over time it would be ideal to sterilise that additional supply. In my view the easiest way to do that would be to create a specific "Coronavirus Recovery Contribution", payable over 10 years. I'd base that on property as it's easy to attach a specific liability to it and a reasonable proxy for wealth.
Savills says the value of residential housing is £7.3 trillion. So let's say that you ask people to pay 3% of the value of their house at a rate of 0.3% per year (0.1% = £73bn). If you don't have the cash it can be rolled up for 10 years with an interest rate equal to the 10 year government bond rate.
To put it in perspective, that means someone with an average UK house (£233K) is being asked to contribute £700 per year or £7,000 upfront. The average Londoner would be asked to pay about £2,000 per year or £20,000 over 10 years. The average house owner in Kensington and Chelsea (£2m) would be paying £6,000 per year or £60,000 over 10 years.
At the end of 2030 the Corona debt is fully sterilised.
Would this be just for those in work? I can’t see how most pensioners could contribute anything when their income is compared to the value of their house.
So they roll up for the 10 years set against the value of their property. After that they would need to realise assets to pay it off
It would not be a good look if relatively wealthy pensioners (by virtual of the fact they own their house - I haven't dug out the stats but I suspect most will be mortgage free at this point) are perceived as not making a contribution to national recovery.
Poor pensioners, though, would be in dire trouble. Maybe if they could sign away a percentage of the property instead, to be realised on their death or if they sell it.
By definition a pensioner owning a house is not "poor".
Moreover, let's assume that they are, and have just turned 65. Why are they not realising assets to improve their quality of life? 3% of the value of the house is not a huge amount.
For many reasons, mainly that 'realising assets' is just not feasible for many. Great for the middle classes but not for a working class pensioner who has a home and a state pension and nothing else (like my parents). What are they supposed to do, sell and rent? There aren't many cheaper areas than where they already are for a start and they also need to stay close to where their support network is. What's wrong with paying on death? They probably don't have much more than ten/fifteen years left in any case.
Sell and move somewhere smaller?
In the case of the average home you are talking about £7k over 10 years.
They already did that as they had no savings and, as paltry as the gains were, they've pretty much all gone now on living costs and the odd holiday. They live in a Park Home.
Why force them to pay what would be a crucial amount of their state pension when the same money could be taken when they have both passed? I'm perfectly fine with having it taken out of the property price when they're gone (or if in a care home). The poorest should not have to pay upfront and that should be made very clear.
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.
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (time travel to English Black Death).
The Stand by Stephen King. Which funnily enough is getting another tv adaptation this year.
Comments
Gilead’s Coronavirus Drug Trial Slowed by Lack of Eligible Recruitshttps://www.wsj.com/articles/gileads-coronavirus-drug-trial-slowed-due-to-lack-of-eligible-recruits-11582003594
Their range of prediction for a total for tomorrow are significantly wider than for the forthcoming days or weeks down the road. That is the inverse of what you should be getting. Given all the data to date, you should be able to produce a reasonable prediction for tomorrow, it is further into the future where your confidence should be far less.
Moreover, let's assume that they are, and have just turned 65. Why are they not realising assets to improve their quality of life? 3% of the value of the house is not a huge amount.
13 April
The Swedish strategy will “probably end in a historical massacre” says Head Doctor at a major hospital in Sweden.
9 April
Swedish Police now preparing for riots as more patients will be refused care.
5 April
REVEALED: Critical shortage of important medicines in Sweden now.
4 April
Swedish hospitals are at a breaking point now – will have to end the intensive care treatment for a large number of Intensive Care Patients.
A leaked internal newsletter to the staff at Karolinska Hospital (Sweden’s best hospital) reveals that the intensive care units are now in a critical stage, where they no longer will be able to give care to a large number of patients.
So far.
It's very difficult to make money writing fiction. Even 'successful' writers often make less than £10,000 in a year from it. The likes of Tom Knox are very much the exception to the rule.
And it's perfectly possible there could be a material change to approach depending on outcome. Some of the above would suggest no action. But others may suggest more frequent testing for BAME medics, or giving them more duties involving hospital wards NOT dealing directly with coronavirus, or protecting a subset of BAME medics over 55 or whatever.
So it's not futile by any means.
https://twitter.com/BloodyPolitics/status/1250061561235988480?s=20
I entirely agree that pensioners having to give 3% less of their house to their children is not unreasonable.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/covid-19-highlights-staff-shortages-at-german-hospitals-a-dc13b683-3884-4683-b9c0-68e0084a1f70
Patients per nurse ratio, 13 in Germany, 8.6 UK, USA 5.3.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-big-wave-of-corona-cases-will-hit-german-hospitals-in-10-to-14-days-a-45cd754c-e179-4dbb-8caf-8f6074e641cf
It was so obvious that wouldn't work. You have only to look at what's happening now in care homes, even with a lockdown.
Luckily, we now have a lot of people working on fresh takes on that, but might only be useful for future waves.
Having done reading around a lot of this, I was quite shocked how backward a lot of this work is compared to bleeding edge modelling in other areas. I guess a failure of multi-disciplinary interaction and the fact that people banging on about global pandemics were seen a little bit like those at Hyde Park Corner screaming about the end of the world is nigh. While the techy community are much more interested in thing like self-driving cars and in terms of health using ML / AI for diagnostic analysis of MRI / X-Rays for things like cancer.
e.g. East Africans (I think) disproportionately suffer from sickle cell anaemia, while people from the Indian sub-continent have higher incidence of diabetes. There are also differences in cardiology as a whole with African Americans (there are drugs that work for AAs but not for white/hispanic americans)
What a more pleasant environment that would be for everyone
The other thing I believe we have seen, CPAP machines early on seem to significantly reduce chances of having to go near a ventilator.
(The number is lower vs 1% because the debt figure here is £218bn vs the £500bn I'd plucked out of the air before. Additionally, I'd assumed value of housing was £5trn but Savills had a much higher number)
More generally we should shift taxation from things like employment and transaction taxes to wealth based taxes. Property is the easiest form of wealth to tax - I'd be in favour of a 1% annual tax anyway *provided* that it is used to reduce more damaging taxes/reduce the deficit
Who knows how long they can keep this up before they go the full Assange and start smearing their shit on the walls? As many of them have been through the war or at least post-war rationing, I suspect most of them will cope better than folk half their age. They understand the alternative is risking a rather horrible, lonely death. Staying home with a Sudoku under those conditions is barely a hardship.
I've given up on seeing Scooter on the 23rd of May.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvE9hCZ-jaU
The idea that the UK Govt or "the English" are deliberately discriminating against the poor beleaguered Scots is, of course, nonsense but feeds straight into the grievance narrative which seems to be so important to some strains of Scottish nationalism. It is completely contemptible but sadly it is a political fact of life that we have to deal with.
https://www.nme.com/news/music/ticketmaster-criticised-for-coronavirus-refund-policy-2646164
Earl of Uxbridge: I lost my leg at Waterloo, don't you know
Young boy: Which platform?
(I know that he was actually the Marquess of Anglesey by the time Waterloo station was built... but the reference is to the reported conversation between Wellington and Uxbridge at the time:
Uxbridge: "By God, sir, I've lost my leg!"
Wellington: "By God, sir, so you have!")
I can't afford 1% of the property value a year or anything like it! That will apply to a lot of people.
I personally don't understand why CGT does not apply to the main residence. It has the benefit of only being charged when assets are materialised and will reduce house prices which would be a good thing. Unfortunately there would have to be some tapering as the change in house prices overnight might be dramatic.
NEW THREAD
The whole point was trying multiple pathways of people with relevant skills to seek ways to expand capacity beyond what Smiths could just do on their own.
Not all were going to work, but worth trying.
Plus also features the character of an old white guy who works in the Arts and is concerned with his virility - so right up your street, I think.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice & Salt
There was a book I remember reading years ago about someone digging up Spanish flu victims on Svalberg to make a biological weapon
In the case of the average home you are talking about £7k over 10 years.
Why force them to pay what would be a crucial amount of their state pension when the same money could be taken when they have both passed? I'm perfectly fine with having it taken out of the property price when they're gone (or if in a care home). The poorest should not have to pay upfront and that should be made very clear.