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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Pelosi says Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 caused “unnecessa
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Pelosi says Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 caused “unnecessary deaths”. Could the same be said of Team Johnson?
Nancy Pelosi has made public a letter she’s sent to her Congress colleagues in which she charged Trump with missteps in handling the coronavirus pandemic that “caused unnecessary death and economic disaster” in the US. That’s a big accusation given how close we are to WH2020.
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oh, first
ah well second - not so much fun there
The verdict is still not clear on lockdown, especially if Sweden avoids having the most deaths per head in Europe and still has not lockeddown
If you want a near neighbour of Germany and Denmark to slag off, why not start with Belgium which is the worst hit location in the world.
Also Johnson never said it was a hoax, he initiated a lockdown, which if started in February would have not been accepted by people.
Welcom to PB @mike9978h
Everyone opposed to the government’s response should agree.
https://www.businessinsider.nl/germany-why-coronavirus-death-rate-lower-italy-spain-test-healthcare-2020-3?international=true&r=US
This is not a high bar.
And we know that in Germany, the PCR test was produced by the private sector and a lot of the labs that normally do testing for the health system (and are crucial to why Germany has massive capacity) are also private. I have a feeling the likes of the Guardian won't be too happy for us to copy that model either.
Neither is true, but the fact so many seem to believe both together is rather odd.
https://twitter.com/DHSCgovuk/status/1250782047095922690?s=20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5OAjnveyJo
Anyway, have to head off. Today is wedding anniversary, so a nice dinner to prepare and plenty of wine to drink!
Deaths up, why isn't the lockdown working?
How many people have you killed by not locking down earlier?
Not enough tests, why?
When is lock down ending?
When is lock down ending?
When is lock down ending?
When is lock down ending?
When is lock down ending?
When is lock down ending?
When is lock down ending?
When is lock down ending?
When is lock down ending?
Indeed, Doctors themselves may differ.
Is there an international 'Corona death' standard to which all countries comply?
Search group urged to respect EU laws as it joins forces with Apple in response to pandemic" (£ or via Google search)
https://www.ft.com/content/f705b090-7c91-49eb-8d00-490da4c6a017
In my mind the best stats are for total deaths, against previous years and adjusted for population. We can predict what the death rate would have been in a 'normal' year and see the 'excess deaths'. As with most stats, it's not perfect - there will have been a reduction in traffic and industrial accidents causing death, and those arising from complications from surgery. But it's probably the best statistic we have.
Deaths generally don't go unrecorded for more than a day or two, whereas determination of cause of death varies across jurisdictions and even between hospitals.
The scientists have been used as human shields, the Chancellor has been bold and imaginative, Boris has genuinely suffered, there is really no doubt that everyone is doing their best. Does that mean everything has gone or is going right? Of course not. But right now normal politics is pretty much stopped and those whinging from the side lines are probably doing themselves more harm than good.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/15/romanian-fruit-pickers-flown-uk-crisis-farming-sector-coronavirus
And how many more times. This isn;t lives v economy its lives versus lives. The lives the worst recession in a century are bound to take.
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1250787119271993344
I'm beginning to enjoy the journalist's questions. Their stupidity knows no bounds. It's like watching pantomime characters, each vying to be sillier than the one before. Peston is my favourite at the moment. Nothing like a bit of knockabout comedy.
Even funnier is that they take themselves seriously.
But its surely possible to quarantine older folk whilst at the same time keeping the wheels of commerce turning.
On Thursday, the government said hospitals would be allowed to perform all procedures, including elective surgeries, while hair salons and massage parlours will be allowed to reopen.
Primary schools, shops and markets will reopen on May 11, while secondary schools, vocational schools and universities will reopen on June 8.
The shape of this is reasonably clear even if the detail isn't.
Travel is going to be vastly reduced, especially international travel.
Nearly all cruise ships will never sail again.
Restaurants and bars are going to struggle for a very long time as crowds stay away.
Internet businesses will thrive.
IT businesses will thrive helping people to keep WFH even when its safe(ish) to go back to the office.
Gyms, cinemas, theatres all have very difficult work to do and many will not survive.
There is going to be a strong drive here and elsewhere to domestic sufficiency with more things manufactured and grown here rather than relying upon international supply chains.
This is going to undermine free trade and drive us back to mercantilism.
The State is going to be far more interventionist and a much bigger player in our economy for good or ill.
How all this shakes out is hard to be completely confident about. We will be poorer, that is for sure, but there will be opportunities.
There's a fine line to tread here, and several factors to take into account. Right now, the critical path is health service capacity, and thankfully we appear to be remaining below it.
There's a case to slowly ease the lockdown as the number of cases in hospitals fall, but it's going to be done very slowly and with a number of *weeks* between each stage to ensure we don't get a surge in cases. I would think that anyone usually based in an office will be working from home for several months to come, but schools, shops and restaurants could be allowed to reopen by the end of April if the number of hospitalised cases is falling.
Temporal dynamics in viral shedding and transmissibility of COVID-19
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0869-5
We report temporal patterns of viral shedding in 94 patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 and modeled COVID-19 infectiousness profiles from a separate sample of 77 infector–infectee transmission pairs. We observed the highest viral load in throat swabs at the time of symptom onset, and inferred that infectiousness peaked on or before symptom onset. We estimated that 44% (95% confidence interval, 25–69%) of secondary cases were infected during the index cases’ presymptomatic stage, in settings with substantial household clustering, active case finding and quarantine outside the home. Disease control measures should be adjusted to account for probable substantial presymptomatic transmission....
Still, blue passports eh?
There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made of the government - and no doubt there will be more over the next few weeks and months.
Comparisons with Trump are not among them.
https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/tomswalkforthenhs
https://twitter.com/Benfogle/status/1250673774967611393?s=19
Hundreds of the Penlon Prima ESO2, which is an updated version of an existing model, are expected to be built for hospitals over the next week.
But the consortium of major firms that helped to develop it hopes to make about 1,500 a week by the start of May.
*One university lab was saying it could potentially do 30,000 tests per day IIRC.
Ferguson said he would like to see the government move faster to put a plan in place for what happens when measures are partially lifted, saying he did not see the same level of planning going on that was put into Brexit....
If you want to save the economy at that cost just make sure you are first in the queue for catching the virus.
Not sure why this is in the thread header as it is completely untrue. The US, Spain, Italy and France all have more deaths than the UK.
This kind of blatant politicking does no one any favours.
Meanwhile, over in the US - which does deserve huge criticism - this table of the spike in unemployment by state is staggering. In Michigan, for example: 31% of those in employment in February are now unemployed:
https://twitter.com/ernietedeschi/status/1250765289689579522
On reflection, its probably time I stopped.
Von der Leyen admite que no estaban preparados y pide perdón a Italia: la presidenta de la Comisión Europea, la alemana Úrsula Von der Leyen, ha reconocido que la UE no estaba preparada para la pandemia y ha lamentado la falta de coordinación y solidaridad entre los Estados miembros cuando los primeros casos en Italia alertaron de la llegada de la enfermedad a Europa.
"Es cierto que nadie estaba realmente preparado para esto, pero también es cierto que hubo demasiadas ausencias cuando Italia necesitó ayuda en los primeros momentos", ha dicho en una comparecencia ante el Parlamento europeo.
Von der Leyen cree "de justicia" que la UE pida "perdón de todo corazón" a los italianos y que esa disculpa se traduzca también en un "cambio de actitud".
Of course it could have been "pushed through" earlier.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport/25751787
And one week earlier, which seem entirely possible, would likely have reduced the number of infections by nearly three quarters.
It would, of course, have down little to help with getting the necessary infrastructure and planning in place for easing the lockdown. The apparent tardiness of which is (fairly or unfairly) increasingly becoming a source of irritation.
On that latter point, this is a good article:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/04/16/the-shutdown-backlash-is-coming-soonwith-a-vengeance-189809
...Among the questions looming over American politics is about the nature of what promise to be multiple backlashes over different dimensions of the coronavirus crisis. Most obvious is what price Trump pays for his administration’s tardiness in responding to the contagion in its early stages. Less obvious is what price supporters of activist government pay for the most astounding and disruptive intervention in the everyday life of the nation since World War II.
The imminent libertarian surge is not a sure thing but it more than a hunch. In informal conversations, one hears the sentiment even from people I know to be fundamentally progressive and inclined to defer to whatever health officials say is responsible and necessary to mitigate the worst effects of coronavirus. It is possible both to support the shutdown and powerfully resent it — the draconian nature of the response, and the widespread perception that to voice skepticism of any aspect of its necessity is outside respectable bounds....
And then go on to argue:
“Those advocating an end to the lockdown are right in one narrow respect: the current lockdown is unsustainable in the long term.”
https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/04/16/the-pale-horse-politics-in-the-shadow-of-covid-19/
Executive summary: everything the government does is wrong and always will be.
1) No restrictions on entry to the UK
2) A total failure to ramp up testing
And you failed to mention either.
UK (422), Italy (631), Spain (342) and France (148).
I suspect we could have gone into lockdown at the same time as Spain and France (a week earlier when our death level was only 55) but I think it's the nature of these crises that we always wish we had done things earlier.
You got a source for that statement Mike ?
Can the moderators not remove untruths from thread headers?
There are charges that can be laid against Boris's government but this is not one.
Early on testing and contact tracing was good. Then there was a deliberate policy change to only hospital admissions and only use PHE lab.
Now definitely issues with swabs, reagents and PCR machines. But i think what happened was the government thought the antibody tests would work and they would have 17 million of these things by now.
Where they failed, was they put all the eggs in that basket. The ventaliator challenge was the right approach, lets develop 4 different strands to increase capacity. One of those hasn't panned as quite as hoped, but we got more capacity from the other 3 and these CPAP masks as well.
They should have done the same for testing. Opened up to uni and industry and said can you do PCR testing, can you do drive throughs, etc.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-in-the-uk-why-calculating-the-death-toll-is-so-difficult-pxcn9ppkw
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52103808
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/official-coronavirus-death-tolls-are-only-estimate-problem-n1183756
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/31/counting-coronavirus-different-countries-calculating-death-tolls/
https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-03-30/tracking-the-coronavirus-why-does-each-country-count-deaths-differently.html
You just cba to look for them.
The government eventually, after several false starts, put together a pretty good financial package for the crisis (though the implementation of that package has been lamentable). The general messaging has been effective, as shown by the substantial compliance with it.
It has also made serious mistakes, some of which appear to be ideologically motivated. Others seem to be the product of an excessive desire to be popular. As a result, the cost to the country, both financially and in lives, seems set to be far greater than it need to have been.
The irrational hostility from government acolytes to any suggestion that it has made mistakes shows just how debased British politics have become.
To help researchers access structured and unstructured data quickly, IBM Research has developed a cloud-based AI research service that has ingested a corpus of thousands of papers from the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) and licensed databases from DrugBank, Clinicaltrials.gov and GenBank. This tool uses advanced AI, allowing users to make specific queries to the collections of papers and extract critical COVID-19 knowledge – including embedded text, tables and figures.
http://research.ibm.com/covid19/deep-search/
It will be interesting to know if they have found a use for AI besides self-crashing cars and those annoying pop-up chatbots on web sites.
https://unherd.com/2020/04/how-trump-intends-to-fix-the-vote/?tl_inbound=1&tl_groups[0]=18743&tl_period_type=3