OT. Probably won't mean anything much to anyone other than climbers but the great Joe Brown, one of the pioneers of British climbing and mountaineering has died aged 89.
Overall the government has done pretty well on this, given the huge initial uncertainties and the sheer scale of the challenge. Most of the criticisms are either simple partisan sniping, based on hindsight, or unrealistic. For example, it's all very well saying we should have tested on a much larger scale early on. Tested with what diagnostic kits and reagents? You can't just magic up 100,00 test kits a day for an entirely novel virus, and the facilities to process them, from thin air.
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:
I would suggest the testing policy is the one big area the government can be criticized. Things like PPE shortages, they are worldwide, and bit tricky when the UK biggest producer has all its stock and factories seized by the Chinese.
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.
Agreed. I still don't understand why we have not been able to ramp up faster. It is surely not beyond our technical capacity ?
The other thing I would strongly criticise is their neglect of social care, and in particular nursing homes. It's been something of a refrain on here that this was just a private sector responsibility. It isn't.
One of the features of our lockdown is that it is less strict than other places. It was presented as a 'marathon not a sprint'; presumably one of the reasons for allowing non essential work to continue was to have a slightly higher R at a slightly lower economic cost than would otherwise be the case. Personally I'm actually thankful for that. But the collorary is that it will go on, and should go on for longer than it otherwise might have done
The other crucial point here is that it is naive in the extreme to judge the success or otherwise of any government's response by the total cumulative mortality rate to the 16th April. We have to look at the full 2020 (and maybe 2021) figures to form a firm view.
What everyone seems to have forgotten is that the original purpose of lockdown was to prevent the epidemic getting so out of control as to overwhelm the NHS. As such it has been, so far, extremely successful. Lockdown is not intended, and never could, prevent the epidemic spreading for ever. Deaths 'prevented' (up until the point where the health service is overwhelmed) are most likely not prevented at all, but postponed until lockdown is relaxed.
Given that the EU Head Ursula von Leyden fromally apologised to Italy today for its failure to respond quickly enough to the situation in Italy as it developed and for remaining too slow in its response, he may have a point.
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".
This is a dumb move by the Government. With us leaving there is no reason for us to be caught up in anything we don't want to be as far as new EU moves go related to CV19. This just makes it all the more likely that we end up leaving with a deal that is sub-optimal for both sides. I really don't see any sensible argument against an extension under what are extraordinary circumstances.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
Particularly irritating are people who argue "The government was slow to lock down (apparently flirting with allowing the disease to spread widely first to get to an early herd immunity) and the lockdown has been mild by international standards."
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.”
Executive summary: everything the government does is wrong and always will be.
The purpose of lockdown is to get control over the epidemic so it replicates at a rate less than one. Which combined with extensive testing allows you to selectively ease restrictions on a risk controlled basis.
Those that locked down earlier will see a shorter full lockdown period, less death and less economic damage. It's what it is.
NHS 111 diagnosis peaked on the day lockdown came in, so potentially more like 4 weeks past peak infection, 3 peaks past peak symptom onset, 1 week past peak deaths.
"I just wonder whether in the UK the Johnson government is open to similar charges in that it in can be argued that its early handling has excerbated the crisis and contributed to the UK having the second highest number of deaths in the world."
Can the moderators not remove untruths from thread headers?
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
Particularly irritating is people who argue "The government was slow to lock down (apparently flirting with allowing the disease to spread widely first to get to an early herd immunity) and the lockdown has been mild by international standards."
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.”
Executive summary: everything the government does is wrong and always will be.
I didn’t say that, because I don’t believe that.
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.
Overall the government has done pretty well on this, given the huge initial uncertainties and the sheer scale of the challenge. Most of the criticisms are either simple partisan sniping, based on hindsight, or unrealistic. For example, it's all very well saying we should have tested on a much larger scale early on. Tested with what diagnostic kits and reagents? You can't just magic up 100,00 test kits a day for an entirely novel virus, and the facilities to process them, from thin air.
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:
I would suggest the testing policy is the one big area the government can be criticized. Things like PPE shortages, they are worldwide, and bit tricky when the UK biggest producer has all its stock and factories seized by the Chinese.
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.
Agreed. I still don't understand why we have not been able to ramp up faster. It is surely not beyond our technical capacity ?
The other thing I would strongly criticise is their neglect of social care, and in particular nursing homes. It's been something of a refrain on here that this was just a private sector responsibility. It isn't.
No expert in PCR testing, but my understanding is we are still having to do this mostly by hand. Some poor sods are sitting there pipetting each individual sample.
There are robotic machines that can do this, but we don't have many and they take time to get setup properly.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
Particularly irritating is people who argue "The government was slow to lock down (apparently flirting with allowing the disease to spread widely first to get to an early herd immunity) and the lockdown has been mild by international standards."
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.”
Executive summary: everything the government does is wrong and always will be.
I didn’t say that, because I don’t believe that.
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.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
That is quite clearly incorrect. We'd seen what was happening in Italy, and people were practically begging the government to take decisive action. In the end many people took things into their own hands by voluntarily taking their kids out of school and starting to self-isolate. There is very little excuse for the government's failure to act more quickly.
By a few days, some were. But while things like cancelling the Cheltenham meeting would no doubt have helped, the very fact that so many people did go there and congregated at such close quarters suggests that there wasn't widespread organic distancing. But to have really made a difference would have meant doing it weeks earlier - and it's unclear whether people would have been content to take such an economic hit at that point.
To the extent that people were self-isolating, weren't most cases due to either the individual themselves or a member of their hosehold having shown possible symptoms, rather than pre-emptive voluntary isolations?
If we go on listening to obsessives like this we won,t be Argentina we will be Zimbabwe.
You think crunching the numbers doesn't matter? Not even for the case you are pretending to make about lives vs economy? What else do you think we should be guided by?
The deaths numbers being 'crunched are completely unreliable, because as just been proved there is no set definition of a corona death.
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.
They are not completely unreliable. Unless you think it makes no odds whether we are losing 3 people a day or 30,000 people a day to coronavirus, we need to take them and make them more reliable, even to do your "lives vs lives" calculation. There's a thousand discussions going on as to how to do this, as you would know if you took an informed and intelligent interest in the subject. As it is, you just want to tell us that you are the only person in the world clever enough to spot that lockdown has its downsides. I would be prepared to bet, if the bet were testable, that you could not tell us without googling it the definition of R0.
Wrong. There are no discussions going on about this, the few sceptics like Hitchens and Co who are asking awkward questions are the subject of a vicious hate campaign - which is part of the reason I am on here doing this
Those are not discussions about whether the UK government's response to this virus has been proportionate or overbearing, reckless, ill founded and enormously counter productive.
"The biggest mistake the UK and US governments made was not following South Korea and Germany in mass testing early enough."
Was that even an option for us?
Variations of this criticism crop up often, especially among journalists, but I have trouble understanding it.
As far as I can tell, testing has always been limited by capacity - or are the critics claiming that the UK government can in fact do more testing but refuses to do so?
If testing is indeed limited by capacity, then calling lack of testing a "big mistake" is a bit weird - the mistake was made ages ago when building lab capacity - it wasn't an error made in the early part of the pandemic.
If the complaint is that testing capacity hasn't increased quickly enough - then isn't that a failure of Public Health England?
I'd like to understand exactly what people are complaining about when they say the UK's approach to testing was/is wrong.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
That is quite clearly incorrect. We'd seen what was happening in Italy, and people were practically begging the government to take decisive action. In the end many people took things into their own hands by voluntarily taking their kids out of school and starting to self-isolate. There is very little excuse for the government's failure to act more quickly.
By a few days, some were. But while things like cancelling the Cheltenham meeting would no doubt have helped, the very fact that so many people did go there and congregated at such close quarters suggests that there wasn't widespread organic distancing. But to have really made a difference would have meant doing it weeks earlier...
That is incorrect. Given the doubling rate of three to four days, a single week could have made a very large difference.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
And yet many other countries managed to lock down when they had far fewer deaths per capita than the UK did when it locked down. Of course it could have been "pushed through" earlier.
You say "of course" it (the legislation) could have been pushed through earlier. Was it even ready? In an ideal world, the government would have introduced the Bill before - or at least at the same time as - it brought in the lock-down. That the initial phase had no legal basis suggests that the very lengthy Bill might well have still been being drafted at the time.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
Particularly irritating is people who argue "The government was slow to lock down (apparently flirting with allowing the disease to spread widely first to get to an early herd immunity) and the lockdown has been mild by international standards."
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.”
Executive summary: everything the government does is wrong and always will be.
I didn’t say that, because I don’t believe that.
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.
If we go on listening to obsessives like this we won,t be Argentina we will be Zimbabwe.
You think crunching the numbers doesn't matter? Not even for the case you are pretending to make about lives vs economy? What else do you think we should be guided by?
The deaths numbers being 'crunched are completely unreliable, because as just been proved there is no set definition of a corona death.
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.
They are not completely unreliable. Unless you think it makes no odds whether we are losing 3 people a day or 30,000 people a day to coronavirus, we need to take them and make them more reliable, even to do your "lives vs lives" calculation. There's a thousand discussions going on as to how to do this, as you would know if you took an informed and intelligent interest in the subject. As it is, you just want to tell us that you are the only person in the world clever enough to spot that lockdown has its downsides. I would be prepared to bet, if the bet were testable, that you could not tell us without googling it the definition of R0.
Wrong. There are no discussions going on about this, the few sceptics like Hitchens and Co who are asking awkward questions are the subject of a vicious hate campaign - which is part of the reason I am on here doing this
Those are not discussions about whether the UK government's response to this virus has been proportionate or overbearing, reckless, ill founded and enormously counter productive.
That is the topic I post on.
I used the confusion of the 'death count' and the absurd reliance on it to help my argument.
Utter nonsense . What have the UK been stopped from doing during the transition period . This will be the latest slogan used to dupe the gullible . And there are certainly plenty of those amongst the public.
Overall the government has done pretty well on this, given the huge initial uncertainties and the sheer scale of the challenge. Most of the criticisms are either simple partisan sniping, based on hindsight, or unrealistic. For example, it's all very well saying we should have tested on a much larger scale early on. Tested with what diagnostic kits and reagents? You can't just magic up 100,00 test kits a day for an entirely novel virus, and the facilities to process them, from thin air.
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:
I would suggest the testing policy is the one big area the government can be criticized. Things like PPE shortages, they are worldwide, and bit tricky when the UK biggest producer has all its stock and factories seized by the Chinese.
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.
Contact tracing was abandoned when people were exposed to multiple possible sources of infection and it was no longer possible to say with confidence where the patient had been infected. Once the virus is endemic a lockdown is the only way to reduce R0. Testing really doesn't help with that except in the most obvious vectors such as front line NHS staff who could infect others.
Testing more broadly would have given us more information and allowed us to test the iceberg theory. But it is pretty fanciful to conclude that it would have saved lives or indeed changed the policies that we used.
Of course many countries have simply banned arrivals from Britain, except for their own nationals.
They're all wrong and we're right?
But that really isn't the choice, is it ? We're talking about a complete absence of any kind of screening. Asking if we should ban all arrivals isn't an answer to that.
I think the answer is that it doesn't work. Screening by temperature misses the asymptomatic and those with mild symptoms, and catches a lot of other people. No other country is currently much worse than us so it doesn't really matter. And to do it properly the Government would have to rent hotels and quarantine everyone for 14 days under house arrest,
New Zealand managed it. If people genuinely, really genuinely need to fly they'll accept quarantine on each end.
The difference being that the number of visitors who genuinely, really genuinely, need to fly to New Zealand is statistically zero.
Why do people (Other than repatriation) need to fly here during a lockdown ?
Fruit pickers?
Why? There are masses of people furloughed. A special dispensation to pick fruit for extra money could be very attractive. 'land army' etc.
We are literally flying in fruit pickers right now
On topic, the government’s paramount priority remains Brexit purity. If some people die in a pandemic as a result, that’s a regrettable necessity for them.
That is an unfair and partisan attack on the Government. We are doing as well as France in terms of testing, and have mobilized quickly.
The government turned down an opportunity to get additional supplies of PPE because it would have involved working with the EU. People enjoying this sunny day will almost certainly die as a result of that ideological decision.
Still, blue passports eh?
You were telling us on the previous thread that we would lose out because we did not participate in the EU tender for PPE & ventilators.
UK getting additional ventilators built by Airbus .McClaren et al as reported on Sky next week,France expecting new ventilators via EU tender in July.
The other crucial point here is that it is naive in the extreme to judge the success or otherwise of any government's response by the total cumulative mortality rate to the 16th April. We have to look at the full 2020 (and maybe 2021) figures to form a firm view.
What everyone seems to have forgotten is that the original purpose of lockdown was to prevent the epidemic getting so out of control as to overwhelm the NHS. As such it has been, so far, extremely successful. Lockdown is not intended, and never could, prevent the epidemic spreading for ever. Deaths 'prevented' (up until the point where the health service is overwhelmed) are most likely not prevented at all, but postponed until lockdown is relaxed.
Just as extremely naive to claim, "Overall the government has done pretty well on this"
We don't know what will happen later on. What we can say is that compared with other countries the UK has seen a high mortality rate so far. I'm happy to judge the government on that, particularly given that it seems connected to decisions it took and decisions it didn't take, which other countries with lower mortality rates did take.
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
Moreover, the number of new infection was already falling before lockdown started, so the idea we were far too late seems to be rather short of actual data.
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.
It is traditional that Belgium hosts our conflicts, so only fitting it should host the Covid-19 conflict too.
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
The ideas behind the financial response are pretty good, as I said. It’s the implementation that’s been lamentable.
The main cause of educational inequality as I have told you before is parents and not necessarily because they are rich but because they value education and push their children. This is why some demographics do better than others. Their parents come from a culture that values education and even if they are poor they will take time to help with homework, get them reading, home tutor them on top of it.
A child with parents that do not give a toss about education and see it as a waste of time as you just claim dole and deal some weed on the side innit....those will always struggle and as a group do poorly.
You want educational inequality gone....take parents out of the loop and you would have more success
Good points. But it's both the parents AND their money. I want to take just the second out of the equation. The inequality this leaves - which is substantial - can and should be tolerated.
Ok so inequality in education only matters to you when it is caused by money. Even though the other that you don't want to address is both much bigger and also impacts on the other kids who are trying to learn as children of those parents tend to be disruptive in the classroom and take up teacher time to deal with and make it more difficult for those to learn to do so?
By the way should someone tell Kinablu we changed thread so he achieves thread equality?
Overall the government has done pretty well on this, given the huge initial uncertainties and the sheer scale of the challenge. Most of the criticisms are either simple partisan sniping, based on hindsight, or unrealistic. For example, it's all very well saying we should have tested on a much larger scale early on. Tested with what diagnostic kits and reagents? You can't just magic up 100,00 test kits a day for an entirely novel virus, and the facilities to process them, from thin air.
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:
I would suggest the testing policy is the one big area the government can be criticized. Things like PPE shortages, they are worldwide, and bit tricky when the UK biggest producer has all its stock and factories seized by the Chinese.
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.
Contact tracing was abandoned when people were exposed to multiple possible sources of infection and it was no longer possible to say with confidence where the patient had been infected. Once the virus is endemic a lockdown is the only way to reduce R0. Testing really doesn't help with that except in the most obvious vectors such as front line NHS staff who could infect others.
Testing more broadly would have given us more information and allowed us to test the iceberg theory. But it is pretty fanciful to conclude that it would have saved lives or indeed changed the policies that we used.
I agree effectiveness of general population testing is over egged. But having ability to screen front line staff quickly is big for reducing spread. Also, due to nature of swab collection, most patients need multiple tests to confirm they have it, Early on, it was basically one test per patient per day, so lota more PPE had to be used until absolutely confirmed. Now we are seeing more like 2 tests per day per patient.
Denmark is doing roughly as well as the South West of England, by number of cases and deaths. They have similar populations, and similar population densities.
Studying what happened in Germany, though, is going to be extremely illuminating, in years to come.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
Comparison of number of deaths at start of respective lockdown is: 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.
Yes, I agree with that. But a week is probably about the earliest it could have been done. Certainly the delaying of the (pre-flagged) Cobra meeting until after a weekend off was as unforgivably relaxed approach at the time.
But politically, these details will be forgotten. Of more consequence will be the economic effects of the peak having risen as high as it has, and so taking as long as it will for the numbers to decline.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
Particularly irritating is people who argue "The government was slow to lock down (apparently flirting with allowing the disease to spread widely first to get to an early herd immunity) and the lockdown has been mild by international standards."
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.”
Executive summary: everything the government does is wrong and always will be.
I didn’t say that, because I don’t believe that.
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.
Theres been irrational hostility in the other direction as well, in insisting measures taken are unique when not unique, or uniquely bad when in fact just bad.
That may not be you, but it cannot be pretended it does not occur, and I should think automated blanket criticism of or excessive negativity toward government policy and response is as unwelcome as automated blanket acceptance of or excessive positivity toward government response.
And the truth may lean more to one side than being in the middle of those extremes, but let us all not repeat the egregious stupidity of Brexit debating in implying any who lean one way, whichever way, must therefore be essentially the same as the most extreme view on that side. It's done to both sides and unfair.
Utter nonsense . What have the UK been stopped from doing during the transition period . This will be the latest slogan used to dupe the gullible . And there are certainly plenty of those amongst the public.
Yep you are spot on I am afraid. I honestly do not understand this thinking from the Government. Even the argument about us having to continue to pay for a bit longer really doesn't hold up at a time when all financial restraint has gone out of the window to deal with the virus.
On topic, the government’s paramount priority remains Brexit purity. If some people die in a pandemic as a result, that’s a regrettable necessity for them.
That is an unfair and partisan attack on the Government. We are doing as well as France in terms of testing, and have mobilized quickly.
The government turned down an opportunity to get additional supplies of PPE because it would have involved working with the EU. People enjoying this sunny day will almost certainly die as a result of that ideological decision.
Still, blue passports eh?
You were telling us on the previous thread that we would lose out because we did not participate in the EU tender for PPE & ventilators.
UK getting additional ventilators built by Airbus .McClaren et al as reported on Sky next week,France expecting new ventilators via EU tender in July.
No matter how many times I point it out, Leavers seem incapable of understanding the difference between “or” and “and”..
There are care home workers relaxing in their gardens right now who will die in the coming weeks because the government decided that it could get all the PPE it needed without participating in the EU scheme.
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
Except again other countries have been able to make the money appear. Why is it realistic for them and not for us?
On topic, the government’s paramount priority remains Brexit purity. If some people die in a pandemic as a result, that’s a regrettable necessity for them.
That is an unfair and partisan attack on the Government. We are doing as well as France in terms of testing, and have mobilized quickly.
The government turned down an opportunity to get additional supplies of PPE because it would have involved working with the EU. People enjoying this sunny day will almost certainly die as a result of that ideological decision.
Still, blue passports eh?
You were telling us on the previous thread that we would lose out because we did not participate in the EU tender for PPE & ventilators.
UK getting additional ventilators built by Airbus .McClaren et al as reported on Sky next week,France expecting new ventilators via EU tender in July.
Will the EU tender process have caused unnecessary deaths?
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
"The biggest mistake the UK and US governments made was not following South Korea and Germany in mass testing early enough."
Was that even an option for us?
...
No, especially South Korea.
But it could be after the current lockdown.
If you get the cases down, and get the testing up... community testing once again becomes viable. At that point you can do contact and trace.
Except to contact and trace properly we need wide spread surveillance. Does the UK have the infrastructure to do this, even if we can convince the public to get onboard.
Remember South Korea is not only one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth, they had SARs and MERs and the result of that was the creation of all this tech in case it happened again.
They spent years creating an overall response system from lab capacity, to automated contact tracing and scheduling of test appointments based upon establishing priority.
Overall the government has done pretty well on this, given the huge initial uncertainties and the sheer scale of the challenge. Most of the criticisms are either simple partisan sniping, based on hindsight, or unrealistic. For example, it's all very well saying we should have tested on a much larger scale early on. Tested with what diagnostic kits and reagents? You can't just magic up 100,00 test kits a day for an entirely novel virus, and the facilities to process them, from thin air.
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:
I would suggest the testing policy is the one big area the government can be criticized. Things like PPE shortages, they are worldwide, and bit tricky when the UK biggest producer has all its stock and factories seized by the Chinese.
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.
Contact tracing was abandoned when people were exposed to multiple possible sources of infection and it was no longer possible to say with confidence where the patient had been infected. Once the virus is endemic a lockdown is the only way to reduce R0. Testing really doesn't help with that except in the most obvious vectors such as front line NHS staff who could infect others.
Testing more broadly would have given us more information and allowed us to test the iceberg theory. But it is pretty fanciful to conclude that it would have saved lives or indeed changed the policies that we used.
I agree effectiveness of general population testing is over egged. But having ability to screen front line staff quickly is big for reducing spread. Also, due to nature of swab collection, most patients need multiple tests to confirm they have it, Early on, it was basically one test per patient per day, so lota more PPE had to be used until absolutely confirmed. Now we are seeing more like 2 tests per day per patient.
The problem is that with NHS staff how often do you test them? Weekly? Given the apparent ability to shed virus pre symptoms that @Nigelb refers to downthread would even that be enough? This thing is indeed a bastard.
I notice the Smithson and the Guardian very rarely post anything positive about the Governments response. How about comparing our world leading employee/small business support with other countries? This isn`t done because the UK actually did well in that measure. Some areas we do well in, others we don't. To keep making political point scoring which the new shadow cabinet is trying to do is just unnecessary.
The Spectator has an article on the Prof Ferguson's prediction track record on recent disease outbreak.
Read it, calculate just how spectacularly out of the park he can be (always to the extreme upside) and ask yourself if this is the man we should be allowing to influence government policy.
A man who won;t even let us examine his methodology.
Utter nonsense . What have the UK been stopped from doing during the transition period . This will be the latest slogan used to dupe the gullible . And there are certainly plenty of those amongst the public.
Yep you are spot on I am afraid. I honestly do not understand this thinking from the Government. Even the argument about us having to continue to pay for a bit longer really doesn't hold up at a time when all financial restraint has gone out of the window to deal with the virus.
Maybe they are worried about these parts
There is no definitive cost to the settlement. The final cost to the UK will depend on future events such as future exchange rates and EU budgets.
the UK should neither pay more nor earlier than if it had remained a Member State. This means that the UK will make payments based on the outturns of EU budget.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
And yet many other countries managed to lock down when they had far fewer deaths per capita than the UK did when it locked down. Of course it could have been "pushed through" earlier.
You say "of course" it (the legislation) could have been pushed through earlier. Was it even ready? In an ideal world, the government would have introduced the Bill before - or at least at the same time as - it brought in the lock-down. That the initial phase had no legal basis suggests that the very lengthy Bill might well have still been being drafted at the time.
They could have made use of the Civil Contingecies act. That would not have required any sort of Parliamentary scrutiny at that point and could then have been superceeded by a properly considered act a week or two later
If we go on listening to obsessives like this we won,t be Argentina we will be Zimbabwe.
You think crunching the numbers doesn't matter? Not even for the case you are pretending to make about lives vs economy? What else do you think we should be guided by?
The deaths numbers being 'crunched are completely unreliable, because as just been proved there is no set definition of a corona death.
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.
They are not completely unreliable. Unless you think it makes no odds whether we are losing 3 people a day or 30,000 people a day to coronavirus, we need to take them and make them more reliable, even to do your "lives vs lives" calculation. There's a thousand discussions going on as to how to do this, as you would know if you took an informed and intelligent interest in the subject. As it is, you just want to tell us that you are the only person in the world clever enough to spot that lockdown has its downsides. I would be prepared to bet, if the bet were testable, that you could not tell us without googling it the definition of R0.
Wrong. There are no discussions going on about this, the few sceptics like Hitchens and Co who are asking awkward questions are the subject of a vicious hate campaign - which is part of the reason I am on here doing this
On reflection, its probably time I stopped.
Problem is that Hitchens and Co aren't "asking awkward questions." They're consistently misrepresenting stats and issues. Taking graphs that don't yet show deaths and asking "isn't it suspicious that there aren't more deaths here?" No - they haven't been recorded yet. And when they are and they show what Hitch and co don't want to see, suddenly they're not looking at them any more but in another direction - until that doesn't show what they want and then another direction, and another...
Or misusing and misunderstanding life expectancies (Toby Young, for example), or claiming that there's no evidence that lockdowns are working (if you take one blip in one day's results (after saying that one day's blip doesn't disprove it elsewhere)...
Pretty much everything they've raised is incorrect, misrepresented, or plain wrong, but they don't seem to care. They just grab something else in a desperate attempt to "prove" what they so want to be true.
I wished you wouldn`t just focus on Germany. The UK has done as well as France, better than Spain and Italy. How about Sweden that didn`t even have a lockdown. Smithson and others always pick the best case (in any measure - PPE, testing etc) and compare the UK to that. Nothing said about how we haven`t run out of rooms, ventilators, the great speed at building new facilities. Mistakes have been made by all Governments and the WHO. Stop nitpicking. Also Johnson never said it was a hoax, he initiated a lockdown, which if started in February would have not been accepted by people.
The mistakes that could have been made and haven't been won't feature. We all know the government has done some things quite well.
Thanks for the welcome. It is true that the things that have been done well are not acknowledged by Mike and others. It would be nice if he and the Guardian types just paused for a minute to acknowledge that. The Guardian called for a lockdown (quicker to call for than to actually draw up and implement) but then complains about domestic violence, kids missing school meals etc - well it was known if you have a lockdown the first couple of weeks is OK but then people get antsy. So you need public support, of which there was not in February.
Sure the government has done things like the Nightingale Hospitals but the more time goes on the more their overall performance looks mediocre at best.
Utter nonsense . What have the UK been stopped from doing during the transition period . This will be the latest slogan used to dupe the gullible . And there are certainly plenty of those amongst the public.
Yep you are spot on I am afraid. I honestly do not understand this thinking from the Government. Even the argument about us having to continue to pay for a bit longer really doesn't hold up at a time when all financial restraint has gone out of the window to deal with the virus.
I’ve spoken to quite a few who voted to Leave and they have no problem with extending the transition. It seems an act of lunacy to force business to have to rush through changes when they’ve just been hammered by the virus , there’s been no infrastructure put in place in NI, no time to get the 50,000 border staff etc .
And what if a second wave hits next winter , can you imagine the turmoil for business .
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
Germany aren't returning to any sort of normal life until the end of August at the earliest. I think that tells you all you need to know about the timeframe for this.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
No more reckless than assuming that you have to wait for tested hospital infections to fall to the low hundreds per day to relax anything.
The only meaningful question is what is the rate of transmission and how will it change when you relax measures. Given the time lags involved, there is some evidence that R0 was below 1 in the UK already on the day lockdown started, as a result of the prior measures taken and general public caution. If that is the case, we could return to that state without causing a large uptick, and given the economic consequences of every day in lockdown, it would be extremely reckless not to take that step as soon as the surveys are in. Frankly given the inertia in government, with policy making largely outsourced to medical experts, all the bias in the decision making process will be towards caution of medical consequences so there is little prospect of a rushed or even timely relaxation.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
Comparison of number of deaths at start of respective lockdown is: 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.
Yes, I agree with that. But a week is probably about the earliest it could have been done. Certainly the delaying of the (pre-flagged) Cobra meeting until after a weekend off was as unforgivably relaxed approach at the time.
But politically, these details will be forgotten. Of more consequence will be the economic effects of the peak having risen as high as it has, and so taking as long as it will for the numbers to decline.
I don't know if it will be forgotten politically, I think the perception has stuck that the UK was slow to go lockdown.
I do agree that the govt has a good opportunity to make up ground (politically speaking) with an effective economic response.
But if they bungle that then I think they will really be in trouble.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
And yet many other countries managed to lock down when they had far fewer deaths per capita than the UK did when it locked down. Of course it could have been "pushed through" earlier.
You say "of course" it (the legislation) could have been pushed through earlier. Was it even ready? In an ideal world, the government would have introduced the Bill before - or at least at the same time as - it brought in the lock-down. That the initial phase had no legal basis suggests that the very lengthy Bill might well have still been being drafted at the time.
They could have made use of the Civil Contingecies act. That would not have required any sort of Parliamentary scrutiny at that point and could then have been superceeded by a properly considered act a week or two later
Possibly the lawyers advised that actually using the Civil Contingencies act would guarantee a legal challenge.
Or possibly there is no liking for firing up that monster, in the current government.
"The biggest mistake the UK and US governments made was not following South Korea and Germany in mass testing early enough."
Was that even an option for us?
...
No, especially South Korea.
But it could be after the current lockdown.
If you get the cases down, and get the testing up... community testing once again becomes viable. At that point you can do contact and trace.
Except to contact and trace properly we need wide spread surveillance. Does the UK have the infrastructure to do this, even if we can convince the public to get onboard.
Remember South Korea is not only one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth, they had SARs and MERs and the result of that was the creation of all this tech in case it happened again.
They spent years creating an overall response system from lab capacity, to automated contact tracing and scheduling of test appointments based upon establishing priority.
Guess we'll just have to ride out the depression till a vaccine is out then.
The Spectator has an article on the Prof Ferguson's prediction track record on recent disease outbreak.
Read it, calculate just how spectacularly out of the park he can be (always to the extreme upside) and ask yourself if this is the man we should be allowing to influence government policy.
A man who won;t even let us examine his methodology.
Its just insane.
Its why there are now a much wider range of people working on this.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
The ideas behind the financial response are pretty good, as I said. It’s the implementation that’s been lamentable.
It really hasn't. You are being unrealistic about how quickly it is possible to do this kind of thing. I haven't seen a single sensible suggestion on how the implementation could have been better or quicker.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
OGH mentions Cheltenham. The Cheltenham Festival attracts about 15,000 Irish racegoers. If Cheltenham made the slightest difference, where is the Irish spike when they all returned home?
There are charges that can be laid against Boris's government but this is not one.
Maybe all the old folk in care homes caught it watching the festival on tv
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
The ideas behind the financial response are pretty good, as I said. It’s the implementation that’s been lamentable.
It really hasn't. You are being unrealistic about how quickly it is possible to do this kind of thing. I haven't seen a single sensible suggestion on how the implementation could have been better or quicker.
I still think the US approach of “drop some money on everyone” is better than the UK’s myriad of schemes involving complex admin and all with loopholes that will figure prominently in the media once we get beyond lockdown.
Which reveals a number that I wanted asked about -
"Under normal circumstances, Penlon {the original manufacturer} would only be able to make 50 to 60 ventilators a week."
That's fantastic news. So not only has strands #1, #2 and #4 increased capacity, strand #3 will be pumping out new ones. And of course the CPAP masks a plenty.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
Particularly irritating is people who argue "The government was slow to lock down (apparently flirting with allowing the disease to spread widely first to get to an early herd immunity) and the lockdown has been mild by international standards."
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.”
Executive summary: everything the government does is wrong and always will be.
I didn’t say that, because I don’t believe that.
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.
When an incurable and highly infectious disease comes out of nowhere, wipes out huindreds of thousands of people quite equally distributed worldwide, and is likely to kill plenty more, it seems folly to attack or praise anyone over their handling of it to me
Criticising (or not) the government: Part 3: Having defended their response both on the health crisis and the financial support, I am happy to add my voice to those saying that the refusal to accept that the transition has to be extended is stark, staring, no-excuses-possible, raving bonkers. I suppose the best that can be said of it is that it is conceivable (although there is no evidence of it) that government ministers themselves realise it is bonkers, but that the Conservative Party is still, despite the chastening experience of the past few weeks, so far out with the fairies that the government is too afraid to tell them the truth. I don't see that as much of an excuse though.
The reason why Britain didn't lock down earlier is the same reason that people are agitating for it to be lifted now. People would not buy into that kind of action unless it was clearly necessary - and it wasn't so clearly necessary until the deaths started mounting up - and it couldn't be enforced until legislation was in place, and I doubt that could have been pushed through any earlier.
And yet many other countries managed to lock down when they had far fewer deaths per capita than the UK did when it locked down. Of course it could have been "pushed through" earlier.
You say "of course" it (the legislation) could have been pushed through earlier. Was it even ready? In an ideal world, the government would have introduced the Bill before - or at least at the same time as - it brought in the lock-down. That the initial phase had no legal basis suggests that the very lengthy Bill might well have still been being drafted at the time.
They could have made use of the Civil Contingecies act. That would not have required any sort of Parliamentary scrutiny at that point and could then have been superceded by a properly considered act a week or two later
They could. But the very fact that it wouldn't have required any parliamentary scrutiny is good reason to be very wary of using it. I wouldn't argue that the response to Covid-19 has been perfect by any means but decisions always look easier in retrospect and an instinct not to massively disrupt people's lives (Brexit apart, and that's a bloody big exception), is not usually a bad thing.
And all this discussion is retrospective. We can't stay in lockdown for 12 months so something approximating to life as normalish is going to have to return while Covid-19 is still out there, circulating and infecting. Discussion and policy options have to think about the future too.
OGH mentions Cheltenham. The Cheltenham Festival attracts about 15,000 Irish racegoers. If Cheltenham made the slightest difference, where is the Irish spike when they all returned home?
There are charges that can be laid against Boris's government but this is not one.
Well the Irish deaths started to take off about 12-13 days after the festival, so it actually lines up pretty well.
For reasons that should be obvious though, you can't really draw conclusions either way from the data. Exponential growth means you don't see "spikes" like that.
At 5.00pm on Friday 17 April, every musician in NYO will throw open their windows or step onto their doorsteps to perform Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ as a gesture of community and solidarity. We’re dedicating this to the people in society who might be in need of a musical-pick-me-up: our hospital staff, supermarket workers, friends and family in isolation, and vulnerable members of society.
We’re inviting everyone who plays an instrument in the UK to take part by playing (or singing, if you’d rather!) the well-known tune with us at 5.00pm on Friday 17 April, and dedicating their performance. If you film your performance, share it on social media using the hashtag #NYOdetoJoy.
We’d really love you to get involved and share the news with your networks so we can inspire as many musicians as possible to share a performance. You can find out more and download the resources on our website: nyo.org.uk/ode-to-joy We’d love to have as many musicians joining us as possible, at every level.
Except again other countries have been able to make the money appear. Why is it realistic for them and not for us?
Perhaps their civil services are better than ours?
Maybe. I accept the devil is often in the detail but if countries like Switzerland can get money to businesses very rapidly when the UK doesn't, I would like understand why. And not just brush it off "it's unrealistic and aren't we doing well?"
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
Its funny because when I read the herd of posters call high deaths numbers 'disappointing' I wonder it they care about those deaths or if in the back of their minds the thought occurs that the whole lockdown strategy they have worshipped is actually a crock of sh8te.
Still no matter. Its only 200bn debt, 2m jobs (and plenty of lives).
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
Except again other countries have been able to make the money appear. Why is it realistic for them and not for us?
Not all tax systems are the same, and some may have the mechanisms they used for the various disbursements already in place.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
I watched Piers Morgan "interview" a Conservative called Helen Whately on GMB yesterday. He continually interrupted her, and there was a time delay on the line which made things more difficult for her to answer. By the end she was smirking/rolling her eyes every time he interrupted, so he castigated her for "laughing" at old people dying in care homes as if he were a headmaster in a 1950s school and she was a naughty pupil. He then delivered his coup de gras of incorrectly accusing her of "voting against a pay rise for nurses" as full fact has now confirmed.
Watching it, I just knew that he must be in the wrong. He is high on his own supply as the new voice of the people vs the govt. Every faux outrageux is another like on social media. I looked at twitter and saw lefties cheering him for it. Sad times
Which reveals a number that I wanted asked about -
"Under normal circumstances, Penlon {the original manufacturer} would only be able to make 50 to 60 ventilators a week."
That's fantastic news. So not only has strands #1, #2 and #4 increased capacity, strand #3 will be pumping out new ones. And of course the CPAP masks a plenty.
It is a shame that it has taken until now to get the answer as to why multiple strands were required. An answer that could have been added to a story anytime.
Defending the government Part 2 (Don't worry, I return to the attack in my next post, Part 3):
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
Except again other countries have been able to make the money appear. Why is it realistic for them and not for us?
The money has appeared for many small businesses (my business got £10K last week). But to answer your question: other countries have completely different tax and benefits systems. What mechanism would you have used - given the UK system - to deliver the dosh?
On topic, the government’s paramount priority remains Brexit purity. If some people die in a pandemic as a result, that’s a regrettable necessity for them.
That is an unfair and partisan attack on the Government. We are doing as well as France in terms of testing, and have mobilized quickly.
The government turned down an opportunity to get additional supplies of PPE because it would have involved working with the EU. People enjoying this sunny day will almost certainly die as a result of that ideological decision.
Still, blue passports eh?
You were telling us on the previous thread that we would lose out because we did not participate in the EU tender for PPE & ventilators.
UK getting additional ventilators built by Airbus .McClaren et al as reported on Sky next week,France expecting new ventilators via EU tender in July.
No matter how many times I point it out, Leavers seem incapable of understanding the difference between “or” and “and”..
There are care home workers relaxing in their gardens right now who will die in the coming weeks because the government decided that it could get all the PPE it needed without participating in the EU scheme.
'or' and 'and' become completely irrelevant if you have already placed sufficient PPE orders in the pipeline,but like every other country you are subject to delays because of lack of supplier capacity.
Are you expecting the EU tender / order to jump the already massive queue?
Only hours ago you made the completely incorrect claim about the EU tender & ventilator supplies for the UK.
My wife's niece is working on the front line in Toulon & was asking us if we could send her masks from the UK over three weeks ago.You seriously believe (or want to believe) that the UK is the only European country with PPE shortages, even Germany has shortages.
The UK doesn't have the 2nd highest number of deaths in the world. Next.
According to Worldometer we currently sit 5th in the world in terms of deaths per million.
All the countries ahead of us are a week or two ahead of us in their cycle and France and Spain have now included non-hospital (care home) deaths in their figures. We haven't.
At the end of the day I expect the UK and USA to have the worse record deaths per million. If that is the case we need to find out why. The US reason is obvious - the moron in the WH.
Utter nonsense . What have the UK been stopped from doing during the transition period . This will be the latest slogan used to dupe the gullible . And there are certainly plenty of those amongst the public.
Yep you are spot on I am afraid. I honestly do not understand this thinking from the Government. Even the argument about us having to continue to pay for a bit longer really doesn't hold up at a time when all financial restraint has gone out of the window to deal with the virus.
I’ve spoken to quite a few who voted to Leave and they have no problem with extending the transition. It seems an act of lunacy to force business to have to rush through changes when they’ve just been hammered by the virus , there’s been no infrastructure put in place in NI, no time to get the 50,000 border staff etc .
And what if a second wave hits next winter , can you imagine the turmoil for business .
Compared to the present turmoil. Frankly, no not much.
We’ve been warned for four years the four horsemen of the apocalypse would arrive if we voted to leave, or actually left, the supermarkets would empty and we couldn’t travel anywhere, and everyone would stockpile tinned fish. Well oddly enough.....
When your economy is forecast to go down by 35% in a quarter Brexit is a rounding figure even if you believed the worst predictions of its short term effect.
All the talk about ending the lockdown as we are past the peak is utterly reckless. Italy and Spain are both well past the peak and still seeing thousands of daily infections and large numbers of deaths. Today and yesterday the Spanish figures were pretty depressing. There. Is. No. Quick. Way. Out. Of. This.
If extreme lock down works then those Spain and Italy numbers should be falling through the floor, right?
You will get in trouble for saying that
People on a blog site's comment section calling out your idiocy isn't exactly getting thrown in a gulag.
What have I said that is idiotic?
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.
Comments
I still don't understand why we have not been able to ramp up faster. It is surely not beyond our technical capacity ?
The other thing I would strongly criticise is their neglect of social care, and in particular nursing homes. It's been something of a refrain on here that this was just a private sector responsibility. It isn't.
Personally I'm actually thankful for that.
But the collorary is that it will go on, and should go on for longer than it otherwise might have done
What everyone seems to have forgotten is that the original purpose of lockdown was to prevent the epidemic getting so out of control as to overwhelm the NHS. As such it has been, so far, extremely successful. Lockdown is not intended, and never could, prevent the epidemic spreading for ever. Deaths 'prevented' (up until the point where the health service is overwhelmed) are most likely not prevented at all, but postponed until lockdown is relaxed.
2-3 weeks past peak infections ?
Those that locked down earlier will see a shorter full lockdown period, less death and less economic damage. It's what it is.
Imagine the difference that could have made. The jobs saved. The lives.
Sounds like you might have a case for prosecution here. An organisation admitting it got it wrong.
The daily briefings have been a big improvement on before.
Is it only me who has noticed the reduction in unofficial, anonymous and inaccurate briefing has coincided with Dominic Cummings being off sick?
There are robotic machines that can do this, but we don't have many and they take time to get setup properly.
https://twitter.com/DavidGHFrost/status/1250796638987333632
To the extent that people were self-isolating, weren't most cases due to either the individual themselves or a member of their hosehold having shown possible symptoms, rather than pre-emptive voluntary isolations?
That is the topic I post on.
Korea and Germany in mass testing early enough."
Was that even an option for us?
Variations of this criticism crop up often, especially among journalists,
but I have trouble understanding it.
As far as I can tell, testing has always been limited by capacity - or are the
critics claiming that the UK government can in fact do more testing but refuses
to do so?
If testing is indeed limited by capacity, then calling lack of testing a "big
mistake" is a bit weird - the mistake was made ages ago when building lab
capacity - it wasn't an error made in the early part of the pandemic.
If the complaint is that testing capacity hasn't increased quickly enough -
then isn't that a failure of Public Health England?
I'd like to understand exactly what people are complaining about when they say
the UK's approach to testing was/is wrong.
But it seems that Mike didn't.
Given the doubling rate of three to four days, a single week could have made a very large difference.
Testing more broadly would have given us more information and allowed us to test the iceberg theory. But it is pretty fanciful to conclude that it would have saved lives or indeed changed the policies that we used.
You were telling us on the previous thread that we would lose out because we did not participate in the EU tender for PPE & ventilators.
UK getting additional ventilators built by Airbus .McClaren et al as reported on Sky next week,France expecting new ventilators via EU tender in July.
He's also fortunate to be up against Keir Starmer who's unwilling to hold him to account for any of this.
We don't know what will happen later on. What we can say is that compared with other countries the UK has seen a high mortality rate so far. I'm happy to judge the government on that, particularly given that it seems connected to decisions it took and decisions it didn't take, which other countries with lower mortality rates did take.
It is not the case the financial responses has been 'lamentable', as Alastair posted upthread. It too has been pretty good. The only real criticism I would make was of the Potemkin budget of the 11th March. As I posted on the day (and I was one of very few people who made the criticism at that time), it was completely unrealistic in terms of what was already blindingly obvious on the economic impact of the pandemic. To giver the government their due, however, within a few days they had grasped the scale of the issue and have dealt with it super-fast. Those saying that the money has been too slow to appear are being totally unrealistic as to what is possible.
But it could be after the current lockdown.
By the way should someone tell Kinablu we changed thread so he achieves thread equality?
Studying what happened in Germany, though, is going to be extremely illuminating, in years to come.
But politically, these details will be forgotten. Of more consequence will be the economic effects of the peak having risen as high as it has, and so taking as long as it will for the numbers to decline.
That may not be you, but it cannot be pretended it does not occur, and I should think automated blanket criticism of or excessive negativity toward government policy and response is as unwelcome as automated blanket acceptance of or excessive positivity toward government response.
And the truth may lean more to one side than being in the middle of those extremes, but let us all not repeat the egregious stupidity of Brexit debating in implying any who lean one way, whichever way, must therefore be essentially the same as the most extreme view on that side. It's done to both sides and unfair.
There are care home workers relaxing in their gardens right now who will die in the coming weeks because the government decided that it could get all the PPE it needed without participating in the EU scheme.
Remember South Korea is not only one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth, they had SARs and MERs and the result of that was the creation of all this tech in case it happened again.
They spent years creating an overall response system from lab capacity, to automated contact tracing and scheduling of test appointments based upon establishing priority.
Read it, calculate just how spectacularly out of the park he can be (always to the extreme upside) and ask yourself if this is the man we should be allowing to influence government policy.
A man who won;t even let us examine his methodology.
Its just insane.
There is no definitive cost to the settlement. The final cost to the UK will depend on future events such as future exchange rates and EU budgets.
the UK should neither pay more nor earlier than if it had remained a Member State. This means that the UK will make payments based on the outturns of EU budget.
source
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8039/
https://twitter.com/MatthewOToole2/status/1250802439042760704
https://twitter.com/BBCkatyaadler/status/1250788569783906304?s=20
No - they haven't been recorded yet. And when they are and they show what Hitch and co don't want to see, suddenly they're not looking at them any more but in another direction - until that doesn't show what they want and then another direction, and another...
Or misusing and misunderstanding life expectancies (Toby Young, for example), or claiming that there's no evidence that lockdowns are working (if you take one blip in one day's results (after saying that one day's blip doesn't disprove it elsewhere)...
Pretty much everything they've raised is incorrect, misrepresented, or plain wrong, but they don't seem to care. They just grab something else in a desperate attempt to "prove" what they so want to be true.
And what if a second wave hits next winter , can you imagine the turmoil for business .
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52309294
Which reveals a number that I wanted asked about -
"Under normal circumstances, Penlon {the original manufacturer} would only be able to make 50 to 60 ventilators a week."
The only meaningful question is what is the rate of transmission and how will it change when you relax measures. Given the time lags involved, there is some evidence that R0 was below 1 in the UK already on the day lockdown started, as a result of the prior measures taken and general public caution. If that is the case, we could return to that state without causing a large uptick, and given the economic consequences of every day in lockdown, it would be extremely reckless not to take that step as soon as the surveys are in. Frankly given the inertia in government, with policy making largely outsourced to medical experts, all the bias in the decision making process will be towards caution of medical consequences so there is little prospect of a rushed or even timely relaxation.
I do agree that the govt has a good opportunity to make up ground (politically speaking) with an effective economic response.
But if they bungle that then I think they will really be in trouble.
Or possibly there is no liking for firing up that monster, in the current government.
And all this discussion is retrospective. We can't stay in lockdown for 12 months so something approximating to life as normalish is going to have to return while Covid-19 is still out there, circulating and infecting. Discussion and policy options have to think about the future too.
For reasons that should be obvious though, you can't really draw conclusions either way from the data. Exponential growth means you don't see "spikes" like that.
At 5.00pm on Friday 17 April, every musician in NYO will throw open their windows or step onto their doorsteps to perform Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ as a gesture of community and solidarity. We’re dedicating this to the people in society who might be in need of a musical-pick-me-up: our hospital staff, supermarket workers, friends and family in isolation, and vulnerable members of society.
We’re inviting everyone who plays an instrument in the UK to take part by playing (or singing, if you’d rather!) the well-known tune with us at 5.00pm on Friday 17 April, and dedicating their performance. If you film your performance, share it on social media using the hashtag #NYOdetoJoy.
We’d really love you to get involved and share the news with your networks so we can inspire as many musicians as possible to share a performance. You can find out more and download the resources on our website: nyo.org.uk/ode-to-joy We’d love to have as many musicians joining us as possible, at every level.
Still no matter. Its only 200bn debt, 2m jobs (and plenty of lives).
https://fullfact.org/health/queens-speech-public-sector-pay/
Watching it, I just knew that he must be in the wrong. He is high on his own supply as the new voice of the people vs the govt. Every faux outrageux is another like on social media. I looked at twitter and saw lefties cheering him for it. Sad times
'or' and 'and' become completely irrelevant if you have already placed sufficient PPE orders in the pipeline,but like every other country you are subject to delays because of lack of supplier capacity.
Are you expecting the EU tender / order to jump the already massive queue?
Only hours ago you made the completely incorrect claim about the EU tender & ventilator supplies for the UK.
My wife's niece is working on the front line in Toulon & was asking us if we could send her masks from the UK over three weeks ago.You seriously believe (or want to believe) that the UK is the only European country with PPE shortages, even Germany has shortages.
All the countries ahead of us are a week or two ahead of us in their cycle and France and Spain have now included non-hospital (care home) deaths in their figures. We haven't.
At the end of the day I expect the UK and USA to have the worse record deaths per million. If that is the case we need to find out why. The US reason is obvious - the moron in the WH.
We’ve been warned for four years the four horsemen of the apocalypse would arrive if we voted to leave, or actually left, the supermarkets would empty and we couldn’t travel anywhere, and everyone would stockpile tinned fish. Well oddly enough.....
When your economy is forecast to go down by 35% in a quarter Brexit is a rounding figure even if you believed the worst predictions of its short term effect.
The NHS was supposed to be completely overwhelmed but in fact it has gone the other way and has record empty beds.
I started reporting on here three weeks ago that hospitals were very quiet and was accused of misinformation, yet Matt Hancock confirmed yesterday what I had been saying with record empty NHS beds, yet somehow I am an idiot and everyone who said i was lying is superior.