Anyway - does anyone have any idea why the NHS staff in those pictures from last night weren't making any effort at social distancing from one another - despite probably being in the highest risk group for COVID-19 infection?
Is it something they're told not to bother with, or what?
I did a bit of a search, and found they have been told to bother with it, except when they can't because they're treating patients. But apparently at least some of them aren't, even when on camera.
Positive test results still signifying nothing more or less than about 40% of the number of people being tested.
That fraction is hard to interpret though, and also hard to compare across countries. For example, Italy report the total number of tests, and the fraction of positives is judged as that... Hence, not easy to interpret.
It's also hard to know how many of these tests are from specimens collected a few days ago - the new UK dashboard reports the number of positives as a function of when the specimen was collected, which might be a more meaningful way of looking at the trend than the raw numbers. It will also be helpful to split up the Pillar II tests (healthcare workers and their families) from the Pillar I (patients admitted to hospital) tests. The former would hopefully be more enriched for milder cases.
" a new paper by Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist and key scientific advisor to the Finish Government, estimates that the IFR is 0.13%, making the virus roughly as dangerous as seasonal flu. Paunio submitted an earlier version of this paper to a MedRxiv prepublication site, as well as PLOS Medicine, but both rejected it. Consequently, I’ve decided to publish it on this site. If any epidemiologists want to challenge Paunio’s conclusions, feel free to do so in the comments."
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is avoidably killing substantial numbers of people for reasons totally unconnected with Coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can (America).
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
He claims to be an academic epidemiologist, though. And he thinks that the infection fatality rate can be only slightly bigger than the percentage of the whole population of NYC who have already been killed by the virus, at this early stage ...
It could be that his driver is the oxygen of publicity. One might hope that people in learned fields are immune to this but are they? Not sure they always are.
OT: If any F1 fans here are missing the season, Formula 1 have put some full races on their Youtube channel. Currently watching one with Murray Walker commentating, it's bliss
I feel sure you're right, unless I'm very much mistaken.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson)...
Loath though I am to question the authority of Fraser, how the eff does he know that ?
"As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.
Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents."
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
I think the question has to be - who are these new cases?
Mr. CatMan, for a while they had the market up but with only the over option. They could legitimately (in an 8 race season, say) void the market though.
The 1997-1998 Asian economic crisis ( and related crashes, in 1998, in Russia, Argentina and elsewhere) took oil sub-$18, see here for fears at the time it could permanently cripple the US oil industry. By the end of 1999 it was $40ish again though.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
David Starkey used to make interesting history documentaries; I have at least six of his DVDs on the shelf. But now he seems to have become the thinking viewers' Katie Hopkins, a professional controversialist.
He has very sensible views on constitutional reform. If there were ever a serious cross party grouping on constitutional reform he should advise it. He is nothing like Katie Hopkins; he is intelligent and not a reactionary lunatic.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
They don't go to the shops in Spain. or at least they didn't
" a new paper by Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist and key scientific advisor to the Finish Government, estimates that the IFR is 0.13%, making the virus roughly as dangerous as seasonal flu. Paunio submitted an earlier version of this paper to a MedRxiv prepublication site, as well as PLOS Medicine, but both rejected it. Consequently, I’ve decided to publish it on this site. If any epidemiologists want to challenge Paunio’s conclusions, feel free to do so in the comments."
Shouldn't the fact it was rejected twice be ringing alarm bells?
I have no opinion about the validity of this paper which I have not read, but I can see that its conclusion is controversial. The author Paunio is not very well known. The committees and working groups set up by the Royal Society may potentially also come up with controversial findings, but they will not so easily be dismissed as coming from an unknown scientist. Rejection for publication or for a job does not always mean that a person's work is wrong or of no value. It happened to J.K Rowling and Albert Einstein.
" a new paper by Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist and key scientific advisor to the Finish Government, estimates that the IFR is 0.13%, making the virus roughly as dangerous as seasonal flu. Paunio submitted an earlier version of this paper to a MedRxiv prepublication site, as well as PLOS Medicine, but both rejected it. Consequently, I’ve decided to publish it on this site. If any epidemiologists want to challenge Paunio’s conclusions, feel free to do so in the comments."
Jane Hill has just been interviewing Prof Peter West from UCL and was astonished to hear why everyone wearing nuisance masks might be a bad thing. About time, but it's probably too late. Once the posh people get an idea in their head, they'll decide we're listening to the wrong sort of experts.
The protection factor is always dependent on the combination of user and wearer, and the politicians are fearful of blaming the public, so they prevaricate. NHS staff are trained in this, or should be, but getting 30,000,000 people to use them properly isn't going to happen.
Edit: I don't wear nuisance masks because the precautions in wearing them properly are too lengthy and too involved.
How long before the headbanging Brexiteers turn this story into something negative about Germany or the EU? Anything to deflect attention away form how crap the Johnson/Cummings Conservative Popular Front of UK has handled the crisis.
Don't know if it's been discussed already on PB but Bob Dylan's recently released 16 min magnum opus on the murder of JFK, is well worth a listen.
First original song he's released in years and a welcome change from the string of album releases which have been cover versions from the Great American Songbook.
If we have time to listen to a song like this it is surely now.
Pitch perfect timing and very resonant.
I love Dylan but was not expecting anything new from him as good as (I'm told) this is. Planning to do it with first drink later today. 6 ish.
A second new Dylan song dropped overnight. I Contain Multitudes. Sounds bland on first listen, but improves each time. Like the best Dylan it is wry and wistful, clever and banal.With a sparse percussion free arrangement.
Starts off banal, but persist, as it steadily improves. Strangely soothing, and I imagine it would work very well indeed accompanied by a large malt, or G&T.
Right. It will have to be the malt then. Gin revs me up and we don't want that right now.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
They don't go to the shops in Spain. or at least they didn't
So just who is getting infected, at that high a rate?
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
I think a lot of transmission now is within households, it is very hard to self isolate in many overcrowded homes.
" a new paper by Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist and key scientific advisor to the Finish Government, estimates that the IFR is 0.13%, making the virus roughly as dangerous as seasonal flu. Paunio submitted an earlier version of this paper to a MedRxiv prepublication site, as well as PLOS Medicine, but both rejected it. Consequently, I’ve decided to publish it on this site. If any epidemiologists want to challenge Paunio’s conclusions, feel free to do so in the comments."
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
n
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
One possible explanation is that the transmission parameter, R0, is not constant but it is a decreasing function of the number of active cases. Empirically, you can see that from the downward curving plots of log(new cases) against time. Mathematically, this can lead to an equilibrium being reached where if the number of cases reduces R0 increases, and if the number of cases increases R0 reduces. Then the number of daily cases gets stuck at a constant level. You can see this pattern in the plots of cases numbers for all the major European countries. This stable level of cases can continue for as long as herd immunity has not been reached.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
I think a lot of transmission now is within households, it is very hard to self isolate in many overcrowded homes.
Plus the ??% who are working, particularly those commuting via public transport. Plus those who are not observing.
The CBI is urging the government to extend the workers wages coverage scheme (it only extends to the end of May).
If they don't then redundancy notices will start to go out very soon because under law there needs to be a 45 day redundancy consultation period.
Under the scheme the government expects nine million workers to be furloughed for the period, one THIRD of all private sector workers.
That's the private sector where ALL of our money comes from. every single penny.
No British government has ever committed economic suicide like this, ever, no matter what circumstances its citizens were facing. Ever. And we have faced some pretty poor times
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
I think a lot of transmission now is within households, it is very hard to self isolate in many overcrowded homes.
Singapore are experiencing similar problems with their migrant workers' dormitories.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
They don't go to the shops in Spain. or at least they didn't
The CBI is urging the government to extend the workers wages coverage scheme (it only extends to the end of May).
If they don't then redundancy notices will start to go out very soon because under law there needs to be a 45 day redundancy consultation period.
Under the scheme the government expects nine million workers to be furloughed for the period, one THIRD of all private sector workers.
That's the private sector where ALL of our money comes from. every single penny.
No British government has ever committed economic suicide like this, ever, no matter what circumstances its citizens were facing. Ever. And we have faced some pretty poor times
The CBI is urging the government to extend the workers wages coverage scheme (it only extends to the end of May).
If they don't then redundancy notices will start to go out very soon because under law there needs to be a 45 day redundancy consultation period.
Under the scheme the government expects nine million workers to be furloughed for the period, one THIRD of all private sector workers.
That's the private sector where ALL of our money comes from. every single penny.
No British government has ever committed economic suicide like this, ever, no matter what circumstances its citizens were facing. Ever. And we have faced some pretty poor times
Are you - and possibly the CBI too - suggesting that our government doesn´t have a clue what it is doing?
If we're talking music, my main late-night listening for the last few weeks has been Pink Floyd. I'd forgotten just how good Echoes is.
Some years ago I acquired box sets of Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies. Never found time to do more than dip into them. Working through them now is proving very satisfying.
The CBI is urging the government to extend the workers wages coverage scheme (it only extends to the end of May).
If they don't then redundancy notices will start to go out very soon because under law there needs to be a 45 day redundancy consultation period.
Under the scheme the government expects nine million workers to be furloughed for the period, one THIRD of all private sector workers.
That's the private sector where ALL of our money comes from. every single penny.
No British government has ever committed economic suicide like this, ever, no matter what circumstances its citizens were facing. Ever. And we have faced some pretty poor times
You are starting to come off slightly hysterical.
You may well be right but I think the situation justifies my admittedly alarmed and shrill tones.
" a new paper by Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist and key scientific advisor to the Finish Government, estimates that the IFR is 0.13%, making the virus roughly as dangerous as seasonal flu. Paunio submitted an earlier version of this paper to a MedRxiv prepublication site, as well as PLOS Medicine, but both rejected it. Consequently, I’ve decided to publish it on this site. If any epidemiologists want to challenge Paunio’s conclusions, feel free to do so in the comments."
Truth is no-one knows what the Infection Fatality Rate is for Covid-19, which increases anyway as more people die over the course of the epidemic. Best estimates are that it is less than 1% and more than ten times more virulent than influenza.
Neil Ferguson at Imperial estimated IFR in China of 0.6% based on testing of international passengers from that country. This IFR figure would increase if it turns out China has been underreporting deaths.
0.6% has also been estimated for Korea based on an extensive testing programme.
I would say Mr Paunio's sample is ridiculously small, leaving aside any methodological issues. He also has an agenda, which is a warning sign for any empirical study.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
They don't go to the shops in Spain. or at least they didn't
So just who is getting infected, at that high a rate?
That is the thing that is really puzzling me, a virus can only infect with human to human contact, with the lockdown, social distancing etc it must be much harder for the virus to keep infecting people. I don't put it down to family infections either as if one member of a household has it, surely they will infect the rest at about the same time, so 35 days into a lockdown is too long to have that as the main reason.
If we're talking music, my main late-night listening for the last few weeks has been Pink Floyd. I'd forgotten just how good Echoes is.
Some years ago I acquired box sets of Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies. Never found time to do more than dip into them. Working through them now is proving very satisfying.
Floyd are good too though!
Lucky man, coming to these for the first time.
In very different ways, both are full of artistically controlled excess.
The CBI is urging the government to extend the workers wages coverage scheme (it only extends to the end of May).
If they don't then redundancy notices will start to go out very soon because under law there needs to be a 45 day redundancy consultation period.
Under the scheme the government expects nine million workers to be furloughed for the period, one THIRD of all private sector workers.
That's the private sector where ALL of our money comes from. every single penny.
No British government has ever committed economic suicide like this, ever, no matter what circumstances its citizens were facing. Ever. And we have faced some pretty poor times
You are starting to come off slightly hysterical.
You may well be right but I think the situation justifies my admittedly alarmed and shrill tones.
But we shall see.
Of course it is important to consider economic as well as social costs. But calling it economic suicide is a bit much.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high? They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus. The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can. Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
They don't go to the shops in Spain. or at least they didn't
A strange comment, innit? How did they get hold of their food?
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
n
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
One possible explanation is that the transmission parameter, R0, is not constant but it is a decreasing function of the number of active cases. Empirically, you can see that from the downward curving plots of log(new cases) against time. Mathematically, this can lead to an equilibrium being reached where if the number of cases reduces R0 increases, and if the number of cases increases R0 reduces. Then the number of daily cases gets stuck at a constant level. You can see this pattern in the plots of cases numbers for all the major European countries. This stable level of cases can continue for as long as herd immunity has not been reached.
Well, I suppose that makes sense. New infections will only rise at an exponential rate when every carrier encounters only people who have not yet been infected. While this is true at start of an outbreak, after a while most of those infected will encounter others who have already been infected, e.g. within their own household, and so R0 will naturally fall.
The CBI is urging the government to extend the workers wages coverage scheme (it only extends to the end of May).
If they don't then redundancy notices will start to go out very soon because under law there needs to be a 45 day redundancy consultation period.
Under the scheme the government expects nine million workers to be furloughed for the period, one THIRD of all private sector workers.
That's the private sector where ALL of our money comes from. every single penny.
No British government has ever committed economic suicide like this, ever, no matter what circumstances its citizens were facing. Ever. And we have faced some pretty poor times
You are starting to come off slightly hysterical.
You may well be right but I think the situation justifies my admittedly alarmed and shrill tones.
But we shall see.
I agree with you Contrarian. I was listening to a podcast this morning and the (left wing) presenters` estimates of when we will come out of lockdown ranged from Sep to sometime next year - no discussion about how folk can possibly manage with no income. Clueless. I think that they assume that government will pay wages indefinitely. The government has got to get across to the nation the economic catastrophe that this represents. Many people haven`t "got it".
The Treasury has announced the extension of the UK’s job furlough scheme, which will now run an extra month until the end of June to “reflect continuing social distancing measures”
The scheme, which allows firms to keep employees on the payroll with the government paying cash grants covering 80% of their wages up to £2,500, was originally set for a three month period between March and the end of May.
The Treasury said the Chancellor would “keep the scheme under review and extend it if necessary.”
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
n
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
One possible explanation is that the transmission parameter, R0, is not constant but it is a decreasing function of the number of active cases. Empirically, you can see that from the downward curving plots of log(new cases) against time. Mathematically, this can lead to an equilibrium being reached where if the number of cases reduces R0 increases, and if the number of cases increases R0 reduces. Then the number of daily cases gets stuck at a constant level. You can see this pattern in the plots of cases numbers for all the major European countries. This stable level of cases can continue for as long as herd immunity has not been reached.
Well, I suppose that makes sense. New infections will only rise at an exponential rate when every carrier encounters only people who have not yet been infected. While this is true at start of an outbreak, after a while most of those infected will encounter others who have already been infected, e.g. within their own household, and so R0 will naturally fall.
No, that's the effective or net transmission rate. The basic reproduction number R0 varies over time / geographies / behaviours (that's the point of social distancing after all, but one might also expect R0 to be higher in cities than in the countryside, higher in communities where people live in overcrowded housing etc) but it represents by definition the number of infections a single infectious individual produces, on average, in an entirely susceptible population.
In the absence of an intervention or change of behaviour such as increased social distancing, the effective reproduction number drops towards one due to the depletion of susceptibles - in principle until an equilibrium is reached around the herd immunity level, possibly with some "overshoot" with the last wave of infections passing through, but in practice the dynamics are more complicated than that due to the heterogeneity and the fact that local pathogen extinction events become stochastic.
Jane Hill has just been interviewing Prof Peter West from UCL and was astonished to hear why everyone wearing nuisance masks might be a bad thing. About time, but it's probably too late. Once the posh people get an idea in their head, they'll decide we're listening to the wrong sort of experts.
The protection factor is always dependent on the combination of user and wearer, and the politicians are fearful of blaming the public, so they prevaricate. NHS staff are trained in this, or should be, but getting 30,000,000 people to use them properly isn't going to happen.
Edit: I don't wear nuisance masks because the precautions in wearing them properly are too lengthy and too involved.
OK, but in yesterday's podcast Christian Drosten said even homemade masks worn inexpertly would do something to slow the spread.
He also thinks the way out of lock down is to get everyone using an app, so contact tracing can be much more comprehensive.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high? They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus. The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can. Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
They don't go to the shops in Spain. or at least they didn't
A strange comment, innit? How did they get hold of their food?
Perhaps being out on balconies every evening below people in balconies above who are shouting and singing isn’t such a good idea?
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson)...
Loath though I am to question the authority of Fraser, how the eff does he know that ?
People like Nelson who are peddling this crap only have their own interests at heart. New York has seen a large rise in heart attacks, a known consequence of covid (look at the co-morbidities). They are registered as heart attacks but are likely because of covid. Reporting suggests that this happens rapidly and most do not even reach hospital. Now if we had proper testing in the community.....
On this subject, I’d be interested in knowing if being ill with this raises the blood pressure. Anyone know? I have to monitor mine closely and just worried that I might miss something (it naturally varies quite a bit, even with medication).
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson)...
Loath though I am to question the authority of Fraser, how the eff does he know that ?
He is a journalist - therefore he knows everything. Bow in awe.
The CBI is urging the government to extend the workers wages coverage scheme (it only extends to the end of May).
If they don't then redundancy notices will start to go out very soon because under law there needs to be a 45 day redundancy consultation period.
Under the scheme the government expects nine million workers to be furloughed for the period, one THIRD of all private sector workers.
That's the private sector where ALL of our money comes from. every single penny.
No British government has ever committed economic suicide like this, ever, no matter what circumstances its citizens were facing. Ever. And we have faced some pretty poor times
Are you - and possibly the CBI too - suggesting that our government doesn´t have a clue what it is doing?
Or that it does, but that it just does not care?
Put it this way. W
With the media, the twittersphere, the commentariat and social media as it is, it would take a politician of titanic courage and strength to ride out a policy where a certain level of suffering and death was tolerated right now to prevent a higher rate of suffering and death down the line.
Politicians just can't take decisions like that any more.
" a new paper by Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist and key scientific advisor to the Finish Government, estimates that the IFR is 0.13%, making the virus roughly as dangerous as seasonal flu. Paunio submitted an earlier version of this paper to a MedRxiv prepublication site, as well as PLOS Medicine, but both rejected it. Consequently, I’ve decided to publish it on this site. If any epidemiologists want to challenge Paunio’s conclusions, feel free to do so in the comments."
Shouldn't the fact it was rejected twice be ringing alarm bells?
I have no opinion about the validity of this paper which I have not read, but I can see that its conclusion is controversial. The author Paunio is not very well known. The committees and working groups set up by the Royal Society may potentially also come up with controversial findings, but they will not so easily be dismissed as coming from an unknown scientist. Rejection for publication or for a job does not always mean that a person's work is wrong or of no value. It happened to J.K Rowling and Albert Einstein.
In Albert Einstein's case, his work was indeed wrong:
Betting post - you can lay the date of the next election being in 2021 at 9.8. Can anyone think why we would have an election next year?
Boris has his big majority, it's hard to see why he would want to risk it...
The only reason an election happens next year is if it turns out the government has made enormous errors of judgement regarding the covid-19 situation. That seems unlikely at present.
A major split within the Tory Parliamentary Party, probably related to Coronavirus and its devastating financial consequences and/or a growing belief that the country required a Government of National Unity, all aided and abetted by a significant number of principally Tory MPs dying from the disease, resulting in a sharp reduction in the Gov't's majority as they continue to lose any number of subsequent by-elections, all compounded by a conspicuous lack of leadership talent on the Conservative front bench should Boris cease to be leader for any reason. I'm not saying backing a GE next year at 9.8 is a good bet, but equally it's not an impossibility by any means at all. In fact, before the Coronavirus pandemic had even started to kick off, I had placed bets that there WOULD be a GE in either 2020 or 2021 at odds of 30/1 in both instances.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is avoidably killing substantial numbers of people for reasons totally unconnected with Coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can (America).
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
n
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
One possible explanation is that the transmission parameter, R0, is not constant but it is a decreasing function of the number of active cases. Empirically, you can see that from the downward curving plots of log(new cases) against time. Mathematically, this can lead to an equilibrium being reached where if the number of cases reduces R0 increases, and if the number of cases increases R0 reduces. Then the number of daily cases gets stuck at a constant level. You can see this pattern in the plots of cases numbers for all the major European countries. This stable level of cases can continue for as long as herd immunity has not been reached.
Well, I suppose that makes sense. New infections will only rise at an exponential rate when every carrier encounters only people who have not yet been infected. While this is true at start of an outbreak, after a while most of those infected will encounter others who have already been infected, e.g. within their own household, and so R0 will naturally fall.
No, that's the effective or net transmission rate. The basic reproduction number R0 varies over time / geographies / behaviours (that's the point of social distancing after all, but one might also expect R0 to be higher in cities than in the countryside, higher in communities where people live in overcrowded housing etc) but it represents by definition the number of infections a single infectious individual produces, on average, in an entirely susceptible population.
In the absence of an intervention or change of behaviour such as increased social distancing, the effective reproduction number drops towards one due to the depletion of susceptibles - in principle until an equilibrium is reached around the herd immunity level, possibly with some "overshoot" with the last wave of infections passing through, but in practice the dynamics are more complicated than that due to the heterogeneity and the fact that local pathogen extinction events become stochastic.
The Treasury has announced the extension of the UK’s job furlough scheme, which will now run an extra month until the end of June to “reflect continuing social distancing measures”
The scheme, which allows firms to keep employees on the payroll with the government paying cash grants covering 80% of their wages up to £2,500, was originally set for a three month period between March and the end of May.
The Treasury said the Chancellor would “keep the scheme under review and extend it if necessary.”
From the Guardian live blog.
If nine million workers are indeed furloughed then somebody on line calculated that that little policy will cost the taxpayer (if there are any left), 18 billion pounds a month.
Interesting snippet: wife was speaking to Marianne Faithfull yesterday, who is making slow but steady recovery after having the virus. But everybody else in the hospital (one of the larger London ones) who was admitted on the day she was has died.
She is the sole survivor.
You don't get to be Marianne Faithful without being a tough cookie.
That's so good to hear. When it was disclosed she had been admitted I feared for her especially with her being hep C and in her 70s. Marianne must have one of the most diverse army of fans having been making music for over 50 years that includes a repertoire of songs as diverse as 'North Country Maid', 'Lady Madeleine', 'Working Class Hero', 'The Ballad of Lucy Jordan', "Kissin Time" (with Damon Albarn) and 'The Memory Remains' (with Metallica).
It is quite astonishing that anyone could still be claiming that the infection fatality rate could be as low as 0.13%, seeing that even taking only confirmed cases into account 0.09% of the population of New York City has already died. And we may be only halfway through the first wave.
So far from the "research" of these people being publicised online, I should think a very good case could be made for them to be confined in padded cells.
I don't find it astonishing. We're in a truly terrible place with no clear and quick way out. If the mortality rate is tiny it follows that we are close to mass immunity already - since millions will have had it and barely known they were sick. This is a devastatingly attractive notion. It's up there with the magic money tree and life after death. If anything I'm surprised how few believers it has garnered.
I thought all we needed to do with turn off the 5G masts?
I think they need to be burned down by a pitchfork waving mob, but perhaps we are a bit more rustic where I live.
I kid you not. Onion poultices are all the rage for Covid19 in my village, yes really!
Probably not a bad idea. Most people who would be critical of such an idea would come from a place of not knowing how it worked.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson)...
Loath though I am to question the authority of Fraser, how the eff does he know that ?
People like Nelson who are peddling this crap only have their own interests at heart. New York has seen a large rise in heart attacks, a known consequence of covid (look at the co-morbidities). They are registered as heart attacks but are likely because of covid. Reporting suggests that this happens rapidly and most do not even reach hospital. Now if we had proper testing in the community.....
On this subject, I’d be interested in knowing if being ill with this raises the blood pressure. Anyone know? I have to monitor mine closely and just worried that I might miss something (it naturally varies quite a bit, even with medication).
My reading on the vascular effect of COVID19 is that it drops blood pressure. It also can upset cardiac rhythms with an inflammation of the heart muscle. There is also a coagulopathy that could also cause sudden cardiac death.
Mostly though it seems to be respiratory failure that is the terminal event.
@kinabalu, how can I make sense of this exchange when you remove all the earlier posts relating to it?
I always just leave the one I'm replying to. Do most people leave all of them? I'll do that too from now on if it's the norm. But anyway, not missing much in this case. @BannedInParis has some insight into what Spanish flu 2nd wave outcomes specifically tell us about how the Nightingale(s) will be used for Covid. Sounds interesting so I was hoping to squeeze it out of him.
No day has had more deaths than 8th April. Daily totals now down 15% since then. Its not flat.
According to last night’s Newsnight, the totals for subsequent days are still subject to updating. Experts are identifying the peak, but it remains to be seen how quickly the rates are falling back after the 8th.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson)...
Loath though I am to question the authority of Fraser, how the eff does he know that ?
People like Nelson who are peddling this crap only have their own interests at heart. New York has seen a large rise in heart attacks, a known consequence of covid (look at the co-morbidities). They are registered as heart attacks but are likely because of covid. Reporting suggests that this happens rapidly and most do not even reach hospital. Now if we had proper testing in the community.....
On this subject, I’d be interested in knowing if being ill with this raises the blood pressure. Anyone know? I have to monitor mine closely and just worried that I might miss something (it naturally varies quite a bit, even with medication).
My Dad had *low* blood pressure during his illness.
If we follow Italy (and the trajectories are really similar) it would suggest that we might drop to a slightly lower plateau over the next few days (we are at around 3 April on their trajectory).
How long before the headbanging Brexiteers turn this story into something negative about Germany or the EU? Anything to deflect attention away form how crap the Johnson/Cummings Conservative Popular Front of UK has handled the crisis.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Look at Spains figures today, well over 5,000 cases 35 days into their lockdown
How can that be? seriously how? Their lockdown is draconian. Unless lockdown is either useless or only marginally useful.
Or it's really infectious, and even going to the shops puts you at risk.
They don't go to the shops in Spain. or at least they didn't
So just who is getting infected, at that high a rate?
That is the thing that is really puzzling me, a virus can only infect with human to human contact, with the lockdown, social distancing etc it must be much harder for the virus to keep infecting people. I don't put it down to family infections either as if one member of a household has it, surely they will infect the rest at about the same time, so 35 days into a lockdown is too long to have that as the main reason.
Well, going through the Holmesian probable/improbable deduction test, my guess is that the virus is airborne and able to infect people at a much greater distance. Studies are not clear at the moment but, to me it looks a possibility.
I'd have thought the plateau would occur as the virus works its way round people who can't easily get out the way of it (Care workers, NHS workers, perhaps supermarket staff, other key workers particularly public facing) and their households. Once it's gone through them the numbers should start to drop.
Local R is probably well above 1 in a hospital Covid ward, similiarly for care homes and larger households but well below 1 elsewhere.
It'd be a massive breach of privacy but being able to see precisely where the cases are located would be enlightening.
The Treasury has announced the extension of the UK’s job furlough scheme, which will now run an extra month until the end of June to “reflect continuing social distancing measures”
The scheme, which allows firms to keep employees on the payroll with the government paying cash grants covering 80% of their wages up to £2,500, was originally set for a three month period between March and the end of May.
The Treasury said the Chancellor would “keep the scheme under review and extend it if necessary.”
From the Guardian live blog.
If nine million workers are indeed furloughed then somebody on line calculated that that little policy will cost the taxpayer (if there are any left), 18 billion pounds a month.
A month.
Invented money. It has consequences, but not costs in the way you are thinking.
Starts off banal, but persist, as it steadily improves. Strangely soothing, and I imagine it would work very well indeed accompanied by a large malt, or G&T.
Right. It will have to be the malt then. Gin revs me up and we don't want that right now.
Interesting snippet: wife was speaking to Marianne Faithfull yesterday, who is making slow but steady recovery after having the virus. But everybody else in the hospital (one of the larger London ones) who was admitted on the day she was has died.
She is the sole survivor.
You don't get to be Marianne Faithful without being a tough cookie.
That's so good to hear. When it was disclosed she had been admitted I feared for her especially with her being hep C and in her 70s. Marianne must have one of the most diverse army of fans having been making music for over 50 years that includes a repertoire of songs as diverse as 'North Country Maid', 'Lady Madeleine', 'Working Class Hero', 'The Ballad of Lucy Jordan', "Kissin Time" (with Damon Albarn) and 'The Memory Remains' (with Metallica).
No day has had more deaths than 8th April. Daily totals now down 15% since then. Its not flat.
It's not as simple as that. The figures for recent days aren't yet complete - updates keep coming in for over a week.
Provisionally, it does look as though the figures have fallen a little since 8th April, but not much.
Of course you also have to remember that people don't die on a fixed number of days after getting infected. People infected on (say) the 20th March might still be appearing in the most recent mortality figures.
@kinabalu, how can I make sense of this exchange when you remove all the earlier posts relating to it?
I always just leave the one I'm replying to. Do most people leave all of them? I'll do that too from now on if it's the norm. But anyway, not missing much in this case. @BannedInParis has some insight into what Spanish flu 2nd wave outcomes specifically tell us about how the Nightingale(s) will be used for Covid. Sounds interesting so I was hoping to squeeze it out of him.
Thanks. Most people do indeed leave the earlier exchanges to view under "show previous quotes". I fairly often find I need to open up an exchange to understand how the discussion has gone. When we had that phase of Vanilla not collapsing the threads it was useful to cut out intermediate stuff for simple legibility, but thankfully that glitch didn't last more than a few weeks. There is no need now to hide the intermediate stuff.
The Treasury has announced the extension of the UK’s job furlough scheme, which will now run an extra month until the end of June to “reflect continuing social distancing measures”
The scheme, which allows firms to keep employees on the payroll with the government paying cash grants covering 80% of their wages up to £2,500, was originally set for a three month period between March and the end of May.
The Treasury said the Chancellor would “keep the scheme under review and extend it if necessary.”
From the Guardian live blog.
If nine million workers are indeed furloughed then somebody on line calculated that that little policy will cost the taxpayer (if there are any left), 18 billion pounds a month.
A month.
Part of the problem is that far more employees have been furloughed than the government expected. The guidance was to carry on working but work from home where possible. Instead, employees have been furloughed left, right and centre. The longer lockdown goes on the more difficult it will be to get people back to work because they will have become accustomed to being paid to stay at home (as Peston pointed out the other day). This is partly why polls show that lockdown is well supported by the public.
The government is going to find getting out of lockdown far more difficult that putting us into lockdown. And it will get more difficult the longer lockdown lasts.
If lockdown and social distancing are working then how come the percentage of positive tests is still so high?
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can.
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
The truth is clearly that lockdown is killing substantial numbers of people due to other reasons than coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson)...
Loath though I am to question the authority of Fraser, how the eff does he know that ?
People like Nelson who are peddling this crap only have their own interests at heart. New York has seen a large rise in heart attacks, a known consequence of covid (look at the co-morbidities). They are registered as heart attacks but are likely because of covid. Reporting suggests that this happens rapidly and most do not even reach hospital. Now if we had proper testing in the community.....
On this subject, I’d be interested in knowing if being ill with this raises the blood pressure. Anyone know? I have to monitor mine closely and just worried that I might miss something (it naturally varies quite a bit, even with medication).
My Dad had *low* blood pressure during his illness.
n=1
Thanks to you and foxy for that, useful to know that I need to be careful if it is descending.
Ignoring the whole point that the nightingale hospitals were to take the less complex cases to allow the more complex cases to be treated in the permanent hospitals.
columnist for the national.........
They cannot hide the bollox as well nowadays. If only the tame lapdog London media were practicing journalism rather than brown nosing.
A second new Dylan song dropped overnight. I Contain Multitudes. Sounds bland on first listen, but improves each time. Like the best Dylan it is wry and wistful, clever and banal.With a sparse percussion free arrangement.
So I'll do that too. Meaning I'll need TWO drinks. Oh dear.
Bob gets everywhere. One of my faves is Positively 4th Street and the lyrics from that are on a big montage on the wall of the reception at the FSA in Canary Wharf.
Racked my brains to get the relevance to bank regulation but with no joy.
You've got a lotta nerve to say that you make wealth When the economy is down you just stand there sponging You got a lotta nerve to say you've got a ton of cash to lend You just want to be stashing it in your bonus
Ignoring the whole point that the nightingale hospitals were to take the less complex cases to allow the more complex cases to be treated in the permanent hospitals.
columnist for the national.........
They cannot hide the bollox as well nowadays. If only the tame lapdog London media were practicing journalism rather than brown nosing.
Any day now a journalist will discover that whisky contains alcohol.
"Secretive companies putting toxic chemicals in drinks marketed for entertainment!"
@kinabalu, how can I make sense of this exchange when you remove all the earlier posts relating to it?
I always just leave the one I'm replying to. Do most people leave all of them? I'll do that too from now on if it's the norm. But anyway, not missing much in this case. @BannedInParis has some insight into what Spanish flu 2nd wave outcomes specifically tell us about how the Nightingale(s) will be used for Covid. Sounds interesting so I was hoping to squeeze it out of him.
Thanks. Most people do indeed leave the earlier exchanges to view under "show previous quotes". I fairly often find I need to open up an exchange to understand how the discussion has gone. When we had that phase of Vanilla not collapsing the threads it was useful to cut out intermediate stuff for simple legibility, but thankfully that glitch didn't last more than a few weeks. There is no need now to hide the intermediate stuff.
Comments
Hoping we still get a season. And not just because of my blisteringly good tip on Hamilton scoring at 20 or fewer races (1.75).
It's also hard to know how many of these tests are from specimens collected a few days ago - the new UK dashboard reports the number of positives as a function of when the specimen was collected, which might be a more meaningful way of looking at the trend than the raw numbers. It will also be helpful to split up the Pillar II tests (healthcare workers and their families) from the Pillar I (patients admitted to hospital) tests. The former would hopefully be more enriched for milder cases.
They should be dropping like a stone by now. We;ve been in lockdown for a month
The truth is clearly that lockdown is avoidably killing substantial numbers of people for reasons totally unconnected with Coronavirus (one third of all excess deaths according to Fraser Nelson), is destroying our economy, whilst only having a marginal impact on the virus.
The cleverer countries are junking this policy and getting moving while they still can (America).
Our government, meanwhile is making the biggest policy mistake of any British government, ever
Loath though I am to question the authority of Fraser, how the eff does he know that ?
"As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting.
Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military's National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-coronavirus-crisis-early-november-sources/story?id=70031273
I remember securing an accquisition deal when we ran a case at $40 - for a laugh....
Appreciate it won't stop the nutters or those with an agenda from complaining, but no point giving them an easy win.
To his credit, he was one of the authors debunking MMR as a cause of autism.
More recently he is noted for his articles opposing environmentalism and sustainable energy.
The protection factor is always dependent on the combination of user and wearer, and the politicians are fearful of blaming the public, so they prevaricate. NHS staff are trained in this, or should be, but getting 30,000,000 people to use them properly isn't going to happen.
Edit: I don't wear nuisance masks because the precautions in wearing them properly are too lengthy and too involved.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52319956
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/manu-dibango-five-essential-tracks/
The CBI is urging the government to extend the workers wages coverage scheme (it only extends to the end of May).
If they don't then redundancy notices will start to go out very soon because under law there needs to be a 45 day redundancy consultation period.
Under the scheme the government expects nine million workers to be furloughed for the period, one THIRD of all private sector workers.
That's the private sector where ALL of our money comes from. every single penny.
No British government has ever committed economic suicide like this, ever, no matter what circumstances its citizens were facing. Ever. And we have faced some pretty poor times
Or that it does, but that it just does not care?
Floyd are good too though!
But we shall see.
Neil Ferguson at Imperial estimated IFR in China of 0.6% based on testing of international passengers from that country. This IFR figure would increase if it turns out China has been underreporting deaths.
0.6% has also been estimated for Korea based on an extensive testing programme.
I would say Mr Paunio's sample is ridiculously small, leaving aside any methodological issues. He also has an agenda, which is a warning sign for any empirical study.
In very different ways, both are full of artistically controlled excess.
The scheme, which allows firms to keep employees on the payroll with the government paying cash grants covering 80% of their wages up to £2,500, was originally set for a three month period between March and the end of May.
The Treasury said the Chancellor would “keep the scheme under review and extend it if necessary.”
From the Guardian live blog.
In the absence of an intervention or change of behaviour such as increased social distancing, the effective reproduction number drops towards one due to the depletion of susceptibles - in principle until an equilibrium is reached around the herd immunity level, possibly with some "overshoot" with the last wave of infections passing through, but in practice the dynamics are more complicated than that due to the heterogeneity and the fact that local pathogen extinction events become stochastic.
He also thinks the way out of lock down is to get everyone using an app, so contact tracing can be much more comprehensive.
On this subject, I’d be interested in knowing if being ill with this raises the blood pressure. Anyone know? I have to monitor mine closely and just worried that I might miss something (it naturally varies quite a bit, even with medication).
With the media, the twittersphere, the commentariat and social media as it is, it would take a politician of titanic courage and strength to ride out a policy where a certain level of suffering and death was tolerated right now to prevent a higher rate of suffering and death down the line.
Politicians just can't take decisions like that any more.
Einstein vs. Physical Review
As for J.K Rowling, I don't recollect her publishing any scientific papers.
I'm not saying backing a GE next year at 9.8 is a good bet, but equally it's not an impossibility by any means at all. In fact, before the Coronavirus pandemic had even started to kick off, I had placed bets that there WOULD be a GE in either 2020 or 2021 at odds of 30/1 in both instances.
A month.
Mostly though it seems to be respiratory failure that is the terminal event.
The DOH daily figure is a side issue.
n=1
So which European countries,apart from Germany,do you think are handling it well?
France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, The Netherlands,Switzerland?
Local R is probably well above 1 in a hospital Covid ward, similiarly for care homes and larger households but well below 1 elsewhere.
It'd be a massive breach of privacy but being able to see precisely where the cases are located would be enlightening.
As is Bibi Den's Tshibayi "The Best Ambience".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6F5farRJ_4&list=RDW6F5farRJ_4&start_radio=1&t=62
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqaC_p9km-Q
Provisionally, it does look as though the figures have fallen a little since 8th April, but not much.
Of course you also have to remember that people don't die on a fixed number of days after getting infected. People infected on (say) the 20th March might still be appearing in the most recent mortality figures.
Most people do indeed leave the earlier exchanges to view under "show previous quotes".
I fairly often find I need to open up an exchange to understand how the discussion has gone.
When we had that phase of Vanilla not collapsing the threads it was useful to cut out intermediate stuff for simple legibility, but thankfully that glitch didn't last more than a few weeks. There is no need now to hide the intermediate stuff.
The government is going to find getting out of lockdown far more difficult that putting us into lockdown. And it will get more difficult the longer lockdown lasts.
Bob gets everywhere. One of my faves is Positively 4th Street and the lyrics from that are on a big montage on the wall of the reception at the FSA in Canary Wharf.
Racked my brains to get the relevance to bank regulation but with no joy.
You've got a lotta nerve to say that you make wealth
When the economy is down you just stand there sponging
You got a lotta nerve to say you've got a ton of cash to lend
You just want to be stashing it in your bonus
Not really. But best I can do.
"Secretive companies putting toxic chemicals in drinks marketed for entertainment!"