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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » When will the public start to notice that the government isn’t doing very well on Covid-19?
If we’d been told a year ago that Boris Johnson would be prime minister, we could have accepted that as plausible. Theresa May’s authority was hopelessly undermined and Boris was well-placed to succeed her.
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Until we start getting the same level of transparency from the rest of the world, international comparisons are not valid.
https://twitter.com/travisakers/status/1251260796476305409?s=21
The French and Belgian data includes care home deaths. On a like for like basis France has significantly lower deaths per million than the UK. Not sure about Belgium.
Winston Churchill fucked up big time in Gallipoli in WWI and cost tens of thousands of British, Aussie and Kiwi troops deaths but a century later we hold him up to be the greatest heroic leader the country has seen.
In WWII thousands of servicemen were "collateral" damage on the beaches in Devon and Cornwall and across the Highlands of Scotland in practice exercises for secret raids and what became of the Normandy invasion. Just imagine if we had had journalists going on TV in 1940 complaining we didn't have enough Spitfires in stock in 1938!
Almost certainly Covid-19 was running rampant silently across this country in the autumn of last year. How many people kept complaining of having a particularly bad persistent cough or extreme flu like symptoms? It is something I kept hearing people talk about in general conversation.
There is probably one very good reason why the UK has been hit harder than most other European countries. It is called Heathrow Airport. The largest western transit airport outside the USA. Tens of thousands of people flying in and flying out including and especially from China and the USA in October, November and December, never mind January or February this year!
The one lesson we can all draw from this Covid-19 is that the Western world has become far too dependent on cheap and inexpensive goods from China. Just when the Western world desperately needed extra PPE to be manufactured, China had gone into lockdown and its factories were closed.
Can I suggest that the average person probably has plenty of hard-won experience in the real world, and knows perfection is impossible.
Try your best, work hard, correct mistakes, be flexible. That's good enough.
A wry smile crept over my face when I saw Richard Burton's tweet confirming our outcomes unfavourably to the Germans.
The Germans do much better because they have a very good healthcare system. And it isn't a top-down state-rationed monolith.
It's weird.
Just to be clear.
Good on Singh for calling out these weasel words.
We should never have voted for him. (Yeah, I know, Corbyn ...)
I can only imagine those who like it are just enjoying fucking about at home whilst not working and judging others.
I am still seeing a lot of "normalcy bias" in discussion about the virus. There is a worldwide shortage of PPE. If there is a worldwide shortage of money for governments to borrow there will be a UK financial crisis. If a vaccine is available this year we may be alright. 1-2 million doses is enough to vaccinate the most vulnerable and reduce hospital admissions. If it takes until 2021 or later, there is liable to be economic chaos.
On topic: as far as the statistics are concerned it is difficult to make international comparisons because different countries collect statistics in different ways. However, changes over time in a particular country's statistics often lead to meaningful comparisons.
Although you have missed their decision not to put restrictions on entry to this country.
People sit up and pay attention when David criticises because he's consistently fair, balanced, reasonable and rational.
These structural flaws in the WW1 military command structure led to changes which realised dividends in WW2.
Perhaps the lesson to be learned from today is that the civil service, PHE, and the NHS need fundamental reform?
The complacency among government supporters is incomprehensible. It gets worse: many of them seem more concerned about the government being presented in a poor light than stopping more avoidable deaths.
And yes, the opposition has been quite feckless but what motivates me is seeing some awful decisions made and then shrugged off as tolerable.
On timing, Covid-19's first cases were in December last year, not autumn, even if some did have colds or flu earlier.
On Heathrow, yes; On dependency on China, yes. But here you are doing what you complain of at the start.
Could it be that opinion polling on it is a when did you stop beating your wife type question?
They don't want it to end on a random date allowing the virus to let rip, I imagine.
I want it to end of course because of what it means - that fewer people re dying of this rotten virus. But the lockdown itself is a wonderous thing which has made my life so much better.
The UK seems similar to France and Italy and Spain to me.
To have got a Norway or South Korea type number we'd have had to take very different decisions right from the start that we weren't prepared to do.
Getting accurate data on the spread and mortality rates in the community would, to my untrained eye, look like a rather high priority at the moment.
It is, however, quite possible that the Government and its advisors will get away with it in any event. Consider,
1. Once the disease and the death rate are finally brought under some sort of control, the whole focus will inevitably turn to the economic catastrophe and measures to mitigate it (easing the lockdown and ongoing financial support for businesses and households,) and the fallout from that will go on for years. The public and the media may both be too busy fretting about current problems to indulge in too much recrimination over past mistakes
2. The NHS as national religion: anyone who suggests that Britain has handled the pandemic badly is liable to be bashed with the "how dare you criticize our beloved NHS?" stick. Regardless of the fact that criticisms over the lockdown, PPE shortages and so on are nothing to do with the efficiency and performance of the clinicians themselves, the risk is that pointing at the mortality statistics and denouncing them as awful will be interpreted in exactly that way. Simplistically put, as it will be by the time all the detail has been shredded in the course of an outbreak of loud public arguing, if Britain's healthcare outcomes are bad then surely this means that the NHS is bad, and to say that is heresy
3. Political buy-in: the devolved administrations have all acted more-or-less in lockstep with the UK Government, and the opposition in Parliament has been at pains to act in a spirit of national unity. There was very little loud shouting over the lockdown, in particular, at the time when the Government and the boffins were telling us that we should wait until the right moment to take those measures, and the various opposition parties can't just hop into their Tardises and change their responses now. Labour can make a little bit of headway in complaining about PPE and testing issues, but the big ship - the delays in implementing social distancing - has already sailed.
Moreover, some reports suggest that the UK is now one of the leading countries in terms of the global effort to identify therapies for Covid-19 and to develop a vaccine. Certainly if the team at Oxford hit the jackpot with a safe working vaccine before anyone else, then there will be national cheering and all previous errors will be even easier for the Government to write off. Ours is by no means the only country to have suffered mass casualties which might have been avoided with different or faster actions, but then again hindsight is a wonderful thing.
I think that most people were somewhat shocked when lockdown came in, and privately thought the government were over-doing things. Looking back they now see this as a pretty good call, even if earlier lockdown would have been better.
They also hear the media whining about about the end of lockdown, and understand why the start might have been delayed.
I am just not experiencing any criticism of the government's actions among friends and family. On the BBC yes, but who cares what the BBC says?
A rare opportunity for me to join the debate on a Saturday morning. I've had some peripheral involvement through work in the largely unheralded work of local authorities and others in mitigating or preparing for the worst from this.
It's my experience local authorities hope for the best and plan for the worst. The Councils I deal with, irrespective of their political stripe, have had plans of sorts on which they have drawn and the collaboration between public and private sector has been almost exemplary.
I have heard of some contractors asking for effectively "danger money" to work in and around care homes and hospitals but generally the speed and spirit of co-operation has been excellent.
I would also give a huge vote of thanks to road haulage which has kept most of the country going - I wanted to be a lorry driver when I was six but it's a tough life not helped by the closure of services on which they rely mitigated only by the absence of much of the usual traffic.
New Zealand did the right thing. Look at their data.
I feel dreadfully sorry for people without some means of getting outside!
i) Are you without severe covid-19 symptons.
ii) Do you have a job still or means of supporting yourself.
iii) Are your friends and family all still alive and able to eat with a roof over their heads.
If you can get near 3 out of 3, that's the best case scenario till a vaccine comes out.
However France is doing as badly as the UK on testing, which is the key to getting out of full lockdown.
https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1251216765893455875
Then you have the social consequences of a society where a culture snitching on your neighbours and others to the rozzers becomes embedded, which is perhaps what worries me worst of all.
The lock down decision will be debated ad infinitum I suspect - would a week earlier have made a difference? As for testing, I think we have the capacity but who, how and when look to be three questions with which I'm struggling. How is mass testing to be conducted - what of those who don't want to risk abandoning self isolation to get tested? Mobile testing units would be one solution but then I read the tests aren't wholly reliable with false positives and false negatives so we need a test that is as close to 100% accurate as possible before we can test everyone.
Masks - well. if Sadiq Khan makes wearing a mask a condition of travelling on the tube and buses, fine, but I would expect to be supplied with said mask (or masks) . If mask wearing is to be made compulsory, fine, just give me a mask. I'm convinced as to their value for those who are infected - less convinced for those who aren't.
How to end it - it's probably not a bad idea to see how others get on especially the USA and Germany. I understand those who are desperate not to walk down the same road twice and the signs from Singapore in particular show it may not be as simple as some think.
To stay on topic, that is what matters; voters won't punish a government for not doing what they would also not have done.
I read an article yesterday that said we might be overegging Covid-19 deaths because doctors are being encouraged to put carehome deaths down to it if they're not sure.
The next thing for people to start to get their head around is that unfortunately Keir Starmer isn't very good. They should have gone with Nandy.
New Zealand is a far smaller country and rather globally isolated: we could hardly be more connected and are densely populated.
My view is the curve has already flattened, the NHS hasn't been overwhelmed, nightingale hospitals are barely being used and we have dire ONS data on the economic forecasts.
So, we should be seriously looking at a progressive lockdown lift from the middle of May, and no later IMHO.
Good article on German healthcare, and why they’re doing so well.
https://www.businessinsider.nl/germany-why-coronavirus-death-rate-lower-italy-spain-test-healthcare-2020-3?international=true&r=US
Starsports has a series of video interviews, one of which has Daniel Hughes talking about betting on reality tv shows and politics.
https://www.starsportsbet.co.uk/bettingpeople-daniel-hughes/
Heathrow is arguably the centre of the world's transport hub. Arguably, keeping it open throughout is as stupid as letting the Cheltenham Festival go ahead.
Oh, and I live in the country that’s second on that list. Currently we are not allowed out except once every three days for food and medicines, and have to get advance permission from the police to do so. Would people prefer the UK to be more like the UAE in that regard too?
As a Brit (albeit abroad) are there any British institutions you admire?
I did criticise you for posting about the End Of Days on here night and day in mid February onwards because you were spreading hyperbolic panic that wasn't helpful to anyone.
You don't get to criticise me on Coronavirus as I was posting about why more people weren't taking it seriously on my Twitter feed back in *January*.
I just didn't lose my shit. Losing your shit isn't equivalent to being shown to be right in hindsight, which you are also obsessed with being seen to be.
I'll take that as your apology. No harm done.
Let's look at the timing of the lockdown as an example. Our GDP is roughly £2trn or £40bn a week. The shutdown is costing us at least 30% of output which means that there is £12bn of lost GDP each week it is in operation. In fact it is much worse than that because government spending is being massively increased (whatever it takes) and private sector tax generating income has largely stopped outside of supermarkets. The longer term economic consequences are frankly horrendous and we do not want to be in lock down for a day more than we need to be.
Why are we in lockdown? It is not to stop the spread of the virus, that is ultimately futile. It is to protect the NHS. This has been achieved. We have seen none of the overwhelming of health services that we have seen in other countries. Indeed you could make the case for much of the country that we locked down too soon. Ninewells hospital in Dundee, the biggest in Tayside, currently has 7 people on ventilators. 7. The resources available are actually not being used to full advantage.
Why is our death rate marginally above average? I would tentatively suggest several reasons. In London we have the most densely populated area in Europe and England generally is some of the most densely populated landmass. This virus loves dense populations, see New York, Madrid, Belgium. We have a large BAME population who seem particularly vulnerable. We have a major obesity problem that does not help.
There is no good evidence that we are doing worse than anyone else once these factors are taken into account.
So protect the NHS, tick, don't lock down too soon (tick for London), protect the economy as much as possible in this nightmare, tick. Not everything is right, there are frustrations with PPE and the bravery of NHS staff is remarkable but we are doing alright, possibly slightly better than that.
If England pops up as one of the AI civilisation rivals I'll declare war on them and let you know how I get on.
In a shocking coincidence less than 24 hours before this exemption was issued Vince and Linda McMahon's political action Committee vowed to spend at least 18.5million dollars for GOP candidates in Florida come November.
As no one really knows, the "experts" are floundering round between "everything will bounce back" and "nothing will ever be the same again" which covers most of the bases - the truth is likely, as always, to be somewhere between the two.
How much will this experience change us? Don't know but it will - there will be changes which don't last and changes that do. We can hope for some positive outcomes but there will be some negative ones too.
I'll just throw a thought or two out there - will we see more people opting to care for elderly relatives at home within the family? Initially, some speculated the big death toll in Italy was due to larger families living together but on the other hand you have care homes and they may be one of the big horror stories from this (quite apart from those who will be found to have died alone).
Second, will this give a big boost to home working? Talking to my colleagues we are all coping well with not being in office. There's talk of a monthly get together but that doesn't require an office - just a meeting room which you could rent on a daily or even hourly basis. That said, it requires different forms of management and leadership and it will cause organisations to evolve (and those that don't or can't may not survive).
Home working isn't possible for everyone but I wonder if we will see a move toward a more freelancing workforce with individuals offering their skills to each other or to other organisations - this won't happen overnight but it seems a plausible evolution.