The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Patrick Vallance said that deaths are being counted as covid-19 in U.K. hospitals when no testing has been done to see if any covid-19 is present at all
If so, the series isn't even internally consistent then. (Though that seems to me to be a correct decision - when time and resources are at a premium, keep testing for the living.)
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
The underestimation surely applies to cases and deaths? I mean they just upped their death rate by a suspiciously precise 50% a few days ago...
"Surely". An odd thing to say, as no evidence is ever provided for any of this innuendo.
OK - surely they are yellow-skinned and slitty-eyed. No argument about that.
Circumstantial evidence is evidence.
Well, what is the circumstantial evidence? I'm all ears for a shred of evidence, of whatever kind.
It became clear that the Chinese death rate must be more than 100 times what the official figures say as soon as it became clear the UK rate would be more than that.
Especially to people who had previously pointed out how extremely draconian the Chinese containment measures were.
it's quite depressing to think we have another year of this kinda news, at the very least.
Guernsey government reckoning travel restriction will continue throughout 2020
I don’t blame them and I think their forecast is largely right. Don’t think we’ll be getting back to anything approaching normal travel for at least this year, and airlines saying they’ll take the middle seats out of use just smacks of desperation. Anyone fancy a business trip to N York two feet away from big Dave from sales? Though not.
Guernsey and other such like places ( IOM? Jersey? up to NZ maybe? ) might be able to get the virus down to actual zero, put in place draconian quarantine and pretty much open everything else up as normal.
Goods can still move but not people without enforced inward detention, prior to reliable testing. I suppose pilots would have to be tested orrery much daily.
The Hungarians used to have a cordon sanitiser with the Ottoman Empire to keep out the plague. I believe it worked.
It’s not subtle, but it might work for some where the geography allows.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I'll put away the world's smallest violin for now to note this raises the interesting question: how should the government decide which businesses to prop up and which to let go, or how to set criteria for access to government support? I expect a lot of thought is being given to this just now.
Case by case basis - for airlines, is the business strategically needed ? I'd say some airline capability is for sure. If so nationalise it. I'd look to British Airways rather than Virgin though for that.
If Virgin goes under BA with £10 billion in the bank will again have a monopoly of Atlantic crossings, it will not need to be nationalised
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
That, or you can make the simple step of assuming if someone thought the death rate was underestimated, they must also think that the case rate must be similarly underestimated. It really is quite simple.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
The millstone around BA’s neck is the pension scheme. They have more retired pilots than active pilots, and most of them are of the final-salary, index-linked, gold-plated variety.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
it's quite depressing to think we have another year of this kinda news, at the very least.
Guernsey government reckoning travel restriction will continue throughout 2020
I don’t blame them and I think their forecast is largely right. Don’t think we’ll be getting back to anything approaching normal travel for at least this year, and airlines saying they’ll take the middle seats out of use just smacks of desperation. Anyone fancy a business trip to N York two feet away from big Dave from sales? Though not.
Guernsey and other such like places ( IOM? Jersey? up to NZ maybe? ) might be able to get the virus down to actual zero, put in place draconian quarantine and pretty much open everything else up as normal.
Goods can still move but not people without enforced inward detention, prior to reliable testing. I suppose pilots would have to be tested orrery much daily.
The Hungarians used to have a cordon sanitiser with the Ottoman Empire to keep out the plague. I believe it worked.
It’s not subtle, but it might work for some where the geography allows.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I'll put away the world's smallest violin for now to note this raises the interesting question: how should the government decide which businesses to prop up and which to let go, or how to set criteria for access to government support? I expect a lot of thought is being given to this just now.
Its a really interesting question. And what form is that support going to take? Is it nationalisation at one extreme or grants gratis at the other?
FWIW I agree with @Sandpit that parasitical businesses who have earned their money here but avoided paying taxes are bottom of the list. Businesses who have a good future and export are clearly top although the Tory party will angst endlessly about "picking winners". For the majority I think that the government should be offering 100% guaranteed loans with some specific help for the restaurant/café/pub businesses. Which is not too far from where Rishi is right now, just a bit further to go.
I know that its *wrong* to do lockdown shaming. So I'm not. However I am curious about the family across the road who congregate every day in their sun-basked front garden who as I type this are having a sunbed delivered... You have the Yorkshire sun to tan you, why get an artificial sun.
And is a sunbed hire company defined as key industry allowed to be operating...?
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
He's a party grandee now, still popular to boot.
LibDems still like Clegg and Tories still like IDS. Failure is no barrier to popularity within your party.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Patrick Vallance said that deaths are being counted as covid-19 in U.K. hospitals when no testing has been done to see if any covid-19 is present at all
If someone has all the symptons that's probably more accurate than a test.
Not when those symptoms are common with many other viruses.
I am actually rather sympathetic to Jezza on this one. A 36 seat gain looks good until you think back to the epic dismalness of May's campaign, and then it looks like an underperformance, like only beating Scotland 5-1 at footie, and the underperformance requires an explanation. As to the Nobody likes Jezza anyway claim, look how the tory attack youtube video which I kept embarrassingly linking to, bombed that time round.
Fair comment, this, I think. They say divided parties lose votes. As with most things "they say" it is not gospel but has some truth to it. So if we imagine an alternative recent history where Corbyn had all of his MPs full square behind him, and a party machine working unanimously for the election of a Labour government in 2017, rather than split between those doing that and those taking the more exotic option of working for a Conservative one, would this have resulted in a better haul of seats than the 262 he managed? The answer to this is undeniably yes. It must be so. But would he have managed the extra number of seats required to put him into Number Ten? Nobody can know this with any degree of confidence whatsoever. My sense, however, is that the answer is again yes. He would have just got over the line.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Patrick Vallance said that deaths are being counted as covid-19 in U.K. hospitals when no testing has been done to see if any covid-19 is present at all
If someone has all the symptons that's probably more accurate than a test.
Not when those symptoms are common with many other viruses.
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
That, or you can make the simple step of assuming if someone thought the death rate was underestimated, they must also think that the case rate must be similarly underestimated. It really is quite simple.
As I've already said - they said they though the number of deaths was underestimated by a factor of 100 - that's all.
If you want to try to work out what other wild, underevidenced assumptions they were making, then you need to ask them, not me. You can try to make sense of these wild, unevidenced claims if you want to. Don't expect me to clarify them for you!
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
Hardly, Starmer is there for 4 years, if Johnson messes up Starmer is the next PM after the next general election.
The Corbynites need Starmer to lose the next general election to have a chance to say 'I told you so' and reclaim the party, though more likely after both the Starmer Brownites and Corbynites had lost to Boris the Blairites would seize their chance again
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
You are embarrassing yourself. If he proposed a x100 uplift in the number of deaths, you can probably conclude that he would posit an uplift in the number of cases.
There is direct evidence that the numbers are fudged (e.g. the urn count) but mostly, it's the same kind of evidence as would lead you to doubt me if I told you I am 9 feet tall. You don't know who I am, you've never seen a photo of me, but you would rightly disbelieve me.
it's quite depressing to think we have another year of this kinda news, at the very least.
Guernsey government reckoning travel restriction will continue throughout 2020
I don’t blame them and I think their forecast is largely right. Don’t think we’ll be getting back to anything approaching normal travel for at least this year, and airlines saying they’ll take the middle seats out of use just smacks of desperation. Anyone fancy a business trip to N York two feet away from big Dave from sales? Though not.
Guernsey and other such like places ( IOM? Jersey? up to NZ maybe? ) might be able to get the virus down to actual zero, put in place draconian quarantine and pretty much open everything else up as normal.
Goods can still move but not people without enforced inward detention, prior to reliable testing. I suppose pilots would have to be tested orrery much daily.
The Hungarians used to have a cordon sanitiser with the Ottoman Empire to keep out the plague. I believe it worked.
It’s not subtle, but it might work for some where the geography allows.
Sanitizer - sanitaire!
I was just visualising Janissaries queueing up to do the happy birthday handwash before carrying on with pillaging.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Alastair, you're such a spoil sport bringing up tiresome facts.
The number that's worth watching most carefully is the weekly ONS statistic of total deaths. All other things being equal, it's reasonable to attribute any excess over the expected rate to Covid-19 at present.
Indeed, given the lockdown it seems likely that perhaps understates Covid-19's virulence - I suspect that many types of accidental death are well down on usual.
I appreciate everyone likes daily figures because they give a lot more to talk about, but aside from giving some idea of the trajectory, the numbers themselves seem close to useless to me.
Yes, the total deaths figures are by far the best ones to watch. There’s too much variation in specifically virus-related death measurement, but the number of ‘excess deaths’ this year compared to the last few should be reasonably consistent across jurisdictions.
it's quite depressing to think we have another year of this kinda news, at the very least.
Weirdly, they have just paid me 400 euros compensation for a 5 hour flight delay last summer. Seems generous at a time when I would probably pay 400 eur for the opportunity to mooch around Oslo airport for 5 hours.
After a few drinks you’d basically be at break even.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
The millstone around BA’s neck is the pension scheme. They have more retired pilots than active pilots, and most of them are of the final-salary, index-linked, gold-plated variety.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
And another step along the way for the pension protection fund being a reverse tontine for the poor sods of companies still with DB schemes left propping it up, until the inevitable happens and the Govt takes it over. Another one for the taxpayer tab.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Alastair, you're such a spoil sport bringing up tiresome facts.
The number that's worth watching most carefully is the weekly ONS statistic of total deaths. All other things being equal, it's reasonable to attribute any excess over the expected rate to Covid-19 at present.
Indeed, given the lockdown it seems likely that perhaps understates Covid-19's virulence - I suspect that many types of accidental death are well down on usual.
I appreciate everyone likes daily figures because they give a lot more to talk about, but aside from giving some idea of the trajectory, the numbers themselves seem close to useless to me.
The total deaths figure is undoubtedly the most relevant but it will also pick up consequential deaths that are not directly related to Covid, such as those whose cancer treatment has been postponed, optional surgery, those suffering from depression who become suicidal in the isolation, etc etc. Which on one view is fair enough.
The relevance of the daily figures for me is that it shows trends within a country where the numbers are being collated on a consistent basis. International comparisons are pointless at this stage, there are too many unknown variables.
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
Being 1500 miles from the closest other nation and only basically one way in, and there are very limited reasons why people will arrive in NZ e.g. they are going there to transfer as an international hub.
It made it very easy to just say we are shut.
And of course add into that, very low population density.
That is two massive advantages that basically no other country on earth has.
You really need to travel to New Zealand to realise how far it is from anywhere else.
Are you sure? The moon is a long way away but I can’t profess ever to have been there.
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
You are embarrassing yourself. If he proposed a x100 uplift in the number of deaths, you can probably conclude that he would posit an uplift in the number of cases.
No - I can't conclude anything.
It's anyone's guess what may or may not be in his head. There's no evidence for any of it. If you think his vapourings are of any value, take it up with him. It's certainly not up to me to make sense of his nonsense.
This used to be a site where critical thinking was encouraged, I think. These days, people seem eager to swallow any drivel that's posted here, and to attack anyone questioning it. Bizarre.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
The millstone around BA’s neck is the pension scheme. They have more retired pilots than active pilots, and most of them are of the final-salary, index-linked, gold-plated variety.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
BA ain't going bust, it has £10 billion of reserves and if Virgin goes bust complete monopoly of the Heathrow to New York and LA routes
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird one and no mistake, Holmes.
I thought the explanation for that was that people who are worried about getting put at the back of the queue for the ventilator tell the hospital they don't smoke?
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
The millstone around BA’s neck is the pension scheme. They have more retired pilots than active pilots, and most of them are of the final-salary, index-linked, gold-plated variety.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
Most current BA staff do not benefit from the pensions which are causing BA the problems. Those are largely historical.
One very sensitive subject for the government here is that BA was privatised with a defined benefit pension scheme but without a crown guarantee (unlike, for example, BT). Letting it go bust and seeing their former employees' pension rights reduced as a consequence would raise the question whether the government had profited at those former employees' expense.
It's all a bit of a ludicrous counterfactual. But an additional point is that, if Corbyn was correct that Labour's standing just before the 2017 election was called would have been higher but for the coup (and David is pretty convincing on why that's a dubious claim) this would in itself have made an election less likely.
May's ill-starred decision to call an election was predicated on Labour's division and weakness - had it been fairly even in early 2017, May wouldn't have called it (she nearly didn't as it was).
Good point. May was a risk averse politician. She had to think she had a guaranteed landslide to go to the polls in 2017. Remove that belief - no election.
In March/April 2017 the Tory private polling and seat modelling showed Mrs May was on course for a 290 (two hundred and ninety) seat majority.
Nick Timothy and his boss thought even if they ran the shittest campaign on record they’d still get a decent majority.
Looking back, it was a mercy TMay did NOT win that stonking majority, because we'd have ended up with her terrible Brexit deal.
You could, I suppose, argue that she would have handled corona better, but I am very doubtful. She's a cautious vacillator, she would have been as slow to respond as Boris, but in a different way.
I am surprised that you see that much of a difference between May’s deal and Boris’s. The latter simply screwed Northern Ireland that little bit more.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
However, I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Scott Morrison should probably be getting more credit too...
Although it's a little unclear, isn't Australia probably helped very substantially by the weather? It's early Autumn there, and still pretty hot (by our standards). The evidence is that they are well outside the Goldilocks zone for this to spread fast and have a high death rate (unlike Western Europe).
The response in Australia may also have helped, but the crude death rate/infection rate comparisons are a poor measure of how well or badly a country is doing, because there are many variables. As well as the weather conditions (the exact impact of which is unknown), some countries are almost certainly dishonest, others have poor recording systems, others have different methodologies for people who were severely ill before contracting the virus (difference between deaths of and deaths with), others are more likely to allow people to die at home (or lack universal care so people die at home without help) etc.
There will, I am sure, be much to be said about this when the dust has settled. My instinct is that the UK acted slowly and has made various mistakes - we certainly aren't alone in that, however, and it is far to early to reach really firm conclusions. Certainly, I don't think the league table approach is all that meaningful or useful at this point.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Alastair, you're such a spoil sport bringing up tiresome facts.
The number that's worth watching most carefully is the weekly ONS statistic of total deaths. All other things being equal, it's reasonable to attribute any excess over the expected rate to Covid-19 at present.
Indeed, given the lockdown it seems likely that perhaps understates Covid-19's virulence - I suspect that many types of accidental death are well down on usual.
I appreciate everyone likes daily figures because they give a lot more to talk about, but aside from giving some idea of the trajectory, the numbers themselves seem close to useless to me.
The total deaths figure is undoubtedly the most relevant but it will also pick up consequential deaths that are not directly related to Covid, such as those whose cancer treatment has been postponed, optional surgery, those suffering from depression who become suicidal in the isolation, etc etc. Which on one view is fair enough.
The relevance of the daily figures for me is that it shows trends within a country where the numbers are being collated on a consistent basis. International comparisons are pointless at this stage, there are too many unknown variables.
When hospitals shut, deaths go down for a while, not up; surgeries for example result in fewer, earlier, deaths.
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
Yo my man! Back on the treadmill. Good effort. Glad to see your batteries are recharged.
Hope you managed to figure out how to help your friend.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Alastair, you're such a spoil sport bringing up tiresome facts.
The number that's worth watching most carefully is the weekly ONS statistic of total deaths. All other things being equal, it's reasonable to attribute any excess over the expected rate to Covid-19 at present.
Indeed, given the lockdown it seems likely that perhaps understates Covid-19's virulence - I suspect that many types of accidental death are well down on usual.
I appreciate everyone likes daily figures because they give a lot more to talk about, but aside from giving some idea of the trajectory, the numbers themselves seem close to useless to me.
The total deaths figure is undoubtedly the most relevant but it will also pick up consequential deaths that are not directly related to Covid, such as those whose cancer treatment has been postponed, optional surgery, those suffering from depression who become suicidal in the isolation, etc etc. Which on one view is fair enough.
The relevance of the daily figures for me is that it shows trends within a country where the numbers are being collated on a consistent basis. International comparisons are pointless at this stage, there are too many unknown variables.
Lockdown also probably prevents non-COVID deaths, e.g. traffic accidents, flu.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Patrick Vallance said that deaths are being counted as covid-19 in U.K. hospitals when no testing has been done to see if any covid-19 is present at all
Can't say what's happening in the rest of Germany, but in my wife's hospital every single patient who comes to the hospital for any reason whatsoever is tested for Covid. This has been the case for a couple of weeks.
Patients who test negative but are admitted with Covid symptoms are retested, until they get a positive test or leave the hospital. You can make a pretty good clinical diagnosis if a patient has enough symptoms, even without a positive test result.
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
The far left won't be able to get anywhere close to the 20% threshold of Labour MPs nominations that are required to force a leadership challenge.
And even if they managed that, they would discover just as Owen Smith did that there is a significant element of the Labour membership who will support the sitting leader out of loyalty regardless of their own political preferences. They would do well even to match the 27% who supported RLB this year.
After all that the remaining matter of getting the UK electorate to vote for a PM Burgon seems to be a minor obstacle.
I love it that not bailing out foreign owned Virgin in favour of nationalising (foreign owned) BA was suggested. You want a UK airline to nationalise? Its easyJet...
I'd be surprised if any non-state carriers survive this. Airlines were already not the healthiest of things, and with the most optimistic set of goggles on we aren't switching off the pandemic in June and returning to status quo ante. Nor will it matter than various airlines have gone bust as we won't need the capacity anyway.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
I'm working on it , I'm working on it.
As well as early indications in the data, I have to say I am struck by the photos that the media post of those younger, described as "fit and healthy" individuals, who have died.
It does seem they pretty much all fit into the categories of front-line NHS staff, BAME or significantly overweight (and often in multiple of these categories).
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
The millstone around BA’s neck is the pension scheme. They have more retired pilots than active pilots, and most of them are of the final-salary, index-linked, gold-plated variety.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
Most current BA staff do not benefit from the pensions which are causing BA the problems. Those are largely historical.
One very sensitive subject for the government here is that BA was privatised with a defined benefit pension scheme but without a crown guarantee (unlike, for example, BT). Letting it go bust and seeing their former employees' pension rights reduced as a consequence would raise the question whether the government had profited at those former employees' expense.
As a soon to be Royal Mail pensioner, I was concerned when Osborne effectively nationalised RM’s relatively well funded pension scheme, dropped its assets into his national balance sheet, and threw its mass of future pensioners into the civil service pot as people whose pensions would be unfunded, paid for from future governments’ revenue budgets.
Suddenly that doesn’t look like such a bad position to be.
Talking of troubled nations....(lack of) education, education, education...
I swear we’re fighting two pandemics, Covid-19 and stupidity.
What scares me is that our chances of surviving this is relying on the common sense of others.
We’re more fucked than a stepmom on pornhub aren’t we?
Keep in mind the anti-lockdown movement in the US is heavily astroturfed, by DeVos and others. The driving force behind it isn't stupidity, it's a cynical, clear-eyed decision by the ultra-rich that they'd prefer mass deaths over a hit to their investment portfolios.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
I'm working on it , I'm working on it.
Contrary to current received wisdom, it's not that clear that BMI (or ethnicity) has that much impact:
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Alastair, you're such a spoil sport bringing up tiresome facts.
The number that's worth watching most carefully is the weekly ONS statistic of total deaths. All other things being equal, it's reasonable to attribute any excess over the expected rate to Covid-19 at present.
Indeed, given the lockdown it seems likely that perhaps understates Covid-19's virulence - I suspect that many types of accidental death are well down on usual.
I appreciate everyone likes daily figures because they give a lot more to talk about, but aside from giving some idea of the trajectory, the numbers themselves seem close to useless to me.
Yes, the total deaths figures are by far the best ones to watch. There’s too much variation in specifically virus-related death measurement, but the number of ‘excess deaths’ this year compared to the last few should be reasonably consistent across jurisdictions.
We will never quite know the allocation between direct COVID19 deaths and deaths caused by the changes in circumstance for the lockdown.
I believe there is already evidence of a spike in non COVID19 deaths?
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
You are embarrassing yourself. If he proposed a x100 uplift in the number of deaths, you can probably conclude that he would posit an uplift in the number of cases.
No - I can't conclude anything.
It's anyone's guess what may or may not be in his head. There's no evidence for any of it. If you think his vapourings are of any value, take it up with him. It's certainly not up to me to make sense of his nonsense.
This used to be a site where critical thinking was encouraged, I think. These days, people seem eager to swallow any drivel that's posted here, and to attack anyone questioning it. Bizarre.
Yes, you can. I doubt anyone would suggest that the death rate is underestimated by a factor of 10 or 100 yet argue the case rate is not the same. You yourself have pointed out how illogical that would be. Therefore the most reasonable explanation is that they thought both the death rate and the case rate were overestimated. I really don't see why you are having such a hard time accepting that?
It's all a bit of a ludicrous counterfactual. But an additional point is that, if Corbyn was correct that Labour's standing just before the 2017 election was called would have been higher but for the coup (and David is pretty convincing on why that's a dubious claim) this would in itself have made an election less likely.
May's ill-starred decision to call an election was predicated on Labour's division and weakness - had it been fairly even in early 2017, May wouldn't have called it (she nearly didn't as it was).
Good point. May was a risk averse politician. She had to think she had a guaranteed landslide to go to the polls in 2017. Remove that belief - no election.
In March/April 2017 the Tory private polling and seat modelling showed Mrs May was on course for a 290 (two hundred and ninety) seat majority.
Nick Timothy and his boss thought even if they ran the shittest campaign on record they’d still get a decent majority.
Looking back, it was a mercy TMay did NOT win that stonking majority, because we'd have ended up with her terrible Brexit deal.
You could, I suppose, argue that she would have handled corona better, but I am very doubtful. She's a cautious vacillator, she would have been as slow to respond as Boris, but in a different way.
I am surprised that you see that much of a difference between May’s deal and Boris’s. The latter simply screwed Northern Ireland that little bit more.
We don't know what is going to emerge yet. We are still in transition.
While I am not confident of Boris and Dom's handling of corona, I am confident they have the balls to get a better Brexit out of Brussels. Especially as the EU is now weak, and seriously divided.
Blind confidence isn’t a particularly valuable asset in the political world.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird one and no mistake, Holmes.
I thought the explanation for that was that people who are worried about getting put at the back of the queue for the ventilator tell the hospital they don't smoke?
Maybe. Also smokers aren't going to get themselves tested because they have a persistent cough. They always have persistent coughs.
Agreed, the only reason Corbyn did so well in 2017 was he kept Leavers and Remainers in his tent by promising to deliver Brexit while opposing hard Brexit and due to May's terrible campaign and the dementia tax.
By 2019 May had gone, Boris ran a more populist campaign, Leavers deserted Labour for the Tories after Corbyn failed to support Brexit and some Remainers switched from Labour to the LDs after Corbyn refused to commit hard enough to stop Brexit
Spot on analysis. Brexit flattered Lab in 2017 but cost them big in 2019.
Little quibble though -
It does not follow from this that having some of his MPs and key figures in the party machine working actively against him did not cost seats in 2017. It could well have done. Probably did.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
I'm working on it , I'm working on it.
Contrary to current received wisdom, it's not that clear that BMI (or ethnicity) has that much impact:
It's all a bit of a ludicrous counterfactual. But an additional point is that, if Corbyn was correct that Labour's standing just before the 2017 election was called would have been higher but for the coup (and David is pretty convincing on why that's a dubious claim) this would in itself have made an election less likely.
May's ill-starred decision to call an election was predicated on Labour's division and weakness - had it been fairly even in early 2017, May wouldn't have called it (she nearly didn't as it was).
Good point. May was a risk averse politician. She had to think she had a guaranteed landslide to go to the polls in 2017. Remove that belief - no election.
In March/April 2017 the Tory private polling and seat modelling showed Mrs May was on course for a 290 (two hundred and ninety) seat majority.
Nick Timothy and his boss thought even if they ran the shittest campaign on record they’d still get a decent majority.
Looking back, it was a mercy TMay did NOT win that stonking majority, because we'd have ended up with her terrible Brexit deal.
You could, I suppose, argue that she would have handled corona better, but I am very doubtful. She's a cautious vacillator, she would have been as slow to respond as Boris, but in a different way.
I am surprised that you see that much of a difference between May’s deal and Boris’s. The latter simply screwed Northern Ireland that little bit more.
The Boris Deal took GB out of the customs union unlike the May Deal while still avoiding a hard border with the Republic of Ireland in Northern Ireland
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
The millstone around BA’s neck is the pension scheme. They have more retired pilots than active pilots, and most of them are of the final-salary, index-linked, gold-plated variety.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
Most current BA staff do not benefit from the pensions which are causing BA the problems. Those are largely historical.
One very sensitive subject for the government here is that BA was privatised with a defined benefit pension scheme but without a crown guarantee (unlike, for example, BT). Letting it go bust and seeing their former employees' pension rights reduced as a consequence would raise the question whether the government had profited at those former employees' expense.
Ooh, that’s an interesting point which I didn’t know about the privatisation.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
The millstone around BA’s neck is the pension scheme. They have more retired pilots than active pilots, and most of them are of the final-salary, index-linked, gold-plated variety.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
BA ain't going bust, it has £10 billion of reserves and if Virgin goes bust complete monopoly of the Heathrow to New York and LA routes
Even better if thats true, no need to nationalise British Airways as Branson goes bust then.
Talking of troubled nations....(lack of) education, education, education...
I swear we’re fighting two pandemics, Covid-19 and stupidity.
What scares me is that our chances of surviving this is relying on the common sense of others.
We’re more fucked than a stepmom on pornhub aren’t we?
Keep in mind the anti-lockdown movement in the US is heavily astroturfed, by DeVos and others. The driving force behind it isn't stupidity, it's a cynical, clear-eyed decision by the ultra-rich that they'd prefer mass deaths over a hit to their investment portfolios.
I am not sure of the linkage between Betsy DeVos and a stepmom on pornhub?
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
I'm working on it , I'm working on it.
Contrary to current received wisdom, it's not that clear that BMI (or ethnicity) has that much impact:
Agreed, the only reason Corbyn did so well in 2017 was he kept Leavers and Remainers in his tent by promising to deliver Brexit while opposing hard Brexit and due to May's terrible campaign and the dementia tax.
By 2019 May had gone, Boris ran a more populist campaign, Leavers deserted Labour for the Tories after Corbyn failed to support Brexit and some Remainers switched from Labour to the LDs after Corbyn refused to commit hard enough to stop Brexit
Spot on analysis. Brexit flattered Lab in 2017 but cost them big in 2019.
Little quibble though -
It does not follow from this that having some of his MPs and key figures in the party machine working actively against him did not cost seats in 2017. It could well have done. Probably did.
Yes, the logical flaw in Cowling's bolded paragraph is so obvious I really don't see how he had the gall to post it.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
I'm working on it , I'm working on it.
Contrary to current received wisdom, it's not that clear that BMI (or ethnicity) has that much impact:
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Alastair, you're such a spoil sport bringing up tiresome facts.
The number that's worth watching most carefully is the weekly ONS statistic of total deaths. All other things being equal, it's reasonable to attribute any excess over the expected rate to Covid-19 at present.
Indeed, given the lockdown it seems likely that perhaps understates Covid-19's virulence - I suspect that many types of accidental death are well down on usual.
I appreciate everyone likes daily figures because they give a lot more to talk about, but aside from giving some idea of the trajectory, the numbers themselves seem close to useless to me.
This is a key point.
Last week, I posted that the life expectancy of people arriving at care homes is around nine months. Our resident PB medical expert suggested this was too long.
Ultimately the ‘price’ of the virus should surely best be measured by the cumulative lost years of life of our population.
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
The underestimation surely applies to cases and deaths? I mean they just upped their death rate by a suspiciously precise 50% a few days ago...
They didn't increase the number of cases at the same time did they - so if you were to believe the figures completely you'd have to believe there were almost 1,300 people who they knew had the virus, but they hadn't noticed had died. Everything about the Chinese covid statistics is a farce from start to finish.
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
I'd support a temporary? nationalisation of British Airways (We NEED A national carrier) but not a Virgin bailout, that's ridiculous.
The millstone around BA’s neck is the pension scheme. They have more retired pilots than active pilots, and most of them are of the final-salary, index-linked, gold-plated variety.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
Most current BA staff do not benefit from the pensions which are causing BA the problems. Those are largely historical.
One very sensitive subject for the government here is that BA was privatised with a defined benefit pension scheme but without a crown guarantee (unlike, for example, BT). Letting it go bust and seeing their former employees' pension rights reduced as a consequence would raise the question whether the government had profited at those former employees' expense.
Ooh, that’s an interesting point which I didn’t know about the privatisation.
BA would love to screw over some of the older staff cohort. Given they have 10Bn in the bank, not sure that they have much of an argument why they should be allowed to.
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
You are embarrassing yourself. If he proposed a x100 uplift in the number of deaths, you can probably conclude that he would posit an uplift in the number of cases.
No - I can't conclude anything.
It's anyone's guess what may or may not be in his head. There's no evidence for any of it. If you think his vapourings are of any value, take it up with him. It's certainly not up to me to make sense of his nonsense.
This used to be a site where critical thinking was encouraged, I think. These days, people seem eager to swallow any drivel that's posted here, and to attack anyone questioning it. Bizarre.
Yes, you can. I doubt anyone would suggest that the death rate is underestimated by a factor of 10 or 100 yet argue the case rate is not the same. You yourself have pointed out how illogical that would be. Therefore the most reasonable explanation is that they thought both the death rate and the case rate were overestimated. I really don't see why you are having such a hard time accepting that?
Who knows what they were assuming? I repeat - if you want to know that, ask them, not me! I don't know why you are finding that so difficult to understand.
But I did ask you - if you disregard the Chinese figures - what on earth you are assuming about the fatality rate of this disease? 10%? 20%? Not a clue?
It's all a bit of a ludicrous counterfactual. But an additional point is that, if Corbyn was correct that Labour's standing just before the 2017 election was called would have been higher but for the coup (and David is pretty convincing on why that's a dubious claim) this would in itself have made an election less likely.
May's ill-starred decision to call an election was predicated on Labour's division and weakness - had it been fairly even in early 2017, May wouldn't have called it (she nearly didn't as it was).
Good point. May was a risk averse politician. She had to think she had a guaranteed landslide to go to the polls in 2017. Remove that belief - no election.
In March/April 2017 the Tory private polling and seat modelling showed Mrs May was on course for a 290 (two hundred and ninety) seat majority.
Nick Timothy and his boss thought even if they ran the shittest campaign on record they’d still get a decent majority.
Looking back, it was a mercy TMay did NOT win that stonking majority, because we'd have ended up with her terrible Brexit deal.
You could, I suppose, argue that she would have handled corona better, but I am very doubtful. She's a cautious vacillator, she would have been as slow to respond as Boris, but in a different way.
I am surprised that you see that much of a difference between May’s deal and Boris’s. The latter simply screwed Northern Ireland that little bit more.
The Boris Deal took GB out of the customs union unlike the May Deal while still avoiding a hard border with the Republic of Ireland in Northern Ireland
Talking of troubled nations....(lack of) education, education, education...
I swear we’re fighting two pandemics, Covid-19 and stupidity.
What scares me is that our chances of surviving this is relying on the common sense of others.
We’re more fucked than a stepmom on pornhub aren’t we?
There's nothing new here though and it truly is their country. Personally I don't think its a Good Thing that children keep getting slaughtered in their schools. Americans obviously like their kids getting murdered and keep voting for the rights of the gun-toting murderer to access assault rivals over the rights of little Johnny to keep breathing. Same with this virus - people get what they vote for and in large parts of the US they vote for stupid. As is their right.
I would advocate using the pandemic as a good excuse for the civilised world to largely quarantine America until it finds a cure for stupid, but knowing Trump he'd nuke us in retaliation.
Re Ethnicity....It is very easy (as the media is doing) to point to large number of BAME dying, but then ignoring that London and Birmingham are particularly hard hit, where the proportion of BAME is much higher than the average. And again among NHS front-line workers, the same.
But that been said, we do know those with diabetes and heart conditions appear to suffer worse outcomes and they are much more prevalent in the BAME community.
Analysis controlling for all parameters will require a lot of data and careful methodology.
The deaths per million measure that is being much-analysed is useless for two reasons:
1) it isn't deaths per million in the UK. Deaths outside hospitals or not confirmed as involving Covid-19 in hospital are excluded. The actual rate may be understated by as much as 50%.
2) different countries are also measuring different things.
So you're comparing apples with oranges and the apple count is not a particularly meaningful number.
Alastair, you're such a spoil sport bringing up tiresome facts.
The number that's worth watching most carefully is the weekly ONS statistic of total deaths. All other things being equal, it's reasonable to attribute any excess over the expected rate to Covid-19 at present.
Indeed, given the lockdown it seems likely that perhaps understates Covid-19's virulence - I suspect that many types of accidental death are well down on usual.
I appreciate everyone likes daily figures because they give a lot more to talk about, but aside from giving some idea of the trajectory, the numbers themselves seem close to useless to me.
The total deaths figure is undoubtedly the most relevant but it will also pick up consequential deaths that are not directly related to Covid, such as those whose cancer treatment has been postponed, optional surgery, those suffering from depression who become suicidal in the isolation, etc etc. Which on one view is fair enough.
The relevance of the daily figures for me is that it shows trends within a country where the numbers are being collated on a consistent basis. International comparisons are pointless at this stage, there are too many unknown variables.
Lockdown also probably prevents non-COVID deaths, e.g. traffic accidents, flu.
True. If we all keep social distancing and washing our hands this could be one of the mildest flu seasons ever.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
As you say Delta owns 49% of Virgin, so maybe we should offer to match whatever the US offers Delta to prop up this joint venture?
Talking of troubled nations....(lack of) education, education, education...
I swear we’re fighting two pandemics, Covid-19 and stupidity.
What scares me is that our chances of surviving this is relying on the common sense of others.
We’re more fucked than a stepmom on pornhub aren’t we?
Keep in mind the anti-lockdown movement in the US is heavily astroturfed, by DeVos and others. The driving force behind it isn't stupidity, it's a cynical, clear-eyed decision by the ultra-rich that they'd prefer mass deaths over a hit to their investment portfolios.
I am not sure of the linkage between Betsy DeVos and a stepmom on pornhub?
I think she's more a fit with the Nazi BDSM category?
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
He's a party grandee now, still popular to boot.
LibDems still like Clegg and Tories still like IDS. Failure is no barrier to popularity within your party.
Both Clegg and IDS are tricky ones in terms of their record, though.
Clegg did take the Lib Dems into Government (with its highest vote share since 1987). 2015 was, of course, catastrophic. But it's fairly easy to make the case that he was harshly treated, and to contrast the Coalition period favourably with the chaotic period since. Indeed, I recall a LOT of voters in 2015 saying that they liked the Coalition Government and would therefore be voting Tory. The conclusion with hindsight is surely that they should have voted Lib Dem for its continuation... but there you go.
Clegg is also divisive in the Lib Dems. The above broadly accords with my view (albeit I accept it's a bit rose-tinted). But there are plenty of activists who left after 2010 and have only recently returned, and new ones who wouldn't dream of supporting a Clegg-led party. Those who stayed through the bad times are, perhaps inevitably, defensive of him. But they aren't huge in number.
For IDS, I guess his saving grace is he never faced a General Election. So fans can argue he might have done superbly in 2005 (they'd be wrong, of course, but you can't properly disprove it). They can also argue his Euroscepticism was ahead of its time (and they'd be right on that).
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
You are embarrassing yourself. If he proposed a x100 uplift in the number of deaths, you can probably conclude that he would posit an uplift in the number of cases.
No - I can't conclude anything.
It's anyone's guess what may or may not be in his head. There's no evidence for any of it. If you think his vapourings are of any value, take it up with him. It's certainly not up to me to make sense of his nonsense.
This used to be a site where critical thinking was encouraged, I think. These days, people seem eager to swallow any drivel that's posted here, and to attack anyone questioning it. Bizarre.
Yes, you can. I doubt anyone would suggest that the death rate is underestimated by a factor of 10 or 100 yet argue the case rate is not the same. You yourself have pointed out how illogical that would be. Therefore the most reasonable explanation is that they thought both the death rate and the case rate were overestimated. I really don't see why you are having such a hard time accepting that?
Who knows what they were assuming? I repeat - if you want to know that, ask them, not me! I don't know why you are finding that so difficult to understand.
But I did ask you - if you disregard the Chinese figures - what on earth you are assuming about the fatality rate of this disease? 10%? 20%? Not a clue?
Please do explain.
I'm just applying some critical thinking. If someone is assuming that the death rate is an order of magnitude higher than reported, it is likely that they also assume the case rate is an order of magnitude higher than reported.
I wonder how the management of Norwegian feel about rejecting the IAG buyout proposal now?
It's sad. Norwegian was a good airline with some really interesting ideas
I flew them Eek from Buenos Aires to London late last year (sigh!) and I got served drinks quicker than I generally get drinks in Biz on Eva.
It was never a sustainable business model though and it has led to the reduction in service quality on traditional airlines, especially in economy class, to compete on price. The sad part is that when they go bankrupt prices wil go up everywhere else but airlines will bank the savings they've made on service quality.
They were unnecessarily disruptive for little to no gain and burnt through shareholder (and now state) money at an incredible pace.
Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, claims data shows infection rates halved after the Government launched a hand-washing drive and recommend people keep two metres apart on March 16.
He said ministers 'lost sight' of the evidence and rushed into a nationwide quarantine six days later after being instructed by scientific advisers who have been 'consistently wrong' during the crisis.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
As you say Delta owns 49% of Virgin, so maybe we should offer to match whatever the US offers Delta to prop up this joint venture?
The Virgin Islands government should, not the British government. Why should the British government be bailing out companies based offshore?
Should add, you do have to give credit to NZ for swift action.
I think Australia is probably a bigger success story. They are very well connected to Asia, and initially they had a significant number of imported cases from Asia and Europe. And although overall, population density is low, it certainly isn't in the major cities.
Does also make me wonder if warmer climate might help slow the spread.
Ecuador says hi
Yes, but not advocating doing bugger all....Saying that Australia appear to have done very well, but I wonder if some warmer climate also help knocked down the R0 rate a bit more.
Every time I think I've isolated a primary reason - obesity, age, climate, health system, testing, GDP per capita - why this or that nation has had a good plague, or a bad plague, I think of a counter-example which confuses the issue.
As I have said before, it may that dumb luck is a major feature, and in the end most countries will end up quite similar, but they will arrive there at different times.
Terrible air quality seemed a decent reason - the virus finding a happy hunting ground in buggered up lungs. But then finding that smokers were far less likely to get it.
It's a weird bloody thing and no mistake.
Being a fatty over 50 looks very bad news as well.
I'm working on it , I'm working on it.
Hows the getting under 50 coming along?
I'm working on it one day at a time Mark.
Well, if you can get under 50, I think we might have cracked how to deal with Covid-19...
"Piers Corbyn" sounds like a made-up, portmanteau name, designed to summarise the madness of the era
For many years, Piers Corbyn was the more familiar brother to me through his strong advocacy of the idea that sunspot activity was a reliable predictor of weather.
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
You are embarrassing yourself. If he proposed a x100 uplift in the number of deaths, you can probably conclude that he would posit an uplift in the number of cases.
No - I can't conclude anything.
It's anyone's guess what may or may not be in his head. There's no evidence for any of it. If you think his vapourings are of any value, take it up with him. It's certainly not up to me to make sense of his nonsense.
This used to be a site where critical thinking was encouraged, I think. These days, people seem eager to swallow any drivel that's posted here, and to attack anyone questioning it. Bizarre.
Yes, you can. I doubt anyone would suggest that the death rate is underestimated by a factor of 10 or 100 yet argue the case rate is not the same. You yourself have pointed out how illogical that would be. Therefore the most reasonable explanation is that they thought both the death rate and the case rate were overestimated. I really don't see why you are having such a hard time accepting that?
Who knows what they were assuming? I repeat - if you want to know that, ask them, not me! I don't know why you are finding that so difficult to understand.
But I did ask you - if you disregard the Chinese figures - what on earth you are assuming about the fatality rate of this disease? 10%? 20%? Not a clue?
Please do explain.
I'm just applying some critical thinking. If someone is assuming that the death rate is an order of magnitude higher than reported, it is likely that they also assume the case rate is an order of magnitude higher than reported.
You didn't answer my question.
What do you think the fatality rate is, and on what basis?
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
As you say Delta owns 49% of Virgin, so maybe we should offer to match whatever the US offers Delta to prop up this joint venture?
The Virgin Islands government should, not the British government. Why should the British government be bailing out companies based offshore?
Quite. Branson has played the game of being Mr Friend-The-British-People for years, while running the most offshore setup short of the beloved Phil Greene.
His bid for the lottery was entertaining and very illustrative.
As predicted...here comes the backlash against contract tracing apps...
Digital contact tracing will fail unless governments build the technology in a way that respects user privacy, a group of nearly 300 experts have warned.
"Piers Corbyn" sounds like a made-up, portmanteau name, designed to summarise the madness of the era
For many years, Piers Corbyn was the more familiar brother to me through his strong advocacy of the idea that sunspot activity was a reliable predictor of weather.
is that a euphemism for denying climate change? just because it would fit with the rest of his disconnection with reality
Thanks for the thread but who cares what the delusional old bat thinks anymore? Even Labour are going to airbrush the embarrassment of his leadership from their collective memory as fast as possible.
The Corbynites haven’t gone away you know.
If Starmer screws up Richard Burgon is waiting in the wings.
Remember oppositions don’t win general elections, governments lose them.
If Johnson messes up the response Covid-19 we could see PM Burgon.
So you reckon the case fatality rate in China was 300%?
The odd thing is that people come out with this kind of thing and then whine when they are described as morons!
I was partly joking, but what are you talking about? not 300%, 300 per million i.e. just a bit higher than the UK.
My apologies. The official fatality rate in China is now 5.5%.
You think it should be 550%, apparently.
You've doubled down on this, that's hilarious! He said nothing of the kind, and missing that once was funny, but twice?
Someone else with a reading difficulty. You didn't understand that "Missing a couple of zeros" meant it should be multiplied by 100?
Were you away the week you should have done arithmetic at school?
Please don't go insulting people who are trying to point out your mistake. The twitter figure was for deaths per million, not the case fatality rate as you claimed. On top of that you say that 3 missing a couple of zeros is 300%. 3 missing no zeros is 300%. And then you have the temerity to suggest that kle4 was absent for the "one week" that he should have been learning arithmetic.
No, you're hopelessly confused. The suggestion was that the Chinese death numbers needed to be larger by a factor of 100. What I pointed out what that that would mean a fatality rate of 300%. I was wrong - the current fatality rate in China is 5.5%, not 3% - it would be 550%.
I don't know whether you understand, but it's not possible for the fatality rate to be larger than 100%, because that would mean the disease had killed more people than it had infected!
If you can't follow these basic calculations, you should considering just shutting up.
You are embarrassing yourself. If he proposed a x100 uplift in the number of deaths, you can probably conclude that he would posit an uplift in the number of cases.
No - I can't conclude anything.
It's anyone's guess what may or may not be in his head. There's no evidence for any of it. If you think his vapourings are of any value, take it up with him. It's certainly not up to me to make sense of his nonsense.
This used to be a site where critical thinking was encouraged, I think. These days, people seem eager to swallow any drivel that's posted here, and to attack anyone questioning it. Bizarre.
Yes, you can. I doubt anyone would suggest that the death rate is underestimated by a factor of 10 or 100 yet argue the case rate is not the same. You yourself have pointed out how illogical that would be. Therefore the most reasonable explanation is that they thought both the death rate and the case rate were overestimated. I really don't see why you are having such a hard time accepting that?
Who knows what they were assuming? I repeat - if you want to know that, ask them, not me! I don't know why you are finding that so difficult to understand.
But I did ask you - if you disregard the Chinese figures - what on earth you are assuming about the fatality rate of this disease? 10%? 20%? Not a clue?
Please do explain.
I'm just applying some critical thinking. If someone is assuming that the death rate is an order of magnitude higher than reported, it is likely that they also assume the case rate is an order of magnitude higher than reported.
You didn't answer my question.
What do you think the fatality rate is, and on what basis?
What's that got to do with anything? We're discussing your rather nonsensical claim that someone was assuming the fatality rate was above 100%.
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I’d say there’s precisely zero chance of the UK government bailing out Virgin Atlantic. They’re not a strategic UK asset, they’re 49% owned by Delta in the USA and 51% owned by Virgin Group based in the British Virgin Islands.
As you say Delta owns 49% of Virgin, so maybe we should offer to match whatever the US offers Delta to prop up this joint venture?
The Virgin Islands government should, not the British government. Why should the British government be bailing out companies based offshore?
Agreed, the only reason Corbyn did so well in 2017 was he kept Leavers and Remainers in his tent by promising to deliver Brexit while opposing hard Brexit and due to May's terrible campaign and the dementia tax.
By 2019 May had gone, Boris ran a more populist campaign, Leavers deserted Labour for the Tories after Corbyn failed to support Brexit and some Remainers switched from Labour to the LDs after Corbyn refused to commit hard enough to stop Brexit
Spot on analysis. Brexit flattered Lab in 2017 but cost them big in 2019.
Little quibble though -
It does not follow from this that having some of his MPs and key figures in the party machine working actively against him did not cost seats in 2017. It could well have done. Probably did.
Traditional voters who stuck by Labour in 2017 did so in large part because they were supporting their well regarded Labour MP, who they had been voting for long before Corbyn arrived on the scene. The well publicised hostility of local Labour MPs to Corbyn didn't prevent people voting for such MPs in their constituencies. Yet had Labour been perceived to be at the races in that campaign, such that there was a genuine prospect of Corbyn becoming MP, many would have run a mile.
In 2019 we had politically motivated targeting of unwinnable seats by the Corbyn dominated party machine, while seats that should have been defended were ignored. That worked out well, didn't it, with Labour ending up losing far more seats than the polls had predicted.
"Piers Corbyn" sounds like a made-up, portmanteau name, designed to summarise the madness of the era
For many years, Piers Corbyn was the more familiar brother to me through his strong advocacy of the idea that sunspot activity was a reliable predictor of weather.
is that a euphemism for denying climate change? just because it would fit with the rest of his disconnection with reality
He actually ran (runs?) a business giving weather forecasts from sunspot activity.
But yes, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that he is not a believer in anthropogenic global warming:
South African Airways and Virgin Australia are also in serious trouble, talk of administration today for both of these. Airline industry not surprisingly on its knees.
I'll put away the world's smallest violin for now to note this raises the interesting question: how should the government decide which businesses to prop up and which to let go, or how to set criteria for access to government support? I expect a lot of thought is being given to this just now.
Case by case basis - for airlines, is the business strategically needed ? I'd say some airline capability is for sure. If so nationalise it. I'd look to British Airways rather than Virgin though for that.
If Virgin goes under BA with £10 billion in the bank will again have a monopoly of Atlantic crossings, it will not need to be nationalised
Their revenue for 2019 was £13.3bn, so even £10bn in the bank won’t last much more than a year if things continue as they are.
They definitely don’t have a monopoly on transactlantic routes either, several US airlines and Norwegian also compete.
The “betrayal” narrative has already been set up and will be carefully nurtured over the years and brought out when convenient, like an Irish grievance.
Comments
Guernsey and other such like places ( IOM? Jersey? up to NZ maybe? ) might be able to get the virus down to actual zero, put in place draconian quarantine and pretty much open everything else up as normal.
Goods can still move but not people without enforced inward detention, prior to reliable testing. I suppose pilots would have to be tested orrery much daily.
The Hungarians used to have a cordon sanitiser with the Ottoman Empire to keep out the plague. I believe it worked.
It’s not subtle, but it might work for some where the geography allows.
Head of Internal Investigations (not that there is such a role, more’s the pity) at the Lancashire Police.
Sigh. As it is hanging the washing out followed by a walk beckon.
The way to deal with BA is to let them go bust, then have someone buy up the best of the flying assets and LHR slots - with the staff on new, more internationally competitive contracts. Any potential buyer negotiating with government is going to absolutely insist on the third runway being built ASAP though.
FWIW I agree with @Sandpit that parasitical businesses who have earned their money here but avoided paying taxes are bottom of the list. Businesses who have a good future and export are clearly top although the Tory party will angst endlessly about "picking winners". For the majority I think that the government should be offering 100% guaranteed loans with some specific help for the restaurant/café/pub businesses. Which is not too far from where Rishi is right now, just a bit further to go.
And is a sunbed hire company defined as key industry allowed to be operating...?
https://twitter.com/stevesilberman/status/1252053703479025664?s=21
If you want to try to work out what other wild, underevidenced assumptions they were making, then you need to ask them, not me. You can try to make sense of these wild, unevidenced claims if you want to. Don't expect me to clarify them for you!
The Corbynites need Starmer to lose the next general election to have a chance to say 'I told you so' and reclaim the party, though more likely after both the Starmer Brownites and Corbynites had lost to Boris the Blairites would seize their chance again
There is direct evidence that the numbers are fudged (e.g. the urn count) but mostly, it's the same kind of evidence as would lead you to doubt me if I told you I am 9 feet tall. You don't know who I am, you've never seen a photo of me, but you would rightly disbelieve me.
Lucky I’ve never trolled in my life.
Another one for the taxpayer tab.
The relevance of the daily figures for me is that it shows trends within a country where the numbers are being collated on a consistent basis. International comparisons are pointless at this stage, there are too many unknown variables.
It's anyone's guess what may or may not be in his head. There's no evidence for any of it. If you think his vapourings are of any value, take it up with him. It's certainly not up to me to make sense of his nonsense.
This used to be a site where critical thinking was encouraged, I think. These days, people seem eager to swallow any drivel that's posted here, and to attack anyone questioning it. Bizarre.
One very sensitive subject for the government here is that BA was privatised with a defined benefit pension scheme but without a crown guarantee (unlike, for example, BT). Letting it go bust and seeing their former employees' pension rights reduced as a consequence would raise the question whether the government had profited at those former employees' expense.
The response in Australia may also have helped, but the crude death rate/infection rate comparisons are a poor measure of how well or badly a country is doing, because there are many variables. As well as the weather conditions (the exact impact of which is unknown), some countries are almost certainly dishonest, others have poor recording systems, others have different methodologies for people who were severely ill before contracting the virus (difference between deaths of and deaths with), others are more likely to allow people to die at home (or lack universal care so people die at home without help) etc.
There will, I am sure, be much to be said about this when the dust has settled. My instinct is that the UK acted slowly and has made various mistakes - we certainly aren't alone in that, however, and it is far to early to reach really firm conclusions. Certainly, I don't think the league table approach is all that meaningful or useful at this point.
Hope you managed to figure out how to help your friend.
What scares me is that our chances of surviving this is relying on the common sense of others.
We’re more fucked than a stepmom on pornhub aren’t we?
Patients who test negative but are admitted with Covid symptoms are retested, until they get a positive test or leave the hospital. You can make a pretty good clinical diagnosis if a patient has enough symptoms, even without a positive test result.
And even if they managed that, they would discover just as Owen Smith did that there is a significant element of the Labour membership who will support the sitting leader out of loyalty regardless of their own political preferences. They would do well even to match the 27% who supported RLB this year.
After all that the remaining matter of getting the UK electorate to vote for a PM Burgon seems to be a minor obstacle.
I'd be surprised if any non-state carriers survive this. Airlines were already not the healthiest of things, and with the most optimistic set of goggles on we aren't switching off the pandemic in June and returning to status quo ante. Nor will it matter than various airlines have gone bust as we won't need the capacity anyway.
It does seem they pretty much all fit into the categories of front-line NHS staff, BAME or significantly overweight (and often in multiple of these categories).
Suddenly that doesn’t look like such a bad position to be.
https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1251463802362699776?s=20
The two things that definitely do seem to matter, age and gender, are hard to work on.
I believe there is already evidence of a spike in non COVID19 deaths?
Little quibble though -
It does not follow from this that having some of his MPs and key figures in the party machine working actively against him did not cost seats in 2017. It could well have done. Probably did.
https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1251463816262692866?s=20
Last week, I posted that the life expectancy of people arriving at care homes is around nine months. Our resident PB medical expert suggested this was too long.
Ultimately the ‘price’ of the virus should surely best be measured by the cumulative lost years of life of our population.
https://twitter.com/Piers_Corbyn/status/1251984308530745345?s=20
But I did ask you - if you disregard the Chinese figures - what on earth you are assuming about the fatality rate of this disease? 10%? 20%? Not a clue?
Please do explain.
I would advocate using the pandemic as a good excuse for the civilised world to largely quarantine America until it finds a cure for stupid, but knowing Trump he'd nuke us in retaliation.
But that been said, we do know those with diabetes and heart conditions appear to suffer worse outcomes and they are much more prevalent in the BAME community.
Analysis controlling for all parameters will require a lot of data and careful methodology.
As you say Delta owns 49% of Virgin, so maybe we should offer to match whatever the US offers Delta to prop up this joint venture?
A friend tells me.
Warning - don't try and look into the madness.
Clegg did take the Lib Dems into Government (with its highest vote share since 1987). 2015 was, of course, catastrophic. But it's fairly easy to make the case that he was harshly treated, and to contrast the Coalition period favourably with the chaotic period since. Indeed, I recall a LOT of voters in 2015 saying that they liked the Coalition Government and would therefore be voting Tory. The conclusion with hindsight is surely that they should have voted Lib Dem for its continuation... but there you go.
Clegg is also divisive in the Lib Dems. The above broadly accords with my view (albeit I accept it's a bit rose-tinted). But there are plenty of activists who left after 2010 and have only recently returned, and new ones who wouldn't dream of supporting a Clegg-led party. Those who stayed through the bad times are, perhaps inevitably, defensive of him. But they aren't huge in number.
For IDS, I guess his saving grace is he never faced a General Election. So fans can argue he might have done superbly in 2005 (they'd be wrong, of course, but you can't properly disprove it). They can also argue his Euroscepticism was ahead of its time (and they'd be right on that).
They were unnecessarily disruptive for little to no gain and burnt through shareholder (and now state) money at an incredible pace.
Carl Heneghan, professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, claims data shows infection rates halved after the Government launched a hand-washing drive and recommend people keep two metres apart on March 16.
He said ministers 'lost sight' of the evidence and rushed into a nationwide quarantine six days later after being instructed by scientific advisers who have been 'consistently wrong' during the crisis.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8235979/UKs-coronavirus-crisis-peaked-lockdown-Expert-argues-draconian-measures-unnecessary.html
What do you think the fatality rate is, and on what basis?
His bid for the lottery was entertaining and very illustrative.
Digital contact tracing will fail unless governments build the technology in a way that respects user privacy, a group of nearly 300 experts have warned.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/20/coronavirus-digital-contact-tracing-will-fail-unless-privacy-is-respected-experts-warn
In 2019 we had politically motivated targeting of unwinnable seats by the Corbyn dominated party machine, while seats that should have been defended were ignored. That worked out well, didn't it, with Labour ending up losing far more seats than the polls had predicted.
But yes, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that he is not a believer in anthropogenic global warming:
http://www.firstscience.com/SITE/ARTICLES/corbyn.asp
They definitely don’t have a monopoly on transactlantic routes either, several US airlines and Norwegian also compete.