Just seen the Johnson speech footage. He looks and sounds well below par. I think he’s come back way too soon. That will be bad for him and, by extension, bad for us. He’s not going to have the stamina or concentration to do the job that needs doing.
No, this is what the virus does.
Then he should hand over to someone fit.
My concern for the past few weeks is that now, just when we need a government functioning at 100%, we have been missing a prime minister. 90% of the people on here thought I was being crazy - why on earth would we need a fully fit PM when we are going through one of the worst crises of our lifetimes, but I digress.
I was happy to see him back and am sure that his mental capacity remains as per the status quo ante (ie solipsistic shit, but fully functioning).
If it is not, then he should step down.
He may be functioning at 9.00am. He still needs to be at 9.00pm. He was visibly and audibly flagging by the end of that speech. It’s a worry for me.
Boris' role is to be a Reagan like frontman cheering up the nation and setting the direction, like Reagan he can leave implementing the detail to the Cabinet
I think many of the people lambasting "journalists" on here and elsewhere will and should be embarrassed at their willingness to try to find a scapegoat or dog to kick.
They may well be scared shitless and unwilling to question and challenge the government during this unprecedented time but that is exactly what journalists are there to do and thank goodness they are.
And as for the asinine questions people think journalists are asking, and I know @Nigelb has done this already, why don't you go ahead and submit a question for this evening. And if the damning, gotcha, ten paragraph expose is not read out, you can ask yourselves why that should have been.
So I looked at this link ready to post a line about never believing anything you read in newspaper headlines but I don't really see the problem with it?
They replaced "confidence" with the shorter word "trust", which I guess is a superset of confidence - ie it can mean "are you confident that I can do this" or "do you think I'm lying" - but in the context I think it's clear which one it is. Then they used "plummet" for a change from about +40 to +19, which I guess is a *little* bit over-dramatic but not drastically so.
Plummets from a healthy majority to a, er, healthy majority. I worry that if they use words like that to describe relatively minor shifts (given the trend), they are going to run out of superlatives to describe the real thing.
As the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed" on even flimsier evidence I guess the media think the government is fair game.
IIRC the evidence that public trust in the media is a bit low was from a YouGov poll presented on Sky News.
That's David Mundell, MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, a constituency in the Scottish Borders.
Only the best bit of DCT is in the Borders the rest is Dumfries and Galloway which is its own thing
I suppose you'd have to cross the border between them to find that out.
Technically Langholm is in Dumfries and Galloway administratively but it is a Borders town through and through.
Great walks, mountain biking, birth place of Hugh Macdiarmid.
Visit Langholm.
Someone I know, more a pal of a pal, did the MacDiarmid memorial at Langholm. Must get down to see it in the rusty flesh at some point.
Interesting guy. I read his sort-of biography, Lucky Poet, last year. Never steeled myself for A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle as I suspect I'd need to keep referring to the glossary for every other line.
Very few historic deaths in todays numbers, does also look like weekend effect as past 3 days are... 50, 162, 58
That’s two days in a row we’ve had very few historic deaths. Is that just simply the weekend effect?
I don't know. Could be, or it could be that paperwork has got caught up with. There were two days last week with significant numbers of historic deaths from 2+ weeks ago, as if there was a load of paperwork that got lost or stuck in the system somewhere.
And we know they have got faster at reporting deaths recently.
When is the lockdown to be lifted? Why isn't it been lifted? But we only had 300 deaths the past few days, surely we should be lifting the lockdown? If we are past peak, surely we can allow people more freedom under the lockdown rules? ....
That seems unacceptable to me. Delaying key cancer treatment. I can't get my head around that - even allowing for the imperative to stay on top of the virus.
I feel the same about the restrictions around funerals and visiting the sick and dying.
These are value judgments that I struggle to share.
It sounds like the advice of the oncologist is trying to balance the risk of faster cancer development against the risk of being infected with Covid-19 whilst taking immunosuppressant drugs.
iow, it’s a medical decision, not a delayed treatment?
Yes - and if so I can see it how it could be a difficult but correct decision.
As opposed to, say, delaying a treatment on the grounds of it being too dangerous to practically administer in current circumstances or because resource has been exhausted by virus related matters.
When I was at the hospital (taking an elderly relative for an appointment) the consultant I spoke to said that they had a big problem with no-shows.
That is, people with real problems, treatment booked, everything and everyone ready to go on the medical side. Patient not showing up....
Must be a lot of that going on - or rather not going on. People scared to use the system for anything bar virus. There will be a positive to this with fewer unnecessary visits. However it will lead to early deaths. Cancer, for example, it is well known that outcomes are better the earlier the diagnosis. We are already poor at this and it will now be worse still.
That's David Mundell, MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, a constituency in the Scottish Borders.
Only the best bit of DCT is in the Borders the rest is Dumfries and Galloway which is its own thing
I suppose you'd have to cross the border between them to find that out.
Technically Langholm is in Dumfries and Galloway administratively but it is a Borders town through and through.
Great walks, mountain biking, birth place of Hugh Macdiarmid.
Visit Langholm.
Someone I know, more a pal of a pal, did the MacDiarmid memorial at Langholm. Must get down to see it in the rusty flesh at some point.
Interesting guy. I read his sort-of biography, Lucky Poet, last year. Never steeled myself for A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle as I suspect I'd need to keep referring to the glossary for every other line.
A kind of Scottish equivalent of Ezra Pound.
Eccentric rather than nuts like Pound. A thistle is a very good metaphor for how he could be to friend and foe.
My dad was a habituee of various pubs in Edinburgh in the 40s, 50s & 60s and acquainted with a few of the poetic fellow drinkers. You don't have to be a nationalist to think it was some roll call: MacDiarmid, MacCaig, MacLean & Mackay Brown among others.
So I looked at this link ready to post a line about never believing anything you read in newspaper headlines but I don't really see the problem with it?
They replaced "confidence" with the shorter word "trust", which I guess is a superset of confidence - ie it can mean "are you confident that I can do this" or "do you think I'm lying" - but in the context I think it's clear which one it is. Then they used "plummet" for a change from about +40 to +19, which I guess is a *little* bit over-dramatic but not drastically so.
Plummets from a healthy majority to a, er, healthy majority. I worry that if they use words like that to describe relatively minor shifts (given the trend), they are going to run out of superlatives to describe the real thing.
As the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed" on even flimsier evidence I guess the media think the government is fair game.
IIRC the evidence that public trust in the media is a bit low was from a YouGov poll presented on Sky News.
Or is Sky News running the country?
It's a good job we don't have to rely on what people here recall or have missed to find out if something happened.
eg "Public confidence in the media has collapsed during this emergency partly because of ludicrous stories such as this" - No 10 spokesman
I think many of the people lambasting "journalists" on here and elsewhere will and should be embarrassed at their willingness to try to find a scapegoat or dog to kick.
They may well be scared shitless and unwilling to question and challenge the government during this unprecedented time but that is exactly what journalists are there to do and thank goodness they are.
And as for the asinine questions people think journalists are asking, and I know @Nigelb has done this already, why don't you go ahead and submit a question for this evening. And if the damning, gotcha, ten paragraph expose is not read out, you can ask yourselves why that should have been.
There does seem to be a lot of holding Robert Peston to account rather than those taking the decisions. Unusual.
So I looked at this link ready to post a line about never believing anything you read in newspaper headlines but I don't really see the problem with it?
They replaced "confidence" with the shorter word "trust", which I guess is a superset of confidence - ie it can mean "are you confident that I can do this" or "do you think I'm lying" - but in the context I think it's clear which one it is. Then they used "plummet" for a change from about +40 to +19, which I guess is a *little* bit over-dramatic but not drastically so.
Plummets from a healthy majority to a, er, healthy majority. I worry that if they use words like that to describe relatively minor shifts (given the trend), they are going to run out of superlatives to describe the real thing.
As the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed" on even flimsier evidence I guess the media think the government is fair game.
IIRC the evidence that public trust in the media is a bit low was from a YouGov poll presented on Sky News.
Or is Sky News running the country?
It's a good job we don't have to rely on what people here recall or have missed to find out if something happened.
eg "Public confidence in the media has collapsed during this emergency partly because of ludicrous stories such as this" - No 10 spokesman
So I looked at this link ready to post a line about never believing anything you read in newspaper headlines but I don't really see the problem with it?
They replaced "confidence" with the shorter word "trust", which I guess is a superset of confidence - ie it can mean "are you confident that I can do this" or "do you think I'm lying" - but in the context I think it's clear which one it is. Then they used "plummet" for a change from about +40 to +19, which I guess is a *little* bit over-dramatic but not drastically so.
Plummets from a healthy majority to a, er, healthy majority. I worry that if they use words like that to describe relatively minor shifts (given the trend), they are going to run out of superlatives to describe the real thing.
As the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed" on even flimsier evidence I guess the media think the government is fair game.
IIRC the evidence that public trust in the media is a bit low was from a YouGov poll presented on Sky News.
Or is Sky News running the country?
It's a good job we don't have to rely on what people here recall or have missed to find out if something happened.
eg "Public confidence in the media has collapsed during this emergency partly because of ludicrous stories such as this" - No 10 spokesman
I wasn't. I was referring to the government statement that public confidence in the media has collapsed, which I think was pretty clear in the way I phrased it 'the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed"'
Why did you ask me if Sky News running the country if your comment had no relationship to mine?
So I looked at this link ready to post a line about never believing anything you read in newspaper headlines but I don't really see the problem with it?
They replaced "confidence" with the shorter word "trust", which I guess is a superset of confidence - ie it can mean "are you confident that I can do this" or "do you think I'm lying" - but in the context I think it's clear which one it is. Then they used "plummet" for a change from about +40 to +19, which I guess is a *little* bit over-dramatic but not drastically so.
Plummets from a healthy majority to a, er, healthy majority. I worry that if they use words like that to describe relatively minor shifts (given the trend), they are going to run out of superlatives to describe the real thing.
As the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed" on even flimsier evidence I guess the media think the government is fair game.
IIRC the evidence that public trust in the media is a bit low was from a YouGov poll presented on Sky News.
Or is Sky News running the country?
It's a good job we don't have to rely on what people here recall or have missed to find out if something happened.
eg "Public confidence in the media has collapsed during this emergency partly because of ludicrous stories such as this" - No 10 spokesman
I wasn't. I was referring to the government statement that public confidence in the media has collapsed, which I think was pretty clear in the way I phrased it 'the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed"'
Why did you ask me if Sky News running the country if your comment had no relationship to mine?
Because the actual numbers on confidence in the media were contained in that report. I was joking.
Continued decreases in daily deaths figures looks promising.
I had a play with numbers over the weekend to try to get a curve to see how the deaths (in hospitals in England) will continue to decrease. Inputs to be R0, Rt (as it varies) and a distribution of death dates (deaths don't all occur on a specific date after infection; there's a distribution of deaths concentrated into a fortnightly period, with a peak in it), so when infections are increasing, deaths caused by infections on D1 will peak some time later, and deaths from the leading of infections on, say D+4 and from the trailing edge of D-4 (and, of course, other days) will all pile up. Which makes the curve worse on the way up and less bad on the way down.
It's not remotely scientific, and just a way for me to visualise for myself how changing Rt numbers affect the curve. What Rt numbers would I need to plug in to get the curve to more-or-less fit what has happened, and what would it project?
I chose R0 as 3.0; Rt(1) for the week before announcement of any restrictions to be decreased from there (because transport and interactions were already diminishing), Rt(2) for the week between the announcement of "Avoid bars and restaurants, voluntary social distancing) and Rt(3) from lockdown onwards.
I aimed for figures close-ish to the ones estimated by Imperial College and wasn't miles off.
So - it's not imposing a "best fit line"; it's trying to tweak those Rt numbers to fit the curve. I ended up with: R0=3 Rt(1)=2.1 Rt(2)=1.3 Rt(3)=0.75 ... and it seemed to fit. The latest figures fit nicely without me changing the numbers (only numbers after the 5 day lag for details entered in, so April 21st is the last day on the actual figures. It remains to be seen how well they'll continue to fit, but bearing in mind that the next two or three weeks of projected decline should be already "baked in" thanks to incubation periods and time taken for the disease to progress, we should already be on target to get deaths in hospitals in England below 200 per day (before the first May Bank Holiday).
Doesn't mean "Yay, let's release lockdown!" - it means it's working, and we may have scope to start easing some restrictions in May, if this trend continues.
(Bear in mind that this curve could be total bollocks, of course. Just because it fits what's gone before and has done okay with two days-worth of predictions doesn't mean it's reliable. Anyone can get a curve to fit historical data - my attempt is to do so while only adjusting Rt)
So I looked at this link ready to post a line about never believing anything you read in newspaper headlines but I don't really see the problem with it?
They replaced "confidence" with the shorter word "trust", which I guess is a superset of confidence - ie it can mean "are you confident that I can do this" or "do you think I'm lying" - but in the context I think it's clear which one it is. Then they used "plummet" for a change from about +40 to +19, which I guess is a *little* bit over-dramatic but not drastically so.
Plummets from a healthy majority to a, er, healthy majority. I worry that if they use words like that to describe relatively minor shifts (given the trend), they are going to run out of superlatives to describe the real thing.
As the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed" on even flimsier evidence I guess the media think the government is fair game.
IIRC the evidence that public trust in the media is a bit low was from a YouGov poll presented on Sky News.
Or is Sky News running the country?
It's a good job we don't have to rely on what people here recall or have missed to find out if something happened.
eg "Public confidence in the media has collapsed during this emergency partly because of ludicrous stories such as this" - No 10 spokesman
I wasn't. I was referring to the government statement that public confidence in the media has collapsed, which I think was pretty clear in the way I phrased it 'the government claims that public confidence in the media has "collapsed"'
Why did you ask me if Sky News running the country if your comment had no relationship to mine?
Because the actual numbers on confidence in the media were contained in that report. I was joking.
I presume that n10. was referring to that poll.
If they were, then they did not make it explicit. But if the government is going to refer to a reduction in confidence in one poll as a "collapse" in attacking a newspaper's reporting, then I can't see how people can complain much about that newspaper calling a similar reduction in confidence in said government in another poll as "plummeting".
In any case it hardly counts as an example of dishonest journalism, it seems a bit weird to pick it out. Newspapers are forever describing much smaller opinion poll changes as "plummeting" or similar, or have people never read a newspaper before?
I think many of the people lambasting "journalists" on here and elsewhere will and should be embarrassed at their willingness to try to find a scapegoat or dog to kick.
They may well be scared shitless and unwilling to question and challenge the government during this unprecedented time but that is exactly what journalists are there to do and thank goodness they are.
And as for the asinine questions people think journalists are asking, and I know @Nigelb has done this already, why don't you go ahead and submit a question for this evening. And if the damning, gotcha, ten paragraph expose is not read out, you can ask yourselves why that should have been.
There does seem to be a lot of holding Robert Peston to account rather than those taking the decisions. Unusual.
It took me an hour (with beer) to write an automated system to generate the chart below. Scrapes the NHS England data etc.
Yet we had a talking head on BBC24 commenting as if the reporting was for yesterday....
I think many of the people lambasting "journalists" on here and elsewhere will and should be embarrassed at their willingness to try to find a scapegoat or dog to kick.
They may well be scared shitless and unwilling to question and challenge the government during this unprecedented time but that is exactly what journalists are there to do and thank goodness they are.
And as for the asinine questions people think journalists are asking, and I know @Nigelb has done this already, why don't you go ahead and submit a question for this evening. And if the damning, gotcha, ten paragraph expose is not read out, you can ask yourselves why that should have been.
There does seem to be a lot of holding Robert Peston to account rather than those taking the decisions. Unusual.
Isn't the criticism of journalists though exactly because they are not holding politicians to account. Every time they ask a stupid, dumb, ill informed and pointless question they are letting the politicians off the hook. . We need informed , intelligent journalists asking difficult questions. We have morons with no knowledge of the subject and apparently no self awareness continually trying to engineer 'gotcha' situations and so wasting valuable opportunities to hold the Government to account for their many real failings.
Yes it is - and a very nice one. Lots of lovely plants coming through - hostas I see. Try putting copper rings around them to avoid the dreaded slugs. You might want to plant some summer flowering bulbs and tubers: gladioli, rudbeckia and dahlias for instance.
Comments
My one was Al Haig. But I prefer "Sir" Casper.
They may well be scared shitless and unwilling to question and challenge the government during this unprecedented time but that is exactly what journalists are there to do and thank goodness they are.
And as for the asinine questions people think journalists are asking, and I know @Nigelb has done this already, why don't you go ahead and submit a question for this evening. And if the damning, gotcha, ten paragraph expose is not read out, you can ask yourselves why that should have been.
Or is Sky News running the country?
https://twitter.com/johnestevens/status/1254717605908230144?s=20
A kind of Scottish equivalent of Ezra Pound.
Very few historic deaths in todays numbers, does also look like weekend effect as past 3 days are... 50, 162, 58
Awaiting Prof cricket to do his thing.
Lets hope tomorrows UK deaths start with a number 6 or lower
And we know they have got faster at reporting deaths recently.
When is the lockdown to be lifted?
Why isn't it been lifted?
But we only had 300 deaths the past few days, surely we should be lifting the lockdown?
If we are past peak, surely we can allow people more freedom under the lockdown rules?
....
My dad was a habituee of various pubs in Edinburgh in the 40s, 50s & 60s and acquainted with a few of the poetic fellow drinkers. You don't have to be a nationalist to think it was some roll call: MacDiarmid, MacCaig, MacLean & Mackay Brown among others.
Todays data included. Spreadsheet at:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Lwn6iaNKdHxfbMkSHtEshDq63dN7wMZN
eg "Public confidence in the media has collapsed during this emergency partly because of ludicrous stories such as this" - No 10 spokesman
Just sticking all of the data into GCP and coming up with a script that will do it for me in the future.
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-britons-still-support-lockdown-despite-being-sadder-and-more-anxious-poll-11977655
Why did you ask me if Sky News running the country if your comment had no relationship to mine?
I presume that n10. was referring to that poll.
I had a play with numbers over the weekend to try to get a curve to see how the deaths (in hospitals in England) will continue to decrease. Inputs to be R0, Rt (as it varies) and a distribution of death dates (deaths don't all occur on a specific date after infection; there's a distribution of deaths concentrated into a fortnightly period, with a peak in it), so when infections are increasing, deaths caused by infections on D1 will peak some time later, and deaths from the leading of infections on, say D+4 and from the trailing edge of D-4 (and, of course, other days) will all pile up.
Which makes the curve worse on the way up and less bad on the way down.
It's not remotely scientific, and just a way for me to visualise for myself how changing Rt numbers affect the curve. What Rt numbers would I need to plug in to get the curve to more-or-less fit what has happened, and what would it project?
I chose R0 as 3.0; Rt(1) for the week before announcement of any restrictions to be decreased from there (because transport and interactions were already diminishing), Rt(2) for the week between the announcement of "Avoid bars and restaurants, voluntary social distancing) and Rt(3) from lockdown onwards.
I aimed for figures close-ish to the ones estimated by Imperial College and wasn't miles off.
So - it's not imposing a "best fit line"; it's trying to tweak those Rt numbers to fit the curve. I ended up with:
R0=3
Rt(1)=2.1
Rt(2)=1.3
Rt(3)=0.75
... and it seemed to fit. The latest figures fit nicely without me changing the numbers (only numbers after the 5 day lag for details entered in, so April 21st is the last day on the actual figures. It remains to be seen how well they'll continue to fit, but bearing in mind that the next two or three weeks of projected decline should be already "baked in" thanks to incubation periods and time taken for the disease to progress, we should already be on target to get deaths in hospitals in England below 200 per day (before the first May Bank Holiday).
Doesn't mean "Yay, let's release lockdown!" - it means it's working, and we may have scope to start easing some restrictions in May, if this trend continues.
(Bear in mind that this curve could be total bollocks, of course. Just because it fits what's gone before and has done okay with two days-worth of predictions doesn't mean it's reliable. Anyone can get a curve to fit historical data - my attempt is to do so while only adjusting Rt)
In any case it hardly counts as an example of dishonest journalism, it seems a bit weird to pick it out. Newspapers are forever describing much smaller opinion poll changes as "plummeting" or similar, or have people never read a newspaper before?
Yet we had a talking head on BBC24 commenting as if the reporting was for yesterday....
I'd heard some displeasing rumours, but if you want to avoid the leaks, be sure to keep away from comment sections/forums etc.