The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
Agreed. Remember the paper I posted the other day which showed that in China a single day's delay in locking down a city made its relative outcome worse than a comparable neighbouring one ? Given the rate of exponential growth for this virus, a week's delay makes a massive difference.
London had the highest mortality rate with 85.7 deaths per 100,000 people. The highest age-standardised mortality rate was in Newham, with 144.3 deaths per 100,000 population, followed by Brent with 141.5 deaths per 100,000 population and Hackney 127.4 deaths per 100,000 population.
London is the main factor in the 'poor' stats of the UK. Although legit questions can be asked of the government, the characteristics of London I would say maybe outweigh what mistakes might have been made. (ie its size, demographics, the nature of it as a major transport hub)
Be in no mistake. When in the next few days the UK achieves the dubious distinction of having the second highest number of deaths in the world, despite being far removed from the vanguard of the initial outbreak, that fact will be hammered home relentlessly. The UK's record to date is not "poor", it's abysmal. The only saving grace is that finally, some two months late, the penny seems to have dropped and it is possible that they will now get the key decisions right moving forward.
To which my reply would be how many other countries have accurately reported their figures.
Just about the only figure that could be sanely used is excess deaths compared to the average and those figures take a long time to appear from most countries.
As with everything to do with this virus people want instant answers that just don't exist and treat all data no matter how inaccurate and incomplete as 100% accurate and fact.
That's the Government's excuse too as a means of dodging the question when confronted with international comparisons. I'm surprised you buy it.
Their problem is that we are a country which counts only deaths confirmed by testing after having until very recently conducted far fewer tests in the community than other countries. So it's reasonable to expect that complete statistics will paint the UK in an even worse comparative light than do the current damning figures.
I don't buy the figures of anywhere - and the only figure that is of actual use (excess deaths) won't be around for a long time.
Equally I'm not going to judge any country as this thing is changing all the time. Remember when Japan was successfully tracking everyone well that's fallen apart and it's structural weaknesses in emergency admissions to hospital has been laid bare amongst other issues.
The only time when we will be able to work out what the best plan was is going to be in 2-5 years time when a vaccine exists and we can look back to see what happened where and what worked and what didn't. Until then it's just a matter of each country doing it's best under the circumstances they have and the options they can enforce.
Very convenient for the Government that. No judgement to be formed on their record until many years hence when everyone has forgotten about coronavirus. They'll be hoping that others think like you.
PS. The blip in Japan is hardly "falling apart". It's been controlled. Yes they went from 87 cases on 30th March to 743 on 11th April but are now back down to 193 cases. 17 deaths yesterday. Miniscule numbers compared witht he UK.
A large proportion of the public dislike going to bars and restaurants in normal times. We don't hear much from them – as they are introverts. But they prefer cups of tea in front of Mrs Brown's Boys rather than meeting real people and doing that chatting and socialising stuff.
London had the highest mortality rate with 85.7 deaths per 100,000 people. The highest age-standardised mortality rate was in Newham, with 144.3 deaths per 100,000 population, followed by Brent with 141.5 deaths per 100,000 population and Hackney 127.4 deaths per 100,000 population.
London is the main factor in the 'poor' stats of the UK. Although legit questions can be asked of the government, the characteristics of London I would say maybe outweigh what mistakes might have been made. (ie its size, demographics, the nature of it as a major transport hub)
Be in no mistake. When in the next few days the UK achieves the dubious distinction of having the second highest number of deaths in the world, despite being far removed from the vanguard of the initial outbreak, that fact will be hammered home relentlessly. The UK's record to date is not "poor", it's abysmal. The only saving grace is that finally, some two months late, the penny seems to have dropped and it is possible that they will now get the key decisions right moving forward.
To which my reply would be how many other countries have accurately reported their figures.
Just about the only figure that could be sanely used is excess deaths compared to the average and those figures take a long time to appear from most countries.
As with everything to do with this virus people want instant answers that just don't exist and treat all data no matter how inaccurate and incomplete as 100% accurate and fact.
That's the Government's excuse too as a means of dodging the question when confronted with international comparisons. I'm surprised you buy it.
Their problem is that we are a country which counts only deaths confirmed by testing after having until very recently conducted far fewer tests in the community than other countries. So it's reasonable to expect that complete statistics will paint the UK in an even worse comparative light than do the current damning figures.
I don't buy the figures of anywhere - and the only figure that is of actual use (excess deaths) won't be around for a long time.
Equally I'm not going to judge any country as this thing is changing all the time. Remember when Japan was successfully tracking everyone well that's fallen apart and it's structural weaknesses in emergency admissions to hospital has been laid bare amongst other issues.
The only time when we will be able to work out what the best plan was is going to be in 2-5 years time when a vaccine exists and we can look back to see what happened where and what worked and what didn't. Until then it's just a matter of each country doing it's best under the circumstances they have and the options they can enforce.
Quite. N Zealand, rightly lauded though it is, does not have to wrestle with issues the Dutch have in terms of timing, population density, cross border traffic flows, etc etc. And that’s before we find out more about how it behaves.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
Did the NHS get overrun with patients? - No therefore the lockdown wasn't too late, it was in fact implemented either at the right time or slightly early.
Your argument would be valid if this was ebola and the plan was to kill the disease by ensuring R0 hit 0 and the disease died out. That isn't the case which means the corona virus is here to stay so we need to deal with it while ensuring the NHS doesn't get overrun.
So all the mutterings by ministers this morning sounds like they have made the 100k give or take. So instantly the criticism switched to wrong people being tested.
I'm sort of hoping nationally we fall short and it highlights the ongoing disaster that is the testing situation in Scotland. I'm not making a political point here, they need to get it fixed because 1500 tests per day isn't going to cut it to move to the next stage of this crisis. Even if it means PHE stepping in and providing extra testing capacity we should actually force the situation and ensure that Scotland can do 10k tests per day as they need to be able to.
For all the criticism the government has taken in the last 6 weeks over testing, they have by some method managed to increase capacity to run 100k tests per day in England. Where is that same criticism for the Scottish government who are still stuck doing less than 2k tests per day. Translated to England the Scottish testing rate would be 13-17k, how mental would the likes of Piers Morgan be going right now if we were still only doing that many tests in England? Why is no one picking this up? We need for all four nations to move forwards together on this.
Wales is doing really badly on testing. They dropped their ambition of 5k tests a day. We can't have that south wales conurbation with bugger all testing going on.
5k for Wales.100k for UK. Wales a little under 5% of the total population...
Devolution is having a bad crisis, at the very least in Wales. The extra layer of govt has been nothing but a hinderance.
Pursuing the same contracts as England to get bumped down, testing seems worse (why abandon that 5k target if going well?), reporting of deaths so late in N Wales there’s an investigation, and the Health Minister getting shall we say “exasperated “ by one of his colleagues ( she’s my A.M. and I’m not surprised he’s got exasperated truth be told!).
The nightingale hospital at the Principality Stadium, in fairness, looked like a good job well done.
That apart, it’s been amateur hour and completely unnecessary.
There is anger here because Debenhams in Llandudno and other stores in Wales have been denied the same rate relief as in England by the Welsh government and the result will be the loss of all Debenhams throughout Wales
If I can play devils advocate to your rant about lazy Brexiteers - is growing strawberries a good use of our agricultural land ?
Or is it just a way to give cheap empty calories which take the taste away from the cheap fizzy wine remainer tossers quaff during their awful metropolitan vegan dinner parties where they moan about proles ?
Perhaps more turnips would better feed the underclass of the nation as we toil in the mills ?
HEY!!!!
How dare you. We remainer tossers try to drink *expensive* fizzy wine at our awful metropolitan vegan dinner parties.
I note you did not try and defend strawberry production - perhaps the vast scientific resources of the Uk could be guided towards genetically modifying avocados such they can be grown in Norfolk.
Strawberries will have to be on hold until robot pickers are available.
Why would growing strawberries not be a good use of UK agricultural land if there is a market for it?
Somerset even had a railway known as the Strawberry Line in Victorian Times. Ask our resident trainspotter.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
You have your view, others have other views. The way it is with covid
Equally I'm not going to judge any country as this thing is changing all the time. Remember when Japan was successfully tracking everyone well that's fallen apart and it's structural weaknesses in emergency admissions to hospital has been laid bare amongst other issues.
I think what you're mainly seeing there is media narratives that are all over the place, not actual changes on the ground.
Japan wasn't ever successfully tracking everyone and I didn't see anyone claiming it was. It was doing some effective cluster tracing as the UK was early on but the big point at the time was that it was doing successful, voluntary, only moderately disruptive social distancing (cancelling events, WFH where practical etc), and doing it early before the infection numbers got out of control. It still is doing that, it hasn't fallen apart. There was a period when case numbers seemed to be falling and people got complacent and stopped doing what they'd been doing successfully and they went up again, but that just underlines that these measures work, rather than Japan's situation being some mysterious inscrutable cultural phenomenon to do with bowing or something as the western media started saying at one point.
So all the mutterings by ministers this morning sounds like they have made the 100k give or take. So instantly the criticism switched to wrong people being tested.
I'm sort of hoping nationally we fall short and it highlights the ongoing disaster that is the testing situation in Scotland. I'm not making a political point here, they need to get it fixed because 1500 tests per day isn't going to cut it to move to the next stage of this crisis. Even if it means PHE stepping in and providing extra testing capacity we should actually force the situation and ensure that Scotland can do 10k tests per day as they need to be able to.
For all the criticism the government has taken in the last 6 weeks over testing, they have by some method managed to increase capacity to run 100k tests per day in England. Where is that same criticism for the Scottish government who are still stuck doing less than 2k tests per day. Translated to England the Scottish testing rate would be 13-17k, how mental would the likes of Piers Morgan be going right now if we were still only doing that many tests in England? Why is no one picking this up? We need for all four nations to move forwards together on this.
Wales is doing really badly on testing. They dropped their ambition of 5k tests a day. We can't have that south wales conurbation with bugger all testing going on.
5k for Wales.100k for UK. Wales a little under 5% of the total population...
Devolution is having a bad crisis, at the very least in Wales. The extra layer of govt has been nothing but a hinderance.
Pursuing the same contracts as England to get bumped down, testing seems worse (why abandon that 5k target if going well?), reporting of deaths so late in N Wales there’s an investigation, and the Health Minister getting shall we say “exasperated “ by one of his colleagues ( she’s my A.M. and I’m not surprised he’s got exasperated truth be told!).
The nightingale hospital at the Principality Stadium, in fairness, looked like a good job well done.
That apart, it’s been amateur hour and completely unnecessary.
That part was done by the military logistics team which isn't a devolved matter in Wales. Central government has handled it aiui. Not in Scotland though where they have direct control, not sure how well it's going.
Yes it was, and your right of course, but public health in Wales were involved and didn’t cock it up so fair enough on that. fair play it seems to the WRU who seemed to have been swift to offer their unique facility ( in vast construction with a roof in the middle of Cardiff) to the authorities.
It's not that people don't like foreigners, it's that people don't like infinite low skilled immigration to drive down the pay for the lowest earners.
If the conditions of a job are so appalling that locals actively looking for work don't want to do it then it shouldn't exist.
Getting people from abroad to live 8 to a room in grotty caravans on sites, working long back breaking shifts with minimal health and safety and no job security should be illegal in my opinion.
All encouraged by a party that calls itself "Labour". What happened to them trying to improve conditions for the working classes?
Not only are they content to reduce the pay of low skilled workers to practically nothing, ruining any chance of a decent life for them, they then call them ignorant racists into the bargain. They are then shocked these horrible people don't want to vote for them anymore.
Hang on - these jobs are NOT low skilled, go ask a fruit farmer. Again the devil is in the detail: 1 The farms are usually miles from major population centres. Which means living away from home. As there aren't suitable hotels sat there waiting for seasonal labour that means things like caravans. 2 The work is back breaking because its fruit and vegetables which means lots of bending over 3 There is job security - the reason why so many of the people applying for the jobs were not progressed is that they refused to commit to the several months contract on offer 4 There aren't "locals actively looking for work". Anglia is flooded with both farms and food factories who process what comes off the farms. I have worked for companies offering good money for shift workers who can't get labour native or migrant because there is more work than people. Yes we have higher unemployment elsewhere, but again people don't live near where the work is.
On topic: Good questions, but I think they approach the problem from the wrong end. We shouldn't be looking at tax proposals individually - that has been the problem which has built up over decades, with tweak laid upon tweak producing far too much complexity and creating far too many anomalies.
Instead we should start from the principle that taxes should be designed to raise revenue whilst creating the minimum possible degree of economic distortion, and work back from that. If we get the structure right, taxes can raise more money with less squealing. We should have a long-term goal of:
- Removing all cliff-edge thresholds from the income system. The best way of doing this is the graduated rate system proposed by various think tanks, in which the tax rate on your total income, not on the marginal extra income rises smoothly for the whole of the income distribution, between lower and upper thresholds. So for example someone earning £20K might pay 1% (£200), someone earning £25K 1.5% (£375), and so on up to (say) £150K where the tax rate on the total income might be 50%. (Illustrative figures only to show the principle). The point here is that at no point in the distribution is there any perverse incentive to avoid a marginal tax hike by diverting, delaying or foregoing income, as we get with the current ludicrous system.
- Obviously TAX and NI should be merged eventually. The current distinction is barmy.
- VAT exemptions should, as @Cyclefree suggests, be phased out. It makes zero sense for children's clothes to be regarded as 'essential' and VAT free, when adult clothes aren't. Removing exemptions would mean a lower rate to raise the same (or probably more) revenue, and with less distortion and less incentive to evade the tax.
- IHT is largely irrelevant because it raises so little money.
- We don't need a Wealth Tax, just sensible tax bands (or a sliding scale) on Council Tax, based on up-to-date valuations. The old Rates system, in other words (Maggie's big mistake..)
None of this can of course be achieved in one go - there would far too many losers, and losers squeal more than winners cheer, even if they are the same people. But they should be set as long term goals, and then the tax system adjusted each year to take us gradually close to sanity in the overall tax system.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
Did the NHS get overrun with patients? - No therefore the lockdown wasn't too late, it was in fact implemented either at the right time or slightly early.
Your argument would be valid if this was ebola and the plan was to kill the disease by ensuring R0 hit 0 and the disease died out. That isn't the case which means the corona virus is here to stay so we need to deal with it while ensuring the NHS doesn't get overrun.
Your argument relies on the rather pessimistic assumptions that no vaccine will be developed, that no effective treatments will be developed, and that no advances in tracking and tracing will be made.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
There is another basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do not make any draconian actions until you need to or know more.
Given the NHS wasn't overwhelmed we didn't act too late. We're still within a bad flu season range of deaths (but a very bad one) not hundreds of thousands and the collapse of the NHS range.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
ie normal life.
Only "normal" for those pillocks who insisted on living it, when it was clearly a massive risk to wider society...
So when would you have shut down the tube?
That's a difficult question, of course. But the signal sent by closing Cheltenham would surely have kept some people at home ?
On that topic, both the Mayor and government seem to have failed to realise that keeping a full service as possible running, while driving numbers of passengers down, might have helped considerably.
People are people. And they live with risk.
Cheltenham cancelled? People book up accommodation months in advance. They would have gone and gone to the pubs. So close off Cheltenham - turn back the trains, close the stations. Not sure that would be a good look for the government.
People spout off all kinds of "solutions" but fail to understand the tawdry reality both of what is practical and of human nature.
Be in no mistake. When in the next few days the UK achieves the dubious distinction of having the second highest number of deaths in the world, despite being far removed from the vanguard of the initial outbreak, that fact will be hammered home relentlessly. The UK's record to date is not "poor", it's abysmal. The only saving grace is that finally, some two months late, the penny seems to have dropped and it is possible that they will now get the key decisions right moving forward.
To which my reply would be how many other countries have accurately reported their figures.
Just about the only figure that could be sanely used is excess deaths compared to the average and those figures take a long time to appear from most countries.
As with everything to do with this virus people want instant answers that just don't exist and treat all data no matter how inaccurate and incomplete as 100% accurate and fact.
That's the Government's excuse too as a means of dodging the question when confronted with international comparisons. I'm surprised you buy it.
Their problem is that we are a country which counts only deaths confirmed by testing after having until very recently conducted far fewer tests in the community than other countries. So it's reasonable to expect that complete statistics will paint the UK in an even worse comparative light than do the current damning figures.
I don't buy the figures of anywhere - and the only figure that is of actual use (excess deaths) won't be around for a long time.
Equally I'm not going to judge any country as this thing is changing all the time. Remember when Japan was successfully tracking everyone well that's fallen apart and it's structural weaknesses in emergency admissions to hospital has been laid bare amongst other issues.
The only time when we will be able to work out what the best plan was is going to be in 2-5 years time when a vaccine exists and we can look back to see what happened where and what worked and what didn't. Until then it's just a matter of each country doing it's best under the circumstances they have and the options they can enforce.
Very convenient for the Government that. No judgement to be formed on their record until many years hence when everyone has forgotten about coronavirus. They'll be hoping that others think like you.
PS. The blip in Japan is hardly "falling apart". It's been controlled. Yes they went from 87 cases on 30th March to 743 on 11th April but are now back down to 193 cases. 17 deaths yesterday. Miniscule numbers compared witht he UK.
London had the highest mortality rate with 85.7 deaths per 100,000 people. The highest age-standardised mortality rate was in Newham, with 144.3 deaths per 100,000 population, followed by Brent with 141.5 deaths per 100,000 population and Hackney 127.4 deaths per 100,000 population.
London is the main factor in the 'poor' stats of the UK. Although legit questions can be asked of the government, the characteristics of London I would say maybe outweigh what mistakes might have been made. (ie its size, demographics, the nature of it as a major transport hub)
Be in no mistake. When in the next few days the UK achieves the dubious distinction of having the second highest number of deaths in the world, despite being far removed from the vanguard of the initial outbreak, that fact will be hammered home relentlessly. The UK's record to date is not "poor", it's abysmal. The only saving grace is that finally, some two months late, the penny seems to have dropped and it is possible that they will now get the key decisions right moving forward.
To which my reply would be how many other countries have accurately reported their figures.
Just about the only figure that could be sanely used is excess deaths compared to the average and those figures take a long time to appear from most countries.
As with everything to do with this virus people want instant answers that just don't exist and treat all data no matter how inaccurate and incomplete as 100% accurate and fact.
That's the Government's excuse too as a means of dodging the question when confronted with international comparisons. I'm surprised you buy it.
Their problem is that we are a country which counts only deaths confirmed by testing after having until very recently conducted far fewer tests in the community than other countries. So it's reasonable to expect that complete statistics will paint the UK in an even worse comparative light than do the current damning figures.
I don't buy the figures of anywhere - and the only figure that is of actual use (excess deaths) won't be around for a long time.
Equally I'm not going to judge any country as this thing is changing all the time. Remember when Japan was successfully tracking everyone well that's fallen apart and it's structural weaknesses in emergency admissions to hospital has been laid bare amongst other issues.
The only time when we will be able to work out what the best plan was is going to be in 2-5 years time when a vaccine exists and we can look back to see what happened where and what worked and what didn't. Until then it's just a matter of each country doing it's best under the circumstances they have and the options they can enforce.
Very convenient for the Government that. No judgement to be formed on their record until many years hence when everyone has forgotten about coronavirus. They'll be hoping that others think like you.
PS. The blip in Japan is hardly "falling apart". It's been controlled. Yes they went from 87 cases on 30th March to 743 on 11th April but are now back down to 193 cases. 17 deaths yesterday. Miniscule numbers compared witht he UK.
That's because Japan is hardly bothering to test anyone. We're now doing almost 100k tests a day; it's inevitable that the case numbers are going up. It just pushes the implied mortality rate down.
It's actually very inconvenient for the government that they're looking bad at the moment. It's very convenient for other countries whose data gathering is significantly worse that they'll only take the rap for their actions after the event. It's just simply not credible that all the basket cases in Southern Europe have suddenly managed to get their act together on statistical reporting, just at the moment it was least in their interests to do so.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
ie normal life.
Only "normal" for those pillocks who insisted on living it, when it was clearly a massive risk to wider society...
So when would you have shut down the tube?
That's a difficult question, of course. But the signal sent by closing Cheltenham would surely have kept some people at home ?
On that topic, both the Mayor and government seem to have failed to realise that keeping a full service as possible running, while driving numbers of passengers down, might have helped considerably.
People are people. And they live with risk.
Cheltenham cancelled? People book up accommodation months in advance. They would have gone and gone to the pubs. So close off Cheltenham - turn back the trains, close the stations. Not sure that would be a good look for the government.
People spout off all kinds of "solutions" but fail to understand the tawdry reality both of what is practical and of human nature.
The obvious move would have been to leave the trains running, but announce that the thing was cancelled, nobody should travel there and if you want to be firm about it, close the *pubs*. More than zero people would still have travelled but generally we've seen that most people follow advice.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
Did the NHS get overrun with patients? - No therefore the lockdown wasn't too late, it was in fact implemented either at the right time or slightly early.
Your argument would be valid if this was ebola and the plan was to kill the disease by ensuring R0 hit 0 and the disease died out. That isn't the case which means the corona virus is here to stay so we need to deal with it while ensuring the NHS doesn't get overrun.
Your argument relies on the rather pessimistic assumptions that no vaccine will be developed, that no effective treatments will be developed, and that no advances in tracking and tracing will be made.
No my argument is based on the reality that we don't have a vaccine today, we don't have effective treatments today and we don't have tracking and tracing available today.
And even then a vaccine won't kill the virus off - just look at polio. In fact the only disease we've ever killed off is smallpox and that took 200 years.
When we have those items we can start to relax things a bit but it just shows how stupid your statements actually are.
- VAT exemptions should, as @Cyclefree suggests, be phased out. It makes zero sense for children's clothes to be regarded as 'essential' and VAT free, when adult clothes aren't. Removing exemptions would mean a lower rate to raise the same (or probably more) revenue, and with less distortion and less incentive to evade the tax.
It does make sense that children's clothes and adults clothes are different. Children grow up and need new clothes, while good and not-disposable adults clothes can last.
My children need new clothes every year - and every few months for babies. A 3 month old and a 2 year old can not wear the same clothes. But I own and wear many clothes I bought years ago. Heck my eldest (six years old) has been through about a dozen different age groups of clothes from "tiny baby" to "six" while I am still wearing some clothes I bought before she was born.
Would this be Japan, who have had to turn patients away and have so little PPE, they can't send full teams of medics in and have to rely on tele-medicine?
Singapore is another early "success" that is now struggling.
The reality is this thing is an absolute bastard. The number of countries, excluding the tiny nations at the end of the earth disconnected from the main thrust of world commerce and having bugger all population density, who appear to be winning is now down to South Korea and Australia.
It's actually very inconvenient for the government that they're looking bad at the moment. It's very convenient for other countries whose data gathering is significantly worse that they'll only take the rap for their actions after the event. It's just simply not credible that all the basket cases in Southern Europe have suddenly managed to get their act together on statistical reporting, just at the moment it was least in their interests to do so.
A comment worthy of Trump himself.
And since we've reached beyond the limits of rational debate, I'm signing off.
On topic: Good questions, but I think they approach the problem from the wrong end. We shouldn't be looking at tax proposals individually - that has been the problem which has built up over decades, with tweak laid upon tweak producing far too much complexity and creating far too many anomalies.
Instead we should start from the principle that taxes should be designed to raise revenue whilst creating the minimum possible degree of economic distortion, and work back from that. If we get the structure right, taxes can raise more money with less squealing. We should have a long-term goal of:
- Removing all cliff-edge thresholds from the income system. The best way of doing this is the graduated rate system proposed by various think tanks, in which the tax rate on your total income, not on the marginal extra income rises smoothly for the whole of the income distribution, between lower and upper thresholds. So for example someone earning £20K might pay 1% (£200), someone earning £25K 1.5% (£375), and so on up to (say) £150K where the tax rate on the total income might be 50%. (Illustrative figures only to show the principle). The point here is that at no point in the distribution is there any perverse incentive to avoid a marginal tax hike by diverting, delaying or foregoing income, as we get with the current ludicrous system.
- Obviously TAX and NI should be merged eventually. The current distinction is barmy.
- VAT exemptions should, as @Cyclefree suggests, be phased out. It makes zero sense for children's clothes to be regarded as 'essential' and VAT free, when adult clothes aren't. Removing exemptions would mean a lower rate to raise the same (or probably more) revenue, and with less distortion and less incentive to evade the tax.
- IHT is largely irrelevant because it raises so little money.
- We don't need a Wealth Tax, just sensible tax bands (or a sliding scale) on Council Tax, based on up-to-date valuations. The old Rates system, in other words (Maggie's big mistake..)
None of this can of course be achieved in one go - there would far too many losers, and losers squeal more than winners cheer, even if they are the same people. But they should be set as long term goals, and then the tax system adjusted each year to take us gradually close to sanity in the overall tax system.
That's because Japan is hardly bothering to test anyone. We're now doing almost 100k tests a day; it's inevitable that the case numbers are going up. It just pushes the implied mortality rate down.
It's actually very inconvenient for the government that they're looking bad at the moment. It's very convenient for other countries whose data gathering is significantly worse that they'll only take the rap for their actions after the event. It's just simply not credible that all the basket cases in Southern Europe have suddenly managed to get their act together on statistical reporting, just at the moment it was least in their interests to do so.
There was a time when it wasn't totally bonkers to think that maybe Japan had a lot of hidden infection that hadn't shown up because of lack of testing, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some shenanigans specific to *Tokyo*, which had bizarrely low numbers before the Olympic cancellation and an unexplained spike in flu deaths not seen in its commuter belt. However, we'd long since have seen these undetected cases show up in hospitals. We'd also have seen the number of cases grow as the number of tests has been (belatedly) increasing, but the opposite is happening.
Japan doesn't have a UK-level covid19 epidemic. It just doesn't.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
ie normal life.
Only "normal" for those pillocks who insisted on living it, when it was clearly a massive risk to wider society...
So when would you have shut down the tube?
That's a difficult question, of course. But the signal sent by closing Cheltenham would surely have kept some people at home ?
On that topic, both the Mayor and government seem to have failed to realise that keeping a full service as possible running, while driving numbers of passengers down, might have helped considerably.
People are people. And they live with risk.
Cheltenham cancelled? People book up accommodation months in advance. They would have gone and gone to the pubs. So close off Cheltenham - turn back the trains, close the stations. Not sure that would be a good look for the government.
People spout off all kinds of "solutions" but fail to understand the tawdry reality both of what is practical and of human nature.
The obvious move would have been to leave the trains running, but announce that the thing was cancelled, nobody should travel there and if you want to be firm about it, close the *pubs*. More than zero people would still have travelled but generally we've seen that most people follow advice.
That again would have been a hugely bold move in the context of the rest of the country would have been fully functioning, Central Line running, etc. But the city of Cheltenham, of all the ongoing events and situations, to be closed.
It really annoys me when politicians talk about taking people out of tax when they mean taking people out of income tax. Due to VAT, everyone pays tax. Even children pay tax when they buy something with their pocket money.
In many ways, this crisis will give politicians the cover to make changes that perhaps they have wanted to previously but have been too difficult. One as Sunak has telegraphed is likely to be the tax treatment of the self-employed. Another may well be pensioner benefits (look at May's attempt to downgrade the triple lock).
This may also apply to the corporate world. BA has a number of older employees on much more generous Ts & Cs than newer employees and it wouldn't surprise me if the former group bear the brunt of the redundancies.
COVID-19 Control Strategies and Intervention Effects in Resource Limited Settings: A Modeling Study https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20079673v1 Background Many countries with weaker health systems are struggling to put together a coherent strategy against the COVID-19 epidemic. We explored COVID-19 control strategies that could offer the greatest benefit in resource limited settings. Methods Using an age-structured SEIR model, we explored the effects of COVID-19 control interventions--a lockdown, physical distancing measures, and active case finding (testing and isolation, contact tracing and quarantine)-- implemented individually and in combination to control a hypothetical COVID-19 epidemic in Kathmandu (population 2.6 million), Nepal. Results A month-long lockdown that is currently in place in Nepal will delay peak demand for hospital beds by 36 days, as compared to a base scenario of no interventions (peak demand at 108 days (IQR 97-119); a 2 month long lockdown will delay it by 74 days, without any difference in annual mortality, or healthcare demand volume. Year-long physical distancing measures will reduce peak demand to 36% (IQR 23%-46%) and annual morality to 67% (IQR 48%-77%) of base scenario. Following a month long lockdown with ongoing physical distancing measures and an active case finding intervention that detects 5% of the daily infection burden could reduce projected morality and peak demand by more than 99%. Interpretation Limited resources settings are best served by a combination of early and aggressive case finding with ongoing physical distancing measures to control the COVID-19 epidemic. A lockdown may be helpful until combination interventions can be put in place but is unlikely to reduce annual mortality or healthcare demand....
It's not that people don't like foreigners, it's that people don't like infinite low skilled immigration to drive down the pay for the lowest earners.
If the conditions of a job are so appalling that locals actively looking for work don't want to do it then it shouldn't exist.
Getting people from abroad to live 8 to a room in grotty caravans on sites, working long back breaking shifts with minimal health and safety and no job security should be illegal in my opinion.
All encouraged by a party that calls itself "Labour". What happened to them trying to improve conditions for the working classes?
Not only are they content to reduce the pay of low skilled workers to practically nothing, ruining any chance of a decent life for them, they then call them ignorant racists into the bargain. They are then shocked these horrible people don't want to vote for them anymore.
Hang on - these jobs are NOT low skilled, go ask a fruit farmer. Again the devil is in the detail: 1 The farms are usually miles from major population centres. Which means living away from home. As there aren't suitable hotels sat there waiting for seasonal labour that means things like caravans. 2 The work is back breaking because its fruit and vegetables which means lots of bending over 3 There is job security - the reason why so many of the people applying for the jobs were not progressed is that they refused to commit to the several months contract on offer 4 There aren't "locals actively looking for work". Anglia is flooded with both farms and food factories who process what comes off the farms. I have worked for companies offering good money for shift workers who can't get labour native or migrant because there is more work than people. Yes we have higher unemployment elsewhere, but again people don't live near where the work is.
So these are highly skilled jobs, with terrible pay and conditions in places with low unemployment. Is it a surprise that no locals want to do it?
Most other sectors work conditions have been allowed to improve, but farming is kept in the dark ages with this sort of immigration. What you are describing is just wage suppression.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
Did the NHS get overrun with patients? - No therefore the lockdown wasn't too late, it was in fact implemented either at the right time or slightly early.
Your argument would be valid if this was ebola and the plan was to kill the disease by ensuring R0 hit 0 and the disease died out. That isn't the case which means the corona virus is here to stay so we need to deal with it while ensuring the NHS doesn't get overrun.
Your argument relies on the rather pessimistic assumptions that no vaccine will be developed, that no effective treatments will be developed, and that no advances in tracking and tracing will be made.
No my argument is based on the reality that we don't have a vaccine today, we don't have effective treatments today and we don't have tracking and tracing available today.
And even then a vaccine won't kill the virus off - just look at polio. In fact the only disease we've ever killed off is smallpox and that took 200 years.
When we have those items we can start to relax things a bit but it just shows how stupid your statements actually are.
What? The point is if we develop, say, a treament that cuts the proportion of people who die after catching coronavirus, then any delay in infections before then will have saved lives. Even more so with a vaccine which could prevent many people getting it at all. So in that case an earlier lockdown would have saved lives.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
With respect this is just nonsense. At the time the best advice was that control of the virus by trace and isolate was doomed to fail. The object therefore was to flatten the curve, an object that has been achieved. Now, with the experience of SK, it is thought that it might be possible to control the virus this way long term. Whether that in fact proves to be the case remains to be seen but it is rewriting history to suggest that was an option that was suggested as being open to the government at the time.
The cost of the lockdown runs to tens of billions a week. We must be locked down for as short a period as possible compatible with our primary objective of not allowing the NHS to be overwhelmed. In Scotland the lock down undoubtedly came at least 2 weeks, possibly 3 weeks too early. The extra capacity created in the NHS has not been used. Other people whose treatment was deferred will die as a result of that wasted capacity. The number of cases remains small and the costs of the lockdown wholly disproportionate. As I understand it the same could be said for the SW. When to lockdown was a difficult decision which had to be taken when a part of the country, London in this case, was reaching breaking point so far as the NHS was concerned.
So all the mutterings by ministers this morning sounds like they have made the 100k give or take. So instantly the criticism switched to wrong people being tested.
I'm sort of hoping nationally we fall short and it highlights the ongoing disaster that is the testing situation in Scotland. I'm not making a political point here, they need to get it fixed because 1500 tests per day isn't going to cut it to move to the next stage of this crisis. Even if it means PHE stepping in and providing extra testing capacity we should actually force the situation and ensure that Scotland can do 10k tests per day as they need to be able to.
For all the criticism the government has taken in the last 6 weeks over testing, they have by some method managed to increase capacity to run 100k tests per day in England. Where is that same criticism for the Scottish government who are still stuck doing less than 2k tests per day. Translated to England the Scottish testing rate would be 13-17k, how mental would the likes of Piers Morgan be going right now if we were still only doing that many tests in England? Why is no one picking this up? We need for all four nations to move forwards together on this.
Wales is doing really badly on testing. They dropped their ambition of 5k tests a day. We can't have that south wales conurbation with bugger all testing going on.
5k for Wales.100k for UK. Wales a little under 5% of the total population...
Devolution is having a bad crisis, at the very least in Wales. The extra layer of govt has been nothing but a hinderance.
Pursuing the same contracts as England to get bumped down, testing seems worse (why abandon that 5k target if going well?), reporting of deaths so late in N Wales there’s an investigation, and the Health Minister getting shall we say “exasperated “ by one of his colleagues ( she’s my A.M. and I’m not surprised he’s got exasperated truth be told!).
The nightingale hospital at the Principality Stadium, in fairness, looked like a good job well done.
That apart, it’s been amateur hour and completely unnecessary.
There is anger here because Debenhams in Llandudno and other stores in Wales have been denied the same rate relief as in England by the Welsh government and the result will be the loss of all Debenhams throughout Wales
One of the strategic things I think we need is to revise devolution arrangements not to incentivise identity politics by sectarians.
I do not know how, though :-) .
The Welsh Government landing on its bum in a puddle is hardly a surprise - it's essentially been a one party microstate since 1999.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
ie normal life.
Only "normal" for those pillocks who insisted on living it, when it was clearly a massive risk to wider society...
So when would you have shut down the tube?
That's a difficult question, of course. But the signal sent by closing Cheltenham would surely have kept some people at home ?
On that topic, both the Mayor and government seem to have failed to realise that keeping a full service as possible running, while driving numbers of passengers down, might have helped considerably.
People are people. And they live with risk.
Cheltenham cancelled? People book up accommodation months in advance. They would have gone and gone to the pubs. So close off Cheltenham - turn back the trains, close the stations. Not sure that would be a good look for the government.
People spout off all kinds of "solutions" but fail to understand the tawdry reality both of what is practical and of human nature.
The obvious move would have been to leave the trains running, but announce that the thing was cancelled, nobody should travel there and if you want to be firm about it, close the *pubs*. More than zero people would still have travelled but generally we've seen that most people follow advice.
That again would have been a hugely bold move in the context of the rest of the country would have been fully functioning, Central Line running, etc. But the city of Cheltenham, of all the ongoing events and situations, to be closed.
Not v practical imo.
They should have been closing pubs nationwide at the point TBH, but I don't really see why it's impractical to close pubs for a few nights in a few places with events that might otherwise attract a lot of people who you advised to stay away, but practical not long afterwards to tell everybody in the entire country not to leave their houses except for approved functions like exercise once a day etc etc.
It might have been *politically unpopular* at that point, (not sure) but that's a different thing.
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
So all the mutterings by ministers this morning sounds like they have made the 100k give or take. So instantly the criticism switched to wrong people being tested.
I'm sort of hoping nationally we fall short and it highlights the ongoing disaster that is the testing situation in Scotland. I'm not making a political point here, they need to get it fixed because 1500 tests per day isn't going to cut it to move to the next stage of this crisis. Even if it means PHE stepping in and providing extra testing capacity we should actually force the situation and ensure that Scotland can do 10k tests per day as they need to be able to.
For all the criticism the government has taken in the last 6 weeks over testing, they have by some method managed to increase capacity to run 100k tests per day in England. Where is that same criticism for the Scottish government who are still stuck doing less than 2k tests per day. Translated to England the Scottish testing rate would be 13-17k, how mental would the likes of Piers Morgan be going right now if we were still only doing that many tests in England? Why is no one picking this up? We need for all four nations to move forwards together on this.
Wales is doing really badly on testing. They dropped their ambition of 5k tests a day. We can't have that south wales conurbation with bugger all testing going on.
5k for Wales.100k for UK. Wales a little under 5% of the total population...
Devolution is having a bad crisis, at the very least in Wales. The extra layer of govt has been nothing but a hinderance.
Pursuing the same contracts as England to get bumped down, testing seems worse (why abandon that 5k target if going well?), reporting of deaths so late in N Wales there’s an investigation, and the Health Minister getting shall we say “exasperated “ by one of his colleagues ( she’s my A.M. and I’m not surprised he’s got exasperated truth be told!).
The nightingale hospital at the Principality Stadium, in fairness, looked like a good job well done.
That apart, it’s been amateur hour and completely unnecessary.
There is anger here because Debenhams in Llandudno and other stores in Wales have been denied the same rate relief as in England by the Welsh government and the result will be the loss of all Debenhams throughout Wales
All those vegan's smashing the doors down to get the infamous sausage roll....
Bakery chain Greggs has said its planned branch re-openings next week will now begin behind closed doors. The sausage roll supplier is fearful of "the risk that excessive numbers of customers" may turn up.
- VAT exemptions should, as @Cyclefree suggests, be phased out. It makes zero sense for children's clothes to be regarded as 'essential' and VAT free, when adult clothes aren't. Removing exemptions would mean a lower rate to raise the same (or probably more) revenue, and with less distortion and less incentive to evade the tax.
It does make sense that children's clothes and adults clothes are different. Children grow up and need new clothes, while good and not-disposable adults clothes can last.
My children need new clothes every year - and every few months for babies. A 3 month old and a 2 year old can not wear the same clothes. But I own and wear many clothes I bought years ago. Heck my eldest (six years old) has been through about a dozen different age groups of clothes from "tiny baby" to "six" while I am still wearing some clothes I bought before she was born.
Another entry into the annals of "Children are not just tiny adults"
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
It is absurd to conflate the two though. There is a distinction in that one was essential to people to travelling to work, whereas large scale mass gatherings were not essential to peoples' daily lives. That is why events such as Cheltenham stand out as totemic evidence of unnecessary delay. Prior to 20th March the Government had left it to those organising such events to decide whether or not to cancel them, and too many organisers decided that they could not afford to cancel.
As far as I understand it is only Cheltenham and Liverpools match that is controversial and we have yet to see conclusive evidence they were. It is probable but at present not proven. Let us wait for the evidence.
I do have an open mind on this one
I don't think you need a rigorous scientific proof in order to draw conclusions on this one. There were 10 days between the start of Cheltenham on 10th March and when the Government finally banned such mass gatherings, yet from the start of March PHE had already acknowledged publically that the spread of the virus throughout the UK was highly likely. Germany acted far earlier, introducing their ban on such events on 10th March which strengthened earlier advice to cancel.
To be honest you may be right but the news coming out of Germany this morning is not good. I prefer to keep an open mind and see how this plays out over the months and even years ahead. Mistakes have been made but of course it is easy, with hindsight, to say x,y,z should have been done when you know an outcome
You're rewriting history - hindsight has nothing to do with it. It was blindingly obvious even at the time that the lockdown was too late and lax. That was why so many people were desperate for the government to take action and why people began to take action themselves when the government failed to act. When you're dealing with potential exponential growth, rapid action at the start makes a critical difference.
There is a basic principle here: when you don't understand what's happening, do whatever you can to reduce the chances of the worst outcome. It almost beggars belief that the government dithered for so long.
With respect this is just nonsense. At the time the best advice was that control of the virus by trace and isolate was doomed to fail. The object therefore was to flatten the curve, an object that has been achieved. Now, with the experience of SK, it is thought that it might be possible to control the virus this way long term. Whether that in fact proves to be the case remains to be seen but it is rewriting history to suggest that was an option that was suggested as being open to the government at the time.
The cost of the lockdown runs to tens of billions a week. We must be locked down for as short a period as possible compatible with our primary objective of not allowing the NHS to be overwhelmed. In Scotland the lock down undoubtedly came at least 2 weeks, possibly 3 weeks too early. The extra capacity created in the NHS has not been used. Other people whose treatment was deferred will die as a result of that wasted capacity. The number of cases remains small and the costs of the lockdown wholly disproportionate. As I understand it the same could be said for the SW. When to lockdown was a difficult decision which had to be taken when a part of the country, London in this case, was reaching breaking point so far as the NHS was concerned.
Well said.
Some people are acting as if the only acceptable death number is zero or as close to zero as possible. The objective was to not overwhelm the NHS and flatten the curve - and the curve has been flattened and the NHS was never overwhelmed.
The lockdown came at the right point for London and was probably too early for the rest of the UK but it makes sense not to repeat the Italian mistake of locking down one region only then seeing people flee from there to the rest of the nation. So it made sense sadly to lock down too early in the rest of the UK otherwise we'd have been flooded with Londoners bringing the plague with them.
The Cheltenham Festival could have helped to "accelerate the spread" of coronavirus, a former government chief scientific adviser said.
Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, said it was "the best possible way to accelerate the spread of the virus".
I'm sure it did. I'm also sure that the Central Line was a better conductor. Then perhaps the Northern Line, then the District & Circle. Then Brighton and District U-21 league qualifier, then...then...oh and Cheltenham is certainly in the mix.
I have little doubt the tubes were big conductors and Cheltenham maybe as well as the football
ie normal life.
Only "normal" for those pillocks who insisted on living it, when it was clearly a massive risk to wider society...
So when would you have shut down the tube?
That's a difficult question, of course. But the signal sent by closing Cheltenham would surely have kept some people at home ?
On that topic, both the Mayor and government seem to have failed to realise that keeping a full service as possible running, while driving numbers of passengers down, might have helped considerably.
People are people. And they live with risk.
Cheltenham cancelled? People book up accommodation months in advance. They would have gone and gone to the pubs. So close off Cheltenham - turn back the trains, close the stations. Not sure that would be a good look for the government.
People spout off all kinds of "solutions" but fail to understand the tawdry reality both of what is practical and of human nature.
The obvious move would have been to leave the trains running, but announce that the thing was cancelled, nobody should travel there and if you want to be firm about it, close the *pubs*. More than zero people would still have travelled but generally we've seen that most people follow advice.
That again would have been a hugely bold move in the context of the rest of the country would have been fully functioning, Central Line running, etc. But the city of Cheltenham, of all the ongoing events and situations, to be closed.
Not v practical imo.
They should have been closing pubs nationwide at the point TBH, but I don't really see why it's impractical to close pubs for a few nights in a few places with events that might otherwise attract a lot of people who you advised to stay away, but practical not long afterwards to tell everybody in the entire country not to leave their houses except for approved functions like exercise once a day etc etc.
It might have been *politically unpopular* at that point, (not sure) but that's a different thing.
The tube was still running. It would have been the maginot line of virus suppression. It was only when the lockdown was put in place that things changed. It is a nonsense to think that they could have cherry-picked stopping this and that particular event.
Once the lockdown was announced then yes, everything could be shut down, and locking a nation down comes at a huge cost and is not to be undertaken unless absolutely necessary which, evidently at that time they thought it was not.
Strikingly, the study shows that in this hybrid European model, people killed by covid-19 had only slightly higher rates of underlying illness than everyone else their age.
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
The NHS are building their own, with a centralised database, rather than use the new blue tooth tech that Apple and Google are rapidly building into their phone operating systems.
So all the mutterings by ministers this morning sounds like they have made the 100k give or take. So instantly the criticism switched to wrong people being tested.
I'm sort of hoping nationally we fall short and it highlights the ongoing disaster that is the testing situation in Scotland. I'm not making a political point here, they need to get it fixed because 1500 tests per day isn't going to cut it to move to the next stage of this crisis. Even if it means PHE stepping in and providing extra testing capacity we should actually force the situation and ensure that Scotland can do 10k tests per day as they need to be able to.
For all the criticism the government has taken in the last 6 weeks over testing, they have by some method managed to increase capacity to run 100k tests per day in England. Where is that same criticism for the Scottish government who are still stuck doing less than 2k tests per day. Translated to England the Scottish testing rate would be 13-17k, how mental would the likes of Piers Morgan be going right now if we were still only doing that many tests in England? Why is no one picking this up? We need for all four nations to move forwards together on this.
The number of tests is a stupid media distraction that Hancock admittedly bears some responsibility for creating. To be productive the testing needs to be relevant. In Scotland there are fewer cases than the UK average but there seems to be a bigger problem with care homes who form a much larger percentage of overall deaths than in the UK. Testing should therefore be being used to protect that sector from further exposure, not testing random members of the public in some sort of a fetish. Whether this is in fact happening on an adequate scale is the real question.
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
The NHS are building their own, with a centralised database, rather than use the new blue tooth tech that Apple and Google are rapidly building into their phone operating systems.
Need I say more.
Add in that the IoS app only works (without forcing your phone to go into massive battery drain mode*), because the spooks at GCHQ have "found" a loophole (i.e. already had it in their toolbox for some more nefarious reason). Apple don't like anybody exploiting their OS in anyway for any reason. They could well update the OS and screw this.
All those vegan's smashing the doors down to get the infamous sausage roll....
Bakery chain Greggs has said its planned branch re-openings next week will now begin behind closed doors. The sausage roll supplier is fearful of "the risk that excessive numbers of customers" may turn up.
How can you re-open 'behind closed doors?' do you just look at the steak bake through the window?
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
The NHS are building their own, with a centralised database, rather than use the new blue tooth tech that Apple and Google are rapidly building into their phone operating systems.
Need I say more.
Goes back to what I was saying a couple of nights ago, we have an unbelievable tech industry in this country and yet we are limited to the resources available in the public sector. It's not going to cut it, public sector tech workers are usually not at the cutting edge and much older than private sector ones. Their assumptions and understanding is usually well behind what it actually possible.
With respect this is just nonsense. At the time the best advice was that control of the virus by trace and isolate was doomed to fail. The object therefore was to flatten the curve, an object that has been achieved. Now, with the experience of SK, it is thought that it might be possible to control the virus this way long term. Whether that in fact proves to be the case remains to be seen but it is rewriting history to suggest that was an option that was suggested as being open to the government at the time.
Secondly, even if you allow that the government couldn't have come up with a better option than lockdown, they did it too late. Which has probably cost 10s of thousands of lives and made the hit to the economy worse when we eventually needed a longer lockdown
All those vegan's smashing the doors down to get the infamous sausage roll....
Bakery chain Greggs has said its planned branch re-openings next week will now begin behind closed doors. The sausage roll supplier is fearful of "the risk that excessive numbers of customers" may turn up.
How can you re-open 'behind closed doors?' do you just look at the steak bake through the window?
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
The NHS are building their own, with a centralised database, rather than use the new blue tooth tech that Apple and Google are rapidly building into their phone operating systems.
Need I say more.
Goes back to what I was saying a couple of nights ago, we have an unbelievable tech industry in this country and yet we are limited to the resources available in the public sector. It's not going to cut it, public sector tech workers are usually not at the cutting edge and much older than private sector ones. Their assumptions and understanding is usually well behind what it actually possible.
And when it comes to building on low level interaction with the OS, who is going to know more about this, the people who actually write the OS or some public sector tech workers?
All those vegan's smashing the doors down to get the infamous sausage roll....
Bakery chain Greggs has said its planned branch re-openings next week will now begin behind closed doors. The sausage roll supplier is fearful of "the risk that excessive numbers of customers" may turn up.
How can you re-open 'behind closed doors?' do you just look at the steak bake through the window?
Take-away / delivery I guess?
Greggs is pretty much take-away. Though they do have a few seats both inside and out, which might be what they're talking about.
The idea that even the poorest should have to pay income tax due to some moral need for all to contribute is a bit weird. Everyone pays VAT and other universal taxes already.
That’s rather missing the point I was making: both income tax and VAT have a narrow tax base - narrower than in other countries. When that tax base is hit - as it is now - we face a problem. You cannot just look at rates. If the relatively poor pay VAT on food in France and Italy what is the argument for saying that the same should not apply here?
There may be a good argument but it needs to be made - and it needs to be something more cogent than “we’ve always done it this way”.
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
It is also significant that it has taken until now to generate sufficient testing capacity and it took several weeks to produce the Nightingale capacity. Neither were available to the government when we started the lockdown.
The tube was still running. It would have been the maginot line of virus suppression. It was only when the lockdown was put in place that things changed. It is a nonsense to think that they could have cherry-picked stopping this and that particular event.
Once the lockdown was announced then yes, everything could be shut down, and locking a nation down comes at a huge cost and is not to be undertaken unless absolutely necessary which, evidently at that time they thought it was not.
What Japan was doing at that point was "Please avoid crowded places indoors, cancel events and work from home where practical". It worked fine. The underground never stopped, it's still running. Britain might have needed a bit more compulsion, but there's no reason to think more pinpoint measures than "shut it all down" wouldn't have been practical there too.
Everything possible except for picking a candidate who remembers his own name.
By the way what exactly is the point of this? Who cares who the delegates are? It's meaningless. If he wants to get Bernie supporters on board, the important thing is his VP pick.
So all the mutterings by ministers this morning sounds like they have made the 100k give or take. So instantly the criticism switched to wrong people being tested.
I'm sort of hoping nationally we fall short and it highlights the ongoing disaster that is the testing situation in Scotland. I'm not making a political point here, they need to get it fixed because 1500 tests per day isn't going to cut it to move to the next stage of this crisis. Even if it means PHE stepping in and providing extra testing capacity we should actually force the situation and ensure that Scotland can do 10k tests per day as they need to be able to.
For all the criticism the government has taken in the last 6 weeks over testing, they have by some method managed to increase capacity to run 100k tests per day in England. Where is that same criticism for the Scottish government who are still stuck doing less than 2k tests per day. Translated to England the Scottish testing rate would be 13-17k, how mental would the likes of Piers Morgan be going right now if we were still only doing that many tests in England? Why is no one picking this up? We need for all four nations to move forwards together on this.
The number of tests is a stupid media distraction that Hancock admittedly bears some responsibility for creating. To be productive the testing needs to be relevant. In Scotland there are fewer cases than the UK average but there seems to be a bigger problem with care homes who form a much larger percentage of overall deaths than in the UK. Testing should therefore be being used to protect that sector from further exposure, not testing random members of the public in some sort of a fetish. Whether this is in fact happening on an adequate scale is the real question.
The testing isn't random members of the public though, it's public facing workers and the people they live with that are eligible, and needing symptoms is a prerequisite. It means NHS workers, carehome workers, the check out assistant in Sainsbury's are all able to get tests and their families too. It's the right strategy, yesterday we had 6k people test positive. I'm hoping that all 6k are going to be isolated from the general public which means they will no longer be able to infect people. But you can only isolate people if you know they have it. Scotland's strategy has been pitiful in this regard and as I said, it isn't political point scoring, I've been critical of Tory Westminster plenty, I don't care that it's the SNP in charge.
So all the mutterings by ministers this morning sounds like they have made the 100k give or take. So instantly the criticism switched to wrong people being tested.
I'm sort of hoping nationally we fall short and it highlights the ongoing disaster that is the testing situation in Scotland. I'm not making a political point here, they need to get it fixed because 1500 tests per day isn't going to cut it to move to the next stage of this crisis. Even if it means PHE stepping in and providing extra testing capacity we should actually force the situation and ensure that Scotland can do 10k tests per day as they need to be able to.
For all the criticism the government has taken in the last 6 weeks over testing, they have by some method managed to increase capacity to run 100k tests per day in England. Where is that same criticism for the Scottish government who are still stuck doing less than 2k tests per day. Translated to England the Scottish testing rate would be 13-17k, how mental would the likes of Piers Morgan be going right now if we were still only doing that many tests in England? Why is no one picking this up? We need for all four nations to move forwards together on this.
The number of tests is a stupid media distraction that Hancock admittedly bears some responsibility for creating. To be productive the testing needs to be relevant. In Scotland there are fewer cases than the UK average but there seems to be a bigger problem with care homes who form a much larger percentage of overall deaths than in the UK. Testing should therefore be being used to protect that sector from further exposure, not testing random members of the public in some sort of a fetish. Whether this is in fact happening on an adequate scale is the real question.
Hancock deserves credit for creating the testing target.
The media hysteria of whether it will be met tomorrow or today is irrelevant, it was the right thing to do to target a high testing capacity and once its there it can be used smartly - and over time implementation will get smarter. But you need the capacity in the first place no matter how productive your criteria is without the capacity you can't do it.
It seems clear they got the testing capacity might be up at 100k per day which is the most important thing and the tests after last night's numbers will presumably be there or there abouts. But without the testing target would capacity now be up at 100k per week?
Whether the target is met or not is not really that meaningful apart from to the media. The idea that 99,999 tests is a disaster but 100,001 tests is a huge success is patently absurd. But without Hancock putting pressure on himself, industry and most importantly the civil service would we be close to that now? I don't think we can know that, but the probability is in my view that Hancock's then seemingly absurdly ambitious target will in the long-run save lives. So well done Hancock!
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has said it will take up to six months to refund passengers for flights cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Virgin is 100 days.
The EU are in the process of waving the 14 day refund law thereby using the ordinary holidaymaker as the sacrificial lamb for these companies
It is an utter disgrace and abuse of power by the EU
I hope consumer groups challenge this dreadful decision
I am fortunate that BA have refunded my £2,000 flight charge for our May trip but even that was extremely difficult to obtain through BA own evasion
And of course O'Leary wants to take six months as he is looking for the EU to shaft the ordinary holidaymakers
It is shameful
Interesting that you had issues with BA BigG. Looks like at some point soon I`m going to have to tackle BA over £2,500 flights which look unlikely to happen in July. Any tips? Did you get the refund via BA or via your credit card company?
That's because Japan is hardly bothering to test anyone. We're now doing almost 100k tests a day; it's inevitable that the case numbers are going up. It just pushes the implied mortality rate down.
It's actually very inconvenient for the government that they're looking bad at the moment. It's very convenient for other countries whose data gathering is significantly worse that they'll only take the rap for their actions after the event. It's just simply not credible that all the basket cases in Southern Europe have suddenly managed to get their act together on statistical reporting, just at the moment it was least in their interests to do so.
There was a time when it wasn't totally bonkers to think that maybe Japan had a lot of hidden infection that hadn't shown up because of lack of testing, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some shenanigans specific to *Tokyo*, which had bizarrely low numbers before the Olympic cancellation and an unexplained spike in flu deaths not seen in its commuter belt. However, we'd long since have seen these undetected cases show up in hospitals. We'd also have seen the number of cases grow as the number of tests has been (belatedly) increasing, but the opposite is happening.
Japan doesn't have a UK-level covid19 epidemic. It just doesn't.
Not yet.
Jordain Haley is an American working in Japan as a business analyst and volunteer translator. Via Skype she told me what happened when she helped a friend, who doesn't speak fluent Japanese, to get a test. On 10 April, her friend had developed a fever and cough, but waited four days, as per the guidelines. "By then she was having trouble breathing and was dizzy from lack of oxygen," Jordain tells me. "I called the Covid hotline. They refused to help. They said if she's sick she should call an ambulance."
The following day (Wednesday 15 April) her friend found a clinic where they gave her a chest X-ray. The doctor said she probably had Covid-19, but not bad enough to be hospitalised. He sent her home and told her to isolate.
Late on Thursday night Jordain's friend called. She was in distress.
"I could hear the EMT (ambulance crew) in the background. She was coughing and wheezing so much I couldn't make out what she was saying. It took them two hours to find a hospital that would accept her. The whole time her breathing was getting worse and worse."
The hospital did another chest X-ray and told her friend to get tested for Covid-19 at her local health centre. But the doctor wouldn't write a recommendation. Instead she was sent home in a taxi. "They said she should roll down the windows in the cab, and that it would be ok," Jordain says, rolling her eyes.
On Friday 17 April Jordain called the local health centre. For two hours she was passed from one desk to another. She answered scores of questions. Finally, she got her friend an appointment. But it came with a warning.
"She must use the side entrance." Jordain was told. "She must not tell anyone where this testing is taking place. It could cause a commotion."
Everything possible except for picking a candidate who remembers his own name.
By the way what exactly is the point of this? Who cares who the delegates are? It's meaningless. If he wants to get Bernie supporters on board, the important thing is his VP pick.
Probably part of the deal to get Bernie to drop out.
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
The NHS are building their own, with a centralised database, rather than use the new blue tooth tech that Apple and Google are rapidly building into their phone operating systems.
Need I say more.
Goes back to what I was saying a couple of nights ago, we have an unbelievable tech industry in this country and yet we are limited to the resources available in the public sector. It's not going to cut it, public sector tech workers are usually not at the cutting edge and much older than private sector ones. Their assumptions and understanding is usually well behind what it actually possible.
And when it comes to building on low level interaction with the OS, who is going to know more about this, the people who actually write the OS or some public sector tech workers?
What makes you think the coding is being done by public sector tech workers and not private sector workers who've been brought or contracted to?
The tube was still running. It would have been the maginot line of virus suppression. It was only when the lockdown was put in place that things changed. It is a nonsense to think that they could have cherry-picked stopping this and that particular event.
Once the lockdown was announced then yes, everything could be shut down, and locking a nation down comes at a huge cost and is not to be undertaken unless absolutely necessary which, evidently at that time they thought it was not.
What Japan was doing at that point was "Please avoid crowded places indoors, cancel events and work from home where practical". It worked fine. The underground never stopped, it's still running. Britain might have needed a bit more compulsion, but there's no reason to think more pinpoint measures than "shut it all down" wouldn't have been practical there too.
I think the govt was nudging at that point (elbow bumps and so forth). So roughly the same. Advice and law are as we know two different beasts.
Don't drink and drive is advice whereas you can drink and drive legally.
Is it sensible to do so? Well of course not but the government has assessed that people able to drink and drive is an acceptable risk for the nation to take.
I very much hope it decides to take the same approach to Covid-19 in terms of what an acceptable risk is and doesn't try to get the number of deaths down to zero (as it doesn't for drink/driving and smoking for example).
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
The NHS are building their own, with a centralised database, rather than use the new blue tooth tech that Apple and Google are rapidly building into their phone operating systems.
Need I say more.
Goes back to what I was saying a couple of nights ago, we have an unbelievable tech industry in this country and yet we are limited to the resources available in the public sector. It's not going to cut it, public sector tech workers are usually not at the cutting edge and much older than private sector ones. Their assumptions and understanding is usually well behind what it actually possible.
It will be interesting to see just how much the government tried to leverage this capacity.
We know Demis from Deepminds got invited to a SAGE meeting, but did they ask him to do any work? Deepminds has hired over 600 people in the past 2 years, the vast majority with PhDs in ML. They also recently hired a high respected ML guy called Neil Lawrence, whose speciality is dealing with the sort of datasets coming out of this pandemic. Deepminds are also in a very privileged position where they are under certain conditions allowed to leverage huge amounts of Google's overall compute power.
Then we have Amazon, they bought basically the whole ML research group from Sheffield University a few years ago.
And that's before we consider Google, Facebook, yadda yadda yadda.
With respect this is just nonsense. At the time the best advice was that control of the virus by trace and isolate was doomed to fail. The object therefore was to flatten the curve, an object that has been achieved. Now, with the experience of SK, it is thought that it might be possible to control the virus this way long term. Whether that in fact proves to be the case remains to be seen but it is rewriting history to suggest that was an option that was suggested as being open to the government at the time.
Secondly, even if you allow that the government couldn't have come up with a better option than lockdown, they did it too late. Which has probably cost 10s of thousands of lives and made the hit to the economy worse when we eventually needed a longer lockdown
Fact: at the time of the abandonment of phase 1 we had very limited capacity to test, certainly not enough to do trace and isolate. This has only really changed this week.
Fact: the advice was that phase 1 was always going to fail, its objective was to buy enough time to increase NHS capacity.
Fact: the idea that the date of the lockdown saved any lives is entirely based on the premise that control of the virus would have been possible in the absence of these elements. It was not.
Fact: the lockdown is devastating economically. It needs to be curtailed as soon as we have a viable way out and it did not need to be started until absolutely necessary.
Fact: we are only now tiptoeing our way to an alternative strategy. We still need to vastly improve our tracing capacity first, otherwise this is the first lockdown of many.
That's because Japan is hardly bothering to test anyone. We're now doing almost 100k tests a day; it's inevitable that the case numbers are going up. It just pushes the implied mortality rate down.
It's actually very inconvenient for the government that they're looking bad at the moment. It's very convenient for other countries whose data gathering is significantly worse that they'll only take the rap for their actions after the event. It's just simply not credible that all the basket cases in Southern Europe have suddenly managed to get their act together on statistical reporting, just at the moment it was least in their interests to do so.
There was a time when it wasn't totally bonkers to think that maybe Japan had a lot of hidden infection that hadn't shown up because of lack of testing, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some shenanigans specific to *Tokyo*, which had bizarrely low numbers before the Olympic cancellation and an unexplained spike in flu deaths not seen in its commuter belt. However, we'd long since have seen these undetected cases show up in hospitals. We'd also have seen the number of cases grow as the number of tests has been (belatedly) increasing, but the opposite is happening.
Japan doesn't have a UK-level covid19 epidemic. It just doesn't.
Not yet.
Jordain Haley is an American working in Japan as a business analyst and volunteer translator. Via Skype she told me what happened when she helped a friend, who doesn't speak fluent Japanese, to get a test. On 10 April, her friend had developed a fever and cough, but waited four days, as per the guidelines. "By then she was having trouble breathing and was dizzy from lack of oxygen," Jordain tells me. "I called the Covid hotline. They refused to help. They said if she's sick she should call an ambulance."
The following day (Wednesday 15 April) her friend found a clinic where they gave her a chest X-ray. The doctor said she probably had Covid-19, but not bad enough to be hospitalised. He sent her home and told her to isolate.
Late on Thursday night Jordain's friend called. She was in distress.
"I could hear the EMT (ambulance crew) in the background. She was coughing and wheezing so much I couldn't make out what she was saying. It took them two hours to find a hospital that would accept her. The whole time her breathing was getting worse and worse."
The hospital did another chest X-ray and told her friend to get tested for Covid-19 at her local health centre. But the doctor wouldn't write a recommendation. Instead she was sent home in a taxi. "They said she should roll down the windows in the cab, and that it would be ok," Jordain says, rolling her eyes.
On Friday 17 April Jordain called the local health centre. For two hours she was passed from one desk to another. She answered scores of questions. Finally, she got her friend an appointment. But it came with a warning.
"She must use the side entrance." Jordain was told. "She must not tell anyone where this testing is taking place. It could cause a commotion."
No denying the testing regime was shitty but this doesn't in anyway contradict what I said. If there were loads of undiagnosed cases some of these people would be getting sick and showing up in hospitals.
PS She didn't have covid19, the BBC seem to have neglected to mention that, end the license fee.
Germany's federal government and states on Thursday postponed a decision on fully reopening schools and kindergartens and resuming Bundesliga soccer matches, Focus Online news magazine reported, citing sources involved in the discussions.
Clearly worried about the R-figure.
Absolutely and why they switched back to stay at home unless you have to go out the other day.
If this had been the UK government, Piers Morgan would currently be screaming about incomponence indecisive U-turns....
The reality is I think we will see some stop start everywhere.
Problem is I can't see how they're going to get away from it. We saw how it was growing before. Any relaxation is going to get it going again to a lesser or greater degree.
That's where (or ought to be where) testing, track&trace, and isolation/quarantine comes in. S Korea made it work with no more than 20k tests a day. We (supposedly) now have five times that.
We also now have empty Nightingale hospitals, hotels etc. which gives the capacity to isolate.
If we had a halfway decent system to use that testing capacity it ought to be entirely possible.
The contact tracing app is the missing ingredient. Let's hope it works.
The NHS are building their own, with a centralised database, rather than use the new blue tooth tech that Apple and Google are rapidly building into their phone operating systems.
Need I say more.
Goes back to what I was saying a couple of nights ago, we have an unbelievable tech industry in this country and yet we are limited to the resources available in the public sector. It's not going to cut it, public sector tech workers are usually not at the cutting edge and much older than private sector ones. Their assumptions and understanding is usually well behind what it actually possible.
And when it comes to building on low level interaction with the OS, who is going to know more about this, the people who actually write the OS or some public sector tech workers?
What makes you think the coding is being done by public sector tech workers and not private sector workers who've been brought or contracted to?
Even if they are private sector contracted in, it isn't the people who write the OS. There is a huge difference between knowing how to make a general purpose app for IoS / Android and the requirements for this one.
With respect this is just nonsense. At the time the best advice was that control of the virus by trace and isolate was doomed to fail. The object therefore was to flatten the curve, an object that has been achieved. Now, with the experience of SK, it is thought that it might be possible to control the virus this way long term. Whether that in fact proves to be the case remains to be seen but it is rewriting history to suggest that was an option that was suggested as being open to the government at the time.
Secondly, even if you allow that the government couldn't have come up with a better option than lockdown, they did it too late. Which has probably cost 10s of thousands of lives and made the hit to the economy worse when we eventually needed a longer lockdown
Fact: at the time of the abandonment of phase 1 we had very limited capacity to test, certainly not enough to do trace and isolate. This has only really changed this week.
Fact: the advice was that phase 1 was always going to fail, its objective was to buy enough time to increase NHS capacity.
Fact: the idea that the date of the lockdown saved any lives is entirely based on the premise that control of the virus would have been possible in the absence of these elements. It was not.
Fact: the lockdown is devastating economically. It needs to be curtailed as soon as we have a viable way out and it did not need to be started until absolutely necessary.
Fact: we are only now tiptoeing our way to an alternative strategy. We still need to vastly improve our tracing capacity first, otherwise this is the first lockdown of many.
Fact: testing is a core part of the test, track, trace, isolate strategy. It's the first part of the funnel. Scotland has fucked it and it's going to delay coming out of lockdown.
With respect this is just nonsense. At the time the best advice was that control of the virus by trace and isolate was doomed to fail. The object therefore was to flatten the curve, an object that has been achieved. Now, with the experience of SK, it is thought that it might be possible to control the virus this way long term. Whether that in fact proves to be the case remains to be seen but it is rewriting history to suggest that was an option that was suggested as being open to the government at the time.
Secondly, even if you allow that the government couldn't have come up with a better option than lockdown, they did it too late. Which has probably cost 10s of thousands of lives and made the hit to the economy worse when we eventually needed a longer lockdown
Fact: at the time of the abandonment of phase 1 we had very limited capacity to test, certainly not enough to do trace and isolate. This has only really changed this week.
Fact: the advice was that phase 1 was always going to fail, its objective was to buy enough time to increase NHS capacity.
Fact: the idea that the date of the lockdown saved any lives is entirely based on the premise that control of the virus would have been possible in the absence of these elements. It was not.
Fact: the lockdown is devastating economically. It needs to be curtailed as soon as we have a viable way out and it did not need to be started until absolutely necessary.
Fact: we are only now tiptoeing our way to an alternative strategy. We still need to vastly improve our tracing capacity first, otherwise this is the first lockdown of many.
Is it better (economically, social, psychologically) to extend the current lockdown now or open things up only to have to close them again later?
I'm equally unsure how many of the current economic issues are actual issues - most of the companies that seem to have closed were almost at the point of closing anyway.
In the short term there should be no fiscal tightening. No tax rises. No spending cuts. The opposite if anything. Borrowing and QE must take the strain. The priority is to get the economy on its feet again. You do not do this by depressing demand. That is like trying to pick yourself up by your own shoelaces - somewhat ludicrous and doomed to failure.
Once we are up and rolling there will be a pressing need to repair the public finances. This means a hit to the living standards and personal wealth of the population. It will be tempting to seek to either (i) magic the pain away or (ii) push it into the future via continued borrowing and/or money creation but this should be resisted. (i) is intellectually incoherent and (ii) is immoral.
How then to fix the damage? Last time the weapon of choice was spending cuts and no doubt there is still some fat there. Trident springs to mind. Are there other white elephants? Must be. However there is little scope in the spending area. Osborne saw to that.
So TAXATION is the name of the game post corona. We have to pay more tax. This is how we balance the books. The bottom quartile should of course be exempted but the rest of us must step up to the plate. This includes people in the "middle" who may not consider themselves well off. However the focus should be on the income and wealth of the upper quartile. Particularly wealth. The value of UK residential property is about 6 trillion pounds. Quite a sum, isn't it?
On topic: Good questions, but I think they approach the problem from the wrong end. We shouldn't be looking at tax proposals individually - that has been the problem which has built up over decades, with tweak laid upon tweak producing far too much complexity and creating far too many anomalies.
Instead we should start from the principle that taxes should be designed to raise revenue whilst creating the minimum possible degree of economic distortion, and work back from that. If we get the structure right, taxes can raise more money with less squealing. We should have a long-term goal of:
- Removing all cliff-edge thresholds from the income system. The best way of doing this is the graduated rate system proposed by various think tanks, in which the tax rate on your total income, not on the marginal extra income rises smoothly for the whole of the income distribution, between lower and upper thresholds. So for example someone earning £20K might pay 1% (£200), someone earning £25K 1.5% (£375), and so on up to (say) £150K where the tax rate on the total income might be 50%. (Illustrative figures only to show the principle). The point here is that at no point in the distribution is there any perverse incentive to avoid a marginal tax hike by diverting, delaying or foregoing income, as we get with the current ludicrous system.
.
You are making an assumption here that tax is all that incentivises people to forgo income.
for example My job my take home pay is Y, for a shelf stacker it is X The extra money I get paid (Y-X) incentivises me to keep in my job and not quit and become a shelf stacker.
However my job also involves unpaid overtime, stress, support rota's, longer commutes probably as most shelf stackers will live closer to work. If the value Y-X becomes small enough that I don't think the extra pay is worth all that extra angst I definitely go sod this I will go shelf stacking instead. Your progressive taxation lowers the value of Y-X as I will be paying a larger portion of tax than currently thus lowering the value of Y and possibly raising the value of X.
With respect this is just nonsense. At the time the best advice was that control of the virus by trace and isolate was doomed to fail. The object therefore was to flatten the curve, an object that has been achieved. Now, with the experience of SK, it is thought that it might be possible to control the virus this way long term. Whether that in fact proves to be the case remains to be seen but it is rewriting history to suggest that was an option that was suggested as being open to the government at the time.
Secondly, even if you allow that the government couldn't have come up with a better option than lockdown, they did it too late. Which has probably cost 10s of thousands of lives and made the hit to the economy worse when we eventually needed a longer lockdown
Fact: at the time of the abandonment of phase 1 we had very limited capacity to test, certainly not enough to do trace and isolate. This has only really changed this week.
Fact: the advice was that phase 1 was always going to fail, its objective was to buy enough time to increase NHS capacity.
Fact: the idea that the date of the lockdown saved any lives is entirely based on the premise that control of the virus would have been possible in the absence of these elements. It was not.
Fact: the lockdown is devastating economically. It needs to be curtailed as soon as we have a viable way out and it did not need to be started until absolutely necessary.
Fact: we are only now tiptoeing our way to an alternative strategy. We still need to vastly improve our tracing capacity first, otherwise this is the first lockdown of many.
Fact: testing is a core part of the test, track, trace, isolate strategy. It's the first part of the funnel. Scotland has fucked it and it's going to delay coming out of lockdown.
I absolutely agree that is not so much a core as the core of such a strategy. Scotland does need to buck its ideas up but they do have the advantage of starting from a lower base. Tayside has observed on several occasions that its higher than average infection rate was a result of more testing, not necessarily more infections. Other areas need to catch up fast. But we have seen in the last week how fast this picture can change.
A terrible idea that could happen is legalising, and taxing, marijuana
My opinion is that legalising it is better than keeping it illegal at least with regulation you can control the potency.
100%
isam makes the mistake of saying "marijuana is bad therefore it should be illegal" rather than explain why it being illegal and unregulated works when it so self-evidently doesn't. Prohibition has failed and moonshine alcohol was not safer or better than legal regulated alcohol.
I thought Boris was only operating on half power, but was fine.
Bloody hell, the laziest PM in history on half power! I am not sure whether that is cause for concern or rejoicing. I wonder if he will be sketching out his plans on half a fag packet?
- VAT exemptions should, as @Cyclefree suggests, be phased out. It makes zero sense for children's clothes to be regarded as 'essential' and VAT free, when adult clothes aren't. Removing exemptions would mean a lower rate to raise the same (or probably more) revenue, and with less distortion and less incentive to evade the tax.
It does make sense that children's clothes and adults clothes are different. Children grow up and need new clothes, while good and not-disposable adults clothes can last.
My children need new clothes every year - and every few months for babies. A 3 month old and a 2 year old can not wear the same clothes. But I own and wear many clothes I bought years ago. Heck my eldest (six years old) has been through about a dozen different age groups of clothes from "tiny baby" to "six" while I am still wearing some clothes I bought before she was born.
I've still got clothes I bought before my boss was born!
With respect this is just nonsense. At the time the best advice was that control of the virus by trace and isolate was doomed to fail. The object therefore was to flatten the curve, an object that has been achieved. Now, with the experience of SK, it is thought that it might be possible to control the virus this way long term. Whether that in fact proves to be the case remains to be seen but it is rewriting history to suggest that was an option that was suggested as being open to the government at the time.
Secondly, even if you allow that the government couldn't have come up with a better option than lockdown, they did it too late. Which has probably cost 10s of thousands of lives and made the hit to the economy worse when we eventually needed a longer lockdown
Fact: at the time of the abandonment of phase 1 we had very limited capacity to test, certainly not enough to do trace and isolate. This has only really changed this week.
Fact: the advice was that phase 1 was always going to fail, its objective was to buy enough time to increase NHS capacity.
Fact: the idea that the date of the lockdown saved any lives is entirely based on the premise that control of the virus would have been possible in the absence of these elements. It was not.
Fact: the lockdown is devastating economically. It needs to be curtailed as soon as we have a viable way out and it did not need to be started until absolutely necessary.
Fact: we are only now tiptoeing our way to an alternative strategy. We still need to vastly improve our tracing capacity first, otherwise this is the first lockdown of many.
Is it better (economically, social, psychologically) to extend the current lockdown now or open things up only to have to close them again later?
I'm equally unsure how many of the current economic issues are actual issues - most of the companies that seem to have closed were almost at the point of closing anyway.
On your first question I honestly have no idea. The advice the government is getting is that going back into lockdown would be demoralising. Not sure.
The scale of the economic issues is frankly hard to imagine. I saw a respectable estimate yesterday that 1/3 of all companies in the UK were now imperilled. The government are right to proceed with their grants and loans but the write offs with the latter are going to be spectacular. The risk is systemic collapse where bad debt brings down otherwise viable companies. It is a very real risk.
A terrible idea that could happen is legalising, and taxing, marijuana
It's everywhere already, go for a walk and you'll find people smoking it. It smells much stronger than 20 years ago as well.
It seems that 90% of 15-25 year old males are smoking it, I dread to think about all the mental health problems resulting in a decade or so.
Its almost as if prohibition is ignored and puts the product in the hands of criminal gangsters whose concern isn't safety regulations but rather profiteering with violence.
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has said it will take up to six months to refund passengers for flights cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Virgin is 100 days.
The EU are in the process of waving the 14 day refund law thereby using the ordinary holidaymaker as the sacrificial lamb for these companies
It is an utter disgrace and abuse of power by the EU
I hope consumer groups challenge this dreadful decision
I am fortunate that BA have refunded my £2,000 flight charge for our May trip but even that was extremely difficult to obtain through BA own evasion
And of course O'Leary wants to take six months as he is looking for the EU to shaft the ordinary holidaymakers
It is shameful
Interesting that you had issues with BA BigG. Looks like at some point soon I`m going to have to tackle BA over £2,500 flights which look unlikely to happen in July. Any tips? Did you get the refund via BA or via your credit card company?
Any advice much appreciated.
My latest email as a member of Which included this link: evidently Mr G is not the only one having problems.
- VAT exemptions should, as @Cyclefree suggests, be phased out. It makes zero sense for children's clothes to be regarded as 'essential' and VAT free, when adult clothes aren't. Removing exemptions would mean a lower rate to raise the same (or probably more) revenue, and with less distortion and less incentive to evade the tax.
It does make sense that children's clothes and adults clothes are different. Children grow up and need new clothes, while good and not-disposable adults clothes can last.
My children need new clothes every year - and every few months for babies. A 3 month old and a 2 year old can not wear the same clothes. But I own and wear many clothes I bought years ago. Heck my eldest (six years old) has been through about a dozen different age groups of clothes from "tiny baby" to "six" while I am still wearing some clothes I bought before she was born.
I've still got clothes I bought before my boss was born!
So all the mutterings by ministers this morning sounds like they have made the 100k give or take. So instantly the criticism switched to wrong people being tested.
I'm sort of hoping nationally we fall short and it highlights the ongoing disaster that is the testing situation in Scotland. I'm not making a political point here, they need to get it fixed because 1500 tests per day isn't going to cut it to move to the next stage of this crisis. Even if it means PHE stepping in and providing extra testing capacity we should actually force the situation and ensure that Scotland can do 10k tests per day as they need to be able to.
For all the criticism the government has taken in the last 6 weeks over testing, they have by some method managed to increase capacity to run 100k tests per day in England. Where is that same criticism for the Scottish government who are still stuck doing less than 2k tests per day. Translated to England the Scottish testing rate would be 13-17k, how mental would the likes of Piers Morgan be going right now if we were still only doing that many tests in England? Why is no one picking this up? We need for all four nations to move forwards together on this.
The number of tests is a stupid media distraction that Hancock admittedly bears some responsibility for creating. To be productive the testing needs to be relevant. In Scotland there are fewer cases than the UK average but there seems to be a bigger problem with care homes who form a much larger percentage of overall deaths than in the UK. Testing should therefore be being used to protect that sector from further exposure, not testing random members of the public in some sort of a fetish. Whether this is in fact happening on an adequate scale is the real question.
The testing isn't random members of the public though, it's public facing workers and the people they live with that are eligible, and needing symptoms is a prerequisite. It means NHS workers, carehome workers, the check out assistant in Sainsbury's are all able to get tests and their families too. It's the right strategy, yesterday we had 6k people test positive. I'm hoping that all 6k are going to be isolated from the general public which means they will no longer be able to infect people. But you can only isolate people if you know they have it. Scotland's strategy has been pitiful in this regard and as I said, it isn't political point scoring, I've been critical of Tory Westminster plenty, I don't care that it's the SNP in charge.
I'm having difficulty with the Scottish figures - surely ytou need to add to them a moeity of the "UK" testing figrues because some of the "UK" stations are in Scotland.
Also, the Scots included care home deaths in covid deaths a lot earlier than the English.
Chinese ventilators that ministers heralded as vital to the NHS’s efforts to tackle Covid-19 were badly built, unsuitable for use in hospitals and potentially dangerous for patients, it has emerged.
A well-placed NHS source said the incident highlighted problems that had occurred with a range of medical supplies and equipment ordered from China during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Some other stuff ordered from China recently, especially personal protective equipment, has also turned out to be either of a lesser quality than what we need or to be the wrong thing altogether, like T-shirts instead of long-sleeved surgical gowns” they said.
Comments
Remember the paper I posted the other day which showed that in China a single day's delay in locking down a city made its relative outcome worse than a comparable neighbouring one ?
Given the rate of exponential growth for this virus, a week's delay makes a massive difference.
https://twitter.com/AlexInAir/status/1256155462606688257?s=20
PS. The blip in Japan is hardly "falling apart". It's been controlled. Yes they went from 87 cases on 30th March to 743 on 11th April but are now back down to 193 cases. 17 deaths yesterday. Miniscule numbers compared witht he UK.
Quite. N Zealand, rightly lauded though it is, does not have to wrestle with issues the Dutch have in terms of timing, population density, cross border traffic flows, etc etc. And that’s before we find out more about how it behaves.
Your argument would be valid if this was ebola and the plan was to kill the disease by ensuring R0 hit 0 and the disease died out. That isn't the case which means the corona virus is here to stay so we need to deal with it while ensuring the NHS doesn't get overrun.
Somerset even had a railway known as the Strawberry Line in Victorian Times. Ask our resident trainspotter.
Japan wasn't ever successfully tracking everyone and I didn't see anyone claiming it was. It was doing some effective cluster tracing as the UK was early on but the big point at the time was that it was doing successful, voluntary, only moderately disruptive social distancing (cancelling events, WFH where practical etc), and doing it early before the infection numbers got out of control. It still is doing that, it hasn't fallen apart. There was a period when case numbers seemed to be falling and people got complacent and stopped doing what they'd been doing successfully and they went up again, but that just underlines that these measures work, rather than Japan's situation being some mysterious inscrutable cultural phenomenon to do with bowing or something as the western media started saying at one point.
1 The farms are usually miles from major population centres. Which means living away from home. As there aren't suitable hotels sat there waiting for seasonal labour that means things like caravans.
2 The work is back breaking because its fruit and vegetables which means lots of bending over
3 There is job security - the reason why so many of the people applying for the jobs were not progressed is that they refused to commit to the several months contract on offer
4 There aren't "locals actively looking for work". Anglia is flooded with both farms and food factories who process what comes off the farms. I have worked for companies offering good money for shift workers who can't get labour native or migrant because there is more work than people. Yes we have higher unemployment elsewhere, but again people don't live near where the work is.
Instead we should start from the principle that taxes should be designed to raise revenue whilst creating the minimum possible degree of economic distortion, and work back from that. If we get the structure right, taxes can raise more money with less squealing. We should have a long-term goal of:
- Removing all cliff-edge thresholds from the income system. The best way of doing this is the graduated rate system proposed by various think tanks, in which the tax rate on your total income, not on the marginal extra income rises smoothly for the whole of the income distribution, between lower and upper thresholds. So for example someone earning £20K might pay 1% (£200), someone earning £25K 1.5% (£375), and so on up to (say) £150K where the tax rate on the total income might be 50%. (Illustrative figures only to show the principle). The point here is that at no point in the distribution is there any perverse incentive to avoid a marginal tax hike by diverting, delaying or foregoing income, as we get with the current ludicrous system.
- Obviously TAX and NI should be merged eventually. The current distinction is barmy.
- VAT exemptions should, as @Cyclefree suggests, be phased out. It makes zero sense for children's clothes to be regarded as 'essential' and VAT free, when adult clothes aren't. Removing exemptions would mean a lower rate to raise the same (or probably more) revenue, and with less distortion and less incentive to evade the tax.
- IHT is largely irrelevant because it raises so little money.
- We don't need a Wealth Tax, just sensible tax bands (or a sliding scale) on Council Tax, based on up-to-date valuations. The old Rates system, in other words (Maggie's big mistake..)
None of this can of course be achieved in one go - there would far too many losers, and losers squeal more than winners cheer, even if they are the same people. But they should be set as long term goals, and then the tax system adjusted each year to take us gradually close to sanity in the overall tax system.
(Won't happen, of course!)
Given the NHS wasn't overwhelmed we didn't act too late. We're still within a bad flu season range of deaths (but a very bad one) not hundreds of thousands and the collapse of the NHS range.
Cheltenham cancelled? People book up accommodation months in advance. They would have gone and gone to the pubs. So close off Cheltenham - turn back the trains, close the stations. Not sure that would be a good look for the government.
People spout off all kinds of "solutions" but fail to understand the tawdry reality both of what is practical and of human nature.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-52466834
It's actually very inconvenient for the government that they're looking bad at the moment. It's very convenient for other countries whose data gathering is significantly worse that they'll only take the rap for their actions after the event. It's just simply not credible that all the basket cases in Southern Europe have suddenly managed to get their act together on statistical reporting, just at the moment it was least in their interests to do so.
And even then a vaccine won't kill the virus off - just look at polio. In fact the only disease we've ever killed off is smallpox and that took 200 years.
When we have those items we can start to relax things a bit but it just shows how stupid your statements actually are.
My children need new clothes every year - and every few months for babies. A 3 month old and a 2 year old can not wear the same clothes. But I own and wear many clothes I bought years ago. Heck my eldest (six years old) has been through about a dozen different age groups of clothes from "tiny baby" to "six" while I am still wearing some clothes I bought before she was born.
Singapore is another early "success" that is now struggling.
The reality is this thing is an absolute bastard. The number of countries, excluding the tiny nations at the end of the earth disconnected from the main thrust of world commerce and having bugger all population density, who appear to be winning is now down to South Korea and Australia.
And since we've reached beyond the limits of rational debate, I'm signing off.
Japan doesn't have a UK-level covid19 epidemic. It just doesn't.
Not v practical imo.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/joe-biden-sexual-assault-us-elections-2020
It provides a plausible explanation for low Democrat turnout if Trump and his allies find other ways to suppress it.
In many ways, this crisis will give politicians the cover to make changes that perhaps they have wanted to previously but have been too difficult. One as Sunak has telegraphed is likely to be the tax treatment of the self-employed. Another may well be pensioner benefits (look at May's attempt to downgrade the triple lock).
This may also apply to the corporate world. BA has a number of older employees on much more generous Ts & Cs than newer employees and it wouldn't surprise me if the former group bear the brunt of the redundancies.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20079673v1
Background Many countries with weaker health systems are struggling to put together a coherent strategy against the COVID-19 epidemic. We explored COVID-19 control strategies that could offer the greatest benefit in resource limited settings. Methods Using an age-structured SEIR model, we explored the effects of COVID-19 control interventions--a lockdown, physical distancing measures, and active case finding (testing and isolation, contact tracing and quarantine)-- implemented individually and in combination to control a hypothetical COVID-19 epidemic in Kathmandu (population 2.6 million), Nepal. Results A month-long lockdown that is currently in place in Nepal will delay peak demand for hospital beds by 36 days, as compared to a base scenario of no interventions (peak demand at 108 days (IQR 97-119); a 2 month long lockdown will delay it by 74 days, without any difference in annual mortality, or healthcare demand volume. Year-long physical distancing measures will reduce peak demand to 36% (IQR 23%-46%) and annual morality to 67% (IQR 48%-77%) of base scenario. Following a month long lockdown with ongoing physical distancing measures and an active case finding intervention that detects 5% of the daily infection burden could reduce projected morality and peak demand by more than 99%. Interpretation Limited resources settings are best served by a combination of early and aggressive case finding with ongoing physical distancing measures to control the COVID-19 epidemic. A lockdown may be helpful until combination interventions can be put in place but is unlikely to reduce annual mortality or healthcare demand....
Most other sectors work conditions have been allowed to improve, but farming is kept in the dark ages with this sort of immigration. What you are describing is just wage suppression.
The cost of the lockdown runs to tens of billions a week. We must be locked down for as short a period as possible compatible with our primary objective of not allowing the NHS to be overwhelmed. In Scotland the lock down undoubtedly came at least 2 weeks, possibly 3 weeks too early. The extra capacity created in the NHS has not been used. Other people whose treatment was deferred will die as a result of that wasted capacity. The number of cases remains small and the costs of the lockdown wholly disproportionate. As I understand it the same could be said for the SW. When to lockdown was a difficult decision which had to be taken when a part of the country, London in this case, was reaching breaking point so far as the NHS was concerned.
I do not know how, though :-) .
The Welsh Government landing on its bum in a puddle is hardly a surprise - it's essentially been a one party microstate since 1999.
It might have been *politically unpopular* at that point, (not sure) but that's a different thing.
Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary has said it will take up to six months to refund passengers for flights cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Bakery chain Greggs has said its planned branch re-openings next week will now begin behind closed doors. The sausage roll supplier is fearful of "the risk that excessive numbers of customers" may turn up.
Some people are acting as if the only acceptable death number is zero or as close to zero as possible. The objective was to not overwhelm the NHS and flatten the curve - and the curve has been flattened and the NHS was never overwhelmed.
The lockdown came at the right point for London and was probably too early for the rest of the UK but it makes sense not to repeat the Italian mistake of locking down one region only then seeing people flee from there to the rest of the nation. So it made sense sadly to lock down too early in the rest of the UK otherwise we'd have been flooded with Londoners bringing the plague with them.
Once the lockdown was announced then yes, everything could be shut down, and locking a nation down comes at a huge cost and is not to be undertaken unless absolutely necessary which, evidently at that time they thought it was not.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/05/02/would-most-covid-19-victims-have-died-soon-without-the-virus
Strikingly, the study shows that in this hybrid European model, people killed by covid-19 had only slightly higher rates of underlying illness than everyone else their age.
Need I say more.
At this point Bernie Bros who refuse to vote Dem in November are nihilists.
https://twitter.com/aseitzwald/status/1255870024402812928?s=19
* otherwise known as normal Apple mode.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-51916707/who-head-our-key-message-is-test-test-test
Secondly, even if you allow that the government couldn't have come up with a better option than lockdown, they did it too late. Which has probably cost 10s of thousands of lives and made the hit to the economy worse when we eventually needed a longer lockdown
There may be a good argument but it needs to be made - and it needs to be something more cogent than “we’ve always done it this way”.
It is an utter disgrace and abuse of power by the EU
I hope consumer groups challenge this dreadful decision
I am fortunate that BA have refunded my £2,000 flight charge for our May trip but even that was extremely difficult to obtain through BA own evasion
And of course O'Leary wants to take six months as he is looking for the EU to shaft the ordinary holidaymakers
It is shameful
The media hysteria of whether it will be met tomorrow or today is irrelevant, it was the right thing to do to target a high testing capacity and once its there it can be used smartly - and over time implementation will get smarter. But you need the capacity in the first place no matter how productive your criteria is without the capacity you can't do it.
It seems clear they got the testing capacity might be up at 100k per day which is the most important thing and the tests after last night's numbers will presumably be there or there abouts. But without the testing target would capacity now be up at 100k per week?
Whether the target is met or not is not really that meaningful apart from to the media. The idea that 99,999 tests is a disaster but 100,001 tests is a huge success is patently absurd. But without Hancock putting pressure on himself, industry and most importantly the civil service would we be close to that now? I don't think we can know that, but the probability is in my view that Hancock's then seemingly absurdly ambitious target will in the long-run save lives. So well done Hancock!
Any advice much appreciated.
Jordain Haley is an American working in Japan as a business analyst and volunteer translator. Via Skype she told me what happened when she helped a friend, who doesn't speak fluent Japanese, to get a test.
On 10 April, her friend had developed a fever and cough, but waited four days, as per the guidelines.
"By then she was having trouble breathing and was dizzy from lack of oxygen," Jordain tells me. "I called the Covid hotline. They refused to help. They said if she's sick she should call an ambulance."
The following day (Wednesday 15 April) her friend found a clinic where they gave her a chest X-ray. The doctor said she probably had Covid-19, but not bad enough to be hospitalised. He sent her home and told her to isolate.
Late on Thursday night Jordain's friend called. She was in distress.
"I could hear the EMT (ambulance crew) in the background. She was coughing and wheezing so much I couldn't make out what she was saying. It took them two hours to find a hospital that would accept her. The whole time her breathing was getting worse and worse."
The hospital did another chest X-ray and told her friend to get tested for Covid-19 at her local health centre. But the doctor wouldn't write a recommendation. Instead she was sent home in a taxi.
"They said she should roll down the windows in the cab, and that it would be ok," Jordain says, rolling her eyes.
On Friday 17 April Jordain called the local health centre. For two hours she was passed from one desk to another. She answered scores of questions. Finally, she got her friend an appointment. But it came with a warning.
"She must use the side entrance." Jordain was told. "She must not tell anyone where this testing is taking place. It could cause a commotion."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-52466834
Don't drink and drive is advice whereas you can drink and drive legally.
Is it sensible to do so? Well of course not but the government has assessed that people able to drink and drive is an acceptable risk for the nation to take.
I very much hope it decides to take the same approach to Covid-19 in terms of what an acceptable risk is and doesn't try to get the number of deaths down to zero (as it doesn't for drink/driving and smoking for example).
We know Demis from Deepminds got invited to a SAGE meeting, but did they ask him to do any work? Deepminds has hired over 600 people in the past 2 years, the vast majority with PhDs in ML. They also recently hired a high respected ML guy called Neil Lawrence, whose speciality is dealing with the sort of datasets coming out of this pandemic. Deepminds are also in a very privileged position where they are under certain conditions allowed to leverage huge amounts of Google's overall compute power.
Then we have Amazon, they bought basically the whole ML research group from Sheffield University a few years ago.
And that's before we consider Google, Facebook, yadda yadda yadda.
Fact: the advice was that phase 1 was always going to fail, its objective was to buy enough time to increase NHS capacity.
Fact: the idea that the date of the lockdown saved any lives is entirely based on the premise that control of the virus would have been possible in the absence of these elements. It was not.
Fact: the lockdown is devastating economically. It needs to be curtailed as soon as we have a viable way out and it did not need to be started until absolutely necessary.
Fact: we are only now tiptoeing our way to an alternative strategy. We still need to vastly improve our tracing capacity first, otherwise this is the first lockdown of many.
PS She didn't have covid19, the BBC seem to have neglected to mention that, end the license fee.
I'm equally unsure how many of the current economic issues are actual issues - most of the companies that seem to have closed were almost at the point of closing anyway.
In the short term there should be no fiscal tightening. No tax rises. No spending cuts. The opposite if anything. Borrowing and QE must take the strain. The priority is to get the economy on its feet again. You do not do this by depressing demand. That is like trying to pick yourself up by your own shoelaces - somewhat ludicrous and doomed to failure.
Once we are up and rolling there will be a pressing need to repair the public finances. This means a hit to the living standards and personal wealth of the population. It will be tempting to seek to either (i) magic the pain away or (ii) push it into the future via continued borrowing and/or money creation but this should be resisted. (i) is intellectually incoherent and (ii) is immoral.
How then to fix the damage? Last time the weapon of choice was spending cuts and no doubt there is still some fat there. Trident springs to mind. Are there other white elephants? Must be. However there is little scope in the spending area. Osborne saw to that.
So TAXATION is the name of the game post corona. We have to pay more tax. This is how we balance the books. The bottom quartile should of course be exempted but the rest of us must step up to the plate. This includes people in the "middle" who may not consider themselves well off. However the focus should be on the income and wealth of the upper quartile. Particularly wealth. The value of UK residential property is about 6 trillion pounds. Quite a sum, isn't it?
for example
My job my take home pay is Y, for a shelf stacker it is X
The extra money I get paid (Y-X) incentivises me to keep in my job and not quit and become a shelf stacker.
However my job also involves unpaid overtime, stress, support rota's, longer commutes probably as most shelf stackers will live closer to work. If the value Y-X becomes small enough that I don't think the extra pay is worth all that extra angst I definitely go sod this I will go shelf stacking instead. Your progressive taxation lowers the value of Y-X as I will be paying a larger portion of tax than currently thus lowering the value of Y and possibly raising the value of X.
isam makes the mistake of saying "marijuana is bad therefore it should be illegal" rather than explain why it being illegal and unregulated works when it so self-evidently doesn't. Prohibition has failed and moonshine alcohol was not safer or better than legal regulated alcohol.
It seems that 90% of 15-25 year old males are smoking it, I dread to think about all the mental health problems resulting in a decade or so.
The scale of the economic issues is frankly hard to imagine. I saw a respectable estimate yesterday that 1/3 of all companies in the UK were now imperilled. The government are right to proceed with their grants and loans but the write offs with the latter are going to be spectacular. The risk is systemic collapse where bad debt brings down otherwise viable companies. It is a very real risk.
https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/04/coronavirus-holiday-and-event-cancellations-are-banks-unfairly-dismissing-refund-requests/?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=ExactTarget&utm_campaign=3980084-C_WS_EM_010520
Also, the Scots included care home deaths in covid deaths a lot earlier than the English.
But I'm still in favour of increasing testing.
You get mild stuff, through to damn hard stuff.
If it was legalised would it 'all' be legalised. I doubt it. So the hard skunk stuff would be there still.
It'll be like 'legalising' alcohol, but the only thing you can buy is Mild Ale.
Or is it different in other countries?
Chinese ventilators that ministers heralded as vital to the NHS’s efforts to tackle Covid-19 were badly built, unsuitable for use in hospitals and potentially dangerous for patients, it has emerged.
A well-placed NHS source said the incident highlighted problems that had occurred with a range of medical supplies and equipment ordered from China during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Some other stuff ordered from China recently, especially personal protective equipment, has also turned out to be either of a lesser quality than what we need or to be the wrong thing altogether, like T-shirts instead of long-sleeved surgical gowns” they said.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/30/entire-order-of-250-chinese-ventilators-were-useless-despite
Just taking the piss. Flog the west any old shit, because they will be too busy to worry about any come back.