BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
I find complaining about the level of care in care homes crass in the extreme. The ultimate in first world entitled whining.
Use them, or don't.
Your comprehension skills seem to need improving - I don't remember anyone commenting care levels within care homes.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
Thank you BGW. It is obviously a common experience now, but until you go through it I don't think you can appreciate it. I had absolutely no idea. I just thought it would be the case of looking after someone infirm.
Another area I found distressing is the anger experienced by the person in the early stages as they try and reconcile what they see and experience with the irrationality of it. My Mum was a very docile person. She became angry and even violent with her experiences. Fortunately she was too small to do any harm but she would hit my father.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Around the handwashing advice is when I saw people starting to work from home as well. I took my daughter to school by car and parked on a residential street near the school. Normally I had not problem parking but I started having trouble finding a space and as I came back in the following days I realised none fo the parked cars were moving. Residents were staying at home and not traveling to work.
Just for context, I went to two football matches in the week before the 7th March, and we were joking about how the handwashing advice really wasn't being followed.
We were going to make cuts - don't forget that the Labour manifesto in 2010 would have spent slightly less than the coalition did.
As I have been pointing out the problem wasn't cutting spending but what was cut and how.
When the Tory PM writes to his Tory council leader saying look here, why are you cutting front line services when we have made all this money available to you, the council leader details no you haven't, and number 10 responds yes we have that's the austerity problem in a single example.
It's not enough to say "we spent more on the NHS". What did you spend it on in the NHS? More money spent but savage cuts to provision shows money being syphoned off to more traditional Tory causes like consultants and lawyers and pointless layers of management.
The fact was that the Government didn't notice they had both increased the demands on the council and yet decreased the money available. As a simplified example to show the actual issue:-
Previously: Government Adult Social care £10m Council expenditure £10m Total available £20m
After reforms: Council Expenditure £15m Total available: £15m
Osbourne and Cameron's Government sat there and said we've given you £5m more a year but ignored the fact they are increased Council required Expenditure by £10m.
Are Councils required to pay themselves more than the Prime Minister gets paid?
Ever heard of market powers? Once one council starts paying over the odds to poach a leader from another council it becomes inevitable...
Guess what happened in the market for competent Council leaders.
If you consider that very few people switch from the public to the private sector, the Government should set national pay bands for councils and force top salaries down.
I thought Conservatives believed in free market capitalism? I’m confused.
Absolutely. We believe in capitalism.
There is no free market there. People taking taxes by force of the law and giving it in largesse to themselves while whining they haven't got enough money and cutting services is not free market capitalism.
If it was a free market company that was slashing its services while paying over the odds to its Chief Executives a competitor that was leaner would arise and people would take their consumption and expenditure to that one. That can't happen with taxes though. Appeals to some 'market' are absurd.
A good Council leader would be one who lives within the budget they have, getting their best results possible and being paid accordingly. Not slashing services and being paid well over the odds.
You assume there is an infinite supply of people able to put up with crap from Councillors and willing to lead councils. My view is that there is a finite supply of such people, and an even smaller supply of competent and the demand for such competent people is far greater than the actual supply.
And what evidence do you have for that proposition?
My view is that it is a pampered, unaffordable luxury to be paying county staff more than the Prime Minister of the country - and if you can afford to do that then there hasn't been enough austerity yet.
I would suggest thinking about what the job entails and then deciding that. A lot of the highest paid chief executives are actually running 2 or more councils.
Oh and remember the only reason why the PM's pay is what it is, is because Gordon Brown pulled a fast one in the days before the 2010 election and hadn't taken the full amount before then.
Yeah I personally think the Prime Minister is criminally underpaid. Should be at least hitting 500k. It is arguably the most important job in the country.
I would certainly raise the PM's pay to at least £162 000 which would put them in the top 1% of earners but at the same time the PM is still in a public service, public sector role not a private sector role creating wealth so I wouldn't go as far as paying them £500k which is even more than the US President gets paid
PM is a Top Job - none topper - and IMO the occupant should receive a hefty financial reward for doing it. Not sure about this current one though. Anything north of £75k looks excessive for Boris Johnson. He seems to be forever either electioneering, on holiday, off sick, or otherwise incommunicado and trying to sort out his private life. True or not, this is the perception of many shrewd observers. Perhaps it's harsh, I sense it might be, but perception really matters in politics - especially the perception of shrewd observers.
The lazy slob will get gazillions for his book when he is booted out.
Book and a blockbuster film, I'd have thought. No doubt called simply "Boris" and with some ridiculously flattering and unsuitable choice such as Idris Elba playing the eponymous. One doesn't look forward to it.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
I find complaining about the level of care in care homes crass in the extreme. The ultimate in first world entitled whining.
Use them, or don't.
Who the hell is complaining about the level of care in care homes. I haven't.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Around the handwashing advice is when I saw people starting to work from home as well. I took my daughter to school by car and parked on a residential street near the school. Normally I had not problem parking but I started having trouble finding a space and as I came back in the following days I realised none fo the parked cars were moving. Residents were staying at home and not traveling to work.
That was when I stopped using the gym, amongst other things. At my workplace, we set up the plans to wfh that week, those with any medical issues started wfh then; the rest of us had our last day in the office on the 17th.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
I find complaining about the level of care in care homes crass in the extreme. The ultimate in first world entitled whining.
Use them, or don't.
You have no idea, are insensitive and sadly lacking compassion
Brady is right, but some companies have driven this. The government advice was to carry on working (from home where possible). The government is aware of the perplexing problem that it has in getting the economy going again.
What companies? Some sectors where closed down and that has had a cascading impact on the rest of the economy. I'm really not aware of a single company not impacted in some way.
Sunik's fear will be the fact that companies are discovering they can manage just fine without their furloughed staff. Some firms seem to have noticed that as Personal Today had an article last week pointing out that you can use Furlough money to pay redundancy payments.
Sunak's fear is that many thousands of smaller businesses simply won;t re-open.
The tax base is being destroyed at the same time as debt is soaring.
This is inevitable. Despite the grants and guaranteed loans hundreds of thousands of small businesses have continued to rack up overhead with minimal income. They will have become balance sheet insolvent. The government has relaxed wrongful trading laws to allow them a chance to trade themselves out of it but if they have a restaurant, a café or a pub I really don't see how they do unless they can take the capital loss. They are not going to make up the loss, indeed trading profitably is going to be an enormous challenge. Someone who has given a personal guarantee to their bank should think very carefully about whether further trading is in their interests.
Most of those businesses would face disaster with or without the lockdown, though. Some will have a chance, if the lockdown and subsequent control measures can keep the virus sufficiently in check.
As in Korea's most affected city, Daegu: http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13349607 ...In late April, a large banner still hung at a major hospital nearby that stated: “We are a base hospital for treating the novel coronavirus. We are doing everything in our power to ensure the safety of people in the community.”
But it was an entirely different picture inside the market.
Dozens of cars were trying to enter the market’s parking lot.
Inside, shoppers wearing face masks were so densely packed that they were unable to pass each other without touching shoulders.
Seemingly without a care in the world, smiling shoppers chowed down on noodle soup dishes and munched snacks in close physical proximity as if the pandemic had never happened....
Daegu also illustrates the utility of regional lockdowns. Which is something the government ought to be considering for the post lockdown period.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
Well, the stated reason why there was a further escalation from that Friday (#4) to the Monday night (#5) was all the people going outside for that sunny weekend.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
I don't think this plot is correct. The advice was the R was still above 2 the day the lockdown was announced.
11:08am Sage warned London ICU could have breached in 7 days The lockdown decision was taken by the Prime Minister after Sage was presented with modelling evidence suggesting intensive care units across the country would be swamped.
At the March 23 meeting of Sage, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, experts considered a summary of the coronavirus modelling which warned "it is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today".
"The rest of the UK is one-two weeks behind London. In the absence of additional measures being put into place in the next few days, it is likely that we will breach ICU capacity in other regions."
The modelling suggested the rapid increase in intensive care admissions suggested the reproduction number - the R rate - was higher than the 2.4 previously estimated and could have been more than three.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
I find complaining about the level of care in care homes crass in the extreme. The ultimate in first world entitled whining.
Use them, or don't.
Little bit of advice; stop digging. You won't get out of this hole.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
Your graph seems to show that the R number was falling before any advice was given
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Not bad. But then what?
If MI6 started actively tracking me, they'd be bitterly disappointed. And I [presumably wouldn't even know they were there.
I guess I might notice that passport control starting taking longer?
You could find your bank accounts frozen with no right of appeal as to why. Some bank did this to an Iranian family with a small business recently.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
I think that without the lockdown, elements 3 and 4 would not really have stuck. To be honest, 4 is probably the most important one as it contains the furlough rules and the closure of schools (for most pupils). Without the lockdown, more people would be working (I guess) and more children would need to go to school.
And an Rt over 1 means that we never reach a peak; it keeps on climbing.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
Thank you BGW. It is obviously a common experience now, but until you go through it I don't think you can appreciate it. I had absolutely no idea. I just thought it would be the case of looking after someone infirm.
Another area I found distressing is the anger experienced by the person in the early stages as they try and reconcile what they see and experience with the irrationality of it. My Mum was a very docile person. She became angry and even violent with her experiences. Fortunately she was too small to do any harm but she would hit my father.
Can we, maybe, have a 'sympathise' button. 'Like' isn't the right word.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Yes. Had an email from Google about my monthly travel/location history that managed to place me in Tokyo for 15 minutes during a month when I hadn't left Britannia.
The time before, and immediately after had me correctly located, near enough, so one of the major problems is being able to prove that the data is shit when some official is treating it as gospel and making decisions on the basis of it.
Yes, on the one hand the data these providers hold is terrifying, on the other the Google thinks I work at an Italian restaurant, and if you buy one toilet, the whole internet concludes that you're really, really into buying toilets.
Just think, in an alternate timeline the UK voted to remain and we'd be having an election this Thursday.
Or if the "Remain Alliance" had put Corbyn in as minority PM last summer with a mandate to hold Ref2, around about now could well have been the target date for it.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
I think that without the lockdown, elements 3 and 4 would not really have stuck. To be honest, 4 is probably the most important one as it contains the furlough rules and the closure of schools (for most pupils). Without the lockdown, more people would be working (I guess) and more children would need to go to school.
And an Rt over 1 means that we never reach a peak; it keeps on climbing.
You do reach a peak with Rt over 1. But it's not really the peak you want to reach with this virus.
Just think, in an alternate timeline the UK voted to remain and we'd be having an election this Thursday.
Or if the "Remain Alliance" had put Corbyn in as minority PM last summer with a mandate to hold Ref2, around about now could well have been the target date for it.
A Low-Cost and High-Efficiency Integrated Device toward Solar-Driven Water Splitting https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.9b09053# Achieving the spontaneous evolution of fuel from integrated devices by solar-driven water splitting is an attractive method for renewable energy conversion. However, their widespread implementation is hindered by their immature architectures and inferior performances. Here, we propose a real integrated device consisting of two series-connected perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and two CoP catalyst electrodes, which can be immersed into the aqueous solution directly for solar-driven water splitting. Benefiting from the low-cost and facile encapsulation technique, this integrated device possesses a compact structure and well-connected circuits for the process of charge carriers generation, transfer, and storage. Moreover, although all expensive components in this integrated device are eliminated, the two series-connected carbon-based PSCs still exhibit a high solar-to-electric efficiency of 10.6% as well as the integrated devices display a solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of as high as 6.7%. This integrated device serves as a model architecture toward future development and optimization of the integrated device that can be immersed into the aqueous solution directly for water splitting...
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Not bad. But then what?
If MI6 started actively tracking me, they'd be bitterly disappointed. And I [presumably wouldn't even know they were there.
I guess I might notice that passport control starting taking longer?
When you popped into B&Q for a bag of fertiliser, a bag of nails and a shitload of gaffer tape you might notice them.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
I find complaining about the level of care in care homes crass in the extreme. The ultimate in first world entitled whining.
Use them, or don't.
Little bit of advice; stop digging. You won't get out of this hole.
I saw the post last night and just had to assume he's never seen someone with dementia, at least not for any length of time. It could only be from a point of ignorance that you'd come away with an opinion like that.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
I don't think this plot is correct. The advice was the R was still above 2 the day the lockdown was announced.
11:08am Sage warned London ICU could have breached in 7 days The lockdown decision was taken by the Prime Minister after Sage was presented with modelling evidence suggesting intensive care units across the country would be swamped.
At the March 23 meeting of Sage, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, experts considered a summary of the coronavirus modelling which warned "it is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today".
"The rest of the UK is one-two weeks behind London. In the absence of additional measures being put into place in the next few days, it is likely that we will breach ICU capacity in other regions."
The modelling suggested the rapid increase in intensive care admissions suggested the reproduction number - the R rate - was higher than the 2.4 previously estimated and could have been more than three.
There's pretty good evidence to suggest that a UK lockdown one week later could have led to the same situation as in northern Italy or New York, with heath services totally overwhelmed.
Instead, we have people complaining about the big white elephant Nightingale in the Docklands.
The call was made at pretty much exactly the right time, on the available evidence.
Getting out is going to be much more difficult, and the decisions much more nuanced and political in nature with several possible approaches available. .
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
Thank you BGW. It is obviously a common experience now, but until you go through it I don't think you can appreciate it. I had absolutely no idea. I just thought it would be the case of looking after someone infirm.
Another area I found distressing is the anger experienced by the person in the early stages as they try and reconcile what they see and experience with the irrationality of it. My Mum was a very docile person. She became angry and even violent with her experiences. Fortunately she was too small to do any harm but she would hit my father.
Can we, maybe, have a 'sympathise' button. 'Like' isn't the right word.
That is very sweet OKC, but not necessary. In the past now and no different to what very many have experienced.
I only raised it because I was incensed by what I read the other day. Wish I hadn't now as it is not about me.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The thing is that the long lockdowners cannot be wrong, whatever the evidence against them.
If they are wrong, then that is tantamount to admitting they have, in effect, been amongst the biggest and most gullible dupes in history. They would be right up there with those who maintained that Stalin did not know about the purges and the gulags, and if he did would have stopped them immediately.
We were going to make cuts - don't forget that the Labour manifesto in 2010 would have spent slightly less than the coalition did.
As I have been pointing out the problem wasn't cutting spending but what was cut and how.
When the Tory PM writes to his Tory council leader saying look here, why are you cutting front line services when we have made all this money available to you, the council leader details no you haven't, and number 10 responds yes we have that's the austerity problem in a single example.
It's not enough to say "we spent more on the NHS". What did you spend it on in the NHS? More money spent but savage cuts to provision shows money being syphoned off to more traditional Tory causes like consultants and lawyers and pointless layers of management.
The fact was that the Government didn't notice they had both increased the demands on the council and yet decreased the money available. As a simplified example to show the actual issue:-
Previously: Government Adult Social care £10m Council expenditure £10m Total available £20m
After reforms: Council Expenditure £15m Total available: £15m
Osbourne and Cameron's Government sat there and said we've given you £5m more a year but ignored the fact they are increased Council required Expenditure by £10m.
Are Councils required to pay themselves more than the Prime Minister gets paid?
Ever heard of market powers? Once one council starts paying over the odds to poach a leader from another council it becomes inevitable...
Guess what happened in the market for competent Council leaders.
If you consider that very few people switch from the public to the private sector, the Government should set national pay bands for councils and force top salaries down.
I thought Conservatives believed in free market capitalism? I’m confused.
Absolutely. We believe in capitalism.
There is no free market there. People taking taxes by force of the law and giving it in largesse to themselves while whining they haven't got enough money and cutting services is not free market capitalism.
If it was a free market company that was slashing its services while paying over the odds to its Chief Executives a competitor that was leaner would arise and people would take their consumption and expenditure to that one. That can't happen with taxes though. Appeals to some 'market' are absurd.
A good Council leader would be one who lives within the budget they have, getting their best results possible and being paid accordingly. Not slashing services and being paid well over the odds.
You assume there is an infinite supply of people able to put up with crap from Councillors and willing to lead councils. My view is that there is a finite supply of such people, and an even smaller supply of competent and the demand for such competent people is far greater than the actual supply.
And what evidence do you have for that proposition?
My view is that it is a pampered, unaffordable luxury to be paying county staff more than the Prime Minister of the country - and if you can afford to do that then there hasn't been enough austerity yet.
I would suggest thinking about what the job entails and then deciding that. A lot of the highest paid chief executives are actually running 2 or more councils.
Oh and remember the only reason why the PM's pay is what it is, is because Gordon Brown pulled a fast one in the days before the 2010 election and hadn't taken the full amount before then.
Yeah I personally think the Prime Minister is criminally underpaid. Should be at least hitting 500k. It is arguably the most important job in the country.
I would certainly raise the PM's pay to at least £162 000 which would put them in the top 1% of earners but at the same time the PM is still in a public service, public sector role not a private sector role creating wealth so I wouldn't go as far as paying them £500k which is even more than the US President gets paid
PM is a Top Job - none topper - and IMO the occupant should receive a hefty financial reward for doing it. Not sure about this current one though. Anything north of £75k looks excessive for Boris Johnson. He seems to be forever either electioneering, on holiday, off sick, or otherwise incommunicado and trying to sort out his private life. True or not, this is the perception of many shrewd observers. Perhaps it's harsh, I sense it might be, but perception really matters in politics - especially the perception of shrewd observers.
The lazy slob will get gazillions for his book when he is booted out.
Book and a blockbuster film, I'd have thought. No doubt called simply "Boris" and with some ridiculously flattering and unsuitable choice such as Idris Elba playing the eponymous. One doesn't look forward to it.
No, Cumberbatch in a blond wig is a shoo-in. After Cummins and Assange, the third instalment of a trilogy. Working title, 'The Egoists'.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Yes. Had an email from Google about my monthly travel/location history that managed to place me in Tokyo for 15 minutes during a month when I hadn't left Britannia.
The time before, and immediately after had me correctly located, near enough, so one of the major problems is being able to prove that the data is shit when some official is treating it as gospel and making decisions on the basis of it.
Yes, on the one hand the data these providers hold is terrifying, on the other the Google thinks I work at an Italian restaurant, and if you buy one toilet, the whole internet concludes that you're really, really into buying toilets.
Why remarketing companies don't have a stop trying to sell me this item button is something I've never understood.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The thing is that the long lockdowners cannot be wrong, whatever the evidence against them.
If they are wrong, then that is tantamount to admitting they have, in effect, been amongst the biggest and most gullible dupes in history. They would be right up there with those who maintained that Stalin did not know about the purges and the gulags, and if he did would have stopped them immediately.
No one seemed interested in it? We've been discussing that plot for two days. The methodology behind it is questionable, and the official advice was the R was between 2 and 3 on the day the lockdown was announced. Anyone can make a plot on the internet these days, it doesn't make it right.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Around the handwashing advice is when I saw people starting to work from home as well. I took my daughter to school by car and parked on a residential street near the school. Normally I had not problem parking but I started having trouble finding a space and as I came back in the following days I realised none fo the parked cars were moving. Residents were staying at home and not traveling to work.
That was when I stopped using the gym, amongst other things. At my workplace, we set up the plans to wfh that week, those with any medical issues started wfh then; the rest of us had our last day in the office on the 17th.
Likewise where I work. A lot of people were WFH, last few teams were setting up etc.
People going to the gym had stopped earlier as well.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
Thank you BGW. It is obviously a common experience now, but until you go through it I don't think you can appreciate it. I had absolutely no idea. I just thought it would be the case of looking after someone infirm.
Another area I found distressing is the anger experienced by the person in the early stages as they try and reconcile what they see and experience with the irrationality of it. My Mum was a very docile person. She became angry and even violent with her experiences. Fortunately she was too small to do any harm but she would hit my father.
Your last paragraph mirrors our experinces in the 1990's. I did express gratitude to those calling about their care for my father in law and they responded by saying they were really monitoring our family, as the experience is like no other and they would intervene if necessary
Fortunately my wife and I managed to keep it self contained but the last few weeks were unbearable, especially when he was the most caring, kind and generous person you could ever want to meet
He did die in our home with us all round his bed and it was peaceful and a release
I cannot express my dismay why any poster on here would not respond to your original post with empathy but ignorance and intolerance is everywhere sadly
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Not bad. But then what?
If MI6 started actively tracking me, they'd be bitterly disappointed. And I [presumably wouldn't even know they were there.
I guess I might notice that passport control starting taking longer?
You could find your bank accounts frozen with no right of appeal as to why. Some bank did this to an Iranian family with a small business recently.
Wait, the bank did that, or the government asked the bank to do that?
In the latter case I guess I should probably concede defeat. In the former, it's just another argument that we should be more careful allowing businesses access to our data - not just the government.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Issue here though is that if you use the cruder but more comprehensive ONS reported death figures, the fall would occur about two weeks later and the effect of the interventions would look very different.
Moth du Jour: Privet Hawkmoth. These are big beasts! Not uncommon - fair chance of attracting these to a suburban moth trap on a warm June/July evening.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
Thank you BGW. It is obviously a common experience now, but until you go through it I don't think you can appreciate it. I had absolutely no idea. I just thought it would be the case of looking after someone infirm.
Another area I found distressing is the anger experienced by the person in the early stages as they try and reconcile what they see and experience with the irrationality of it. My Mum was a very docile person. She became angry and even violent with her experiences. Fortunately she was too small to do any harm but she would hit my father.
Can we, maybe, have a 'sympathise' button. 'Like' isn't the right word.
That is very sweet OKC, but not necessary. In the past now and no different to what very many have experienced.
I only raised it because I was incensed by what I read the other day. Wish I hadn't now as it is not about me.
'Like' is ok.
Indeed, 'kjh', these dreadful things happen in life, but one moves on. IMHO it's understandable you were incensed. Best of.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Around the handwashing advice is when I saw people starting to work from home as well. I took my daughter to school by car and parked on a residential street near the school. Normally I had not problem parking but I started having trouble finding a space and as I came back in the following days I realised none fo the parked cars were moving. Residents were staying at home and not traveling to work.
Doesn’t that imply that a lockdown as we now have wasn’t as necessary as people think?
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
I think that without the lockdown, elements 3 and 4 would not really have stuck. To be honest, 4 is probably the most important one as it contains the furlough rules and the closure of schools (for most pupils). Without the lockdown, more people would be working (I guess) and more children would need to go to school.
And an Rt over 1 means that we never reach a peak; it keeps on climbing.
Lockdown started on 24th March. So if deaths peaked on 8th April new infections probably peaked before the start of lockdown - does that not follow?
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Around the handwashing advice is when I saw people starting to work from home as well. I took my daughter to school by car and parked on a residential street near the school. Normally I had not problem parking but I started having trouble finding a space and as I came back in the following days I realised none fo the parked cars were moving. Residents were staying at home and not traveling to work.
That was when I stopped using the gym, amongst other things. At my workplace, we set up the plans to wfh that week, those with any medical issues started wfh then; the rest of us had our last day in the office on the 17th.
I got back from holiday on the 17th and decided I wouldn't be going to the pub or the gym for the foreseeable future. By Wednesday work had cancelled unnecessary travel and were asking people to work from home if they could. My last day in the office was Thursday.
FPT Last night I read a comment by TGOF666 re people putting their parents into care homes. I also saw some robust responses, but I did want to make my own response.
My mother got dementia not too long ago. She has since died. My father with our support decided she would definitely NOT go into care. We would look after her. I can only assume TGOF666 has not gone through this. Here are just a few examples of what can happen:
At 3 in the morning the washing up needs doing, while you are asleep, which includes the toaster.
Just wandering off any time of the day or night and not knowing where they are.
Start cooking on the hob and leaving it. Running taps and leaving them.
Attacking your husband (aged 90) with a walking stick because he is having an affair with the woman of the non existent other family living in the house.
Screaming at your son in front of his children 'why didn't you tell me my mother was a man' (she visualised my father as her mother). I was one of the few people who could sit down with my mother and explain what was going on, but this stumped me.
This requires 24 hour monitoring - when do you sleep?
Much to my surprise I was very impressed with the social care provided by social services and the Alzheimer society were magnificent. My mother ended up in a care home, which was also great and the staff magnificent - I don't know how they have the patience.
TGOF666 post was disgraceful.
Makes me wonder why you didn't put your kids up for adoption - they can be quite tiring too.
You are a complete bastard.
His comment is crass and uncaring in the extreme
I recognise your description of your experence of dementia and it closely follows those of our family with my father in law
The emotions and stress involved are beyond compare and in our case was acted out in our home with our three teenage children at the time
It was 2 years before we could even talk of the pain and to this day it hurts, and this was in the 90s
Shame on TGOHF666.
An apology would be good
Thank you BGW. It is obviously a common experience now, but until you go through it I don't think you can appreciate it. I had absolutely no idea. I just thought it would be the case of looking after someone infirm.
Another area I found distressing is the anger experienced by the person in the early stages as they try and reconcile what they see and experience with the irrationality of it. My Mum was a very docile person. She became angry and even violent with her experiences. Fortunately she was too small to do any harm but she would hit my father.
Can we, maybe, have a 'sympathise' button. 'Like' isn't the right word.
That is very sweet OKC, but not necessary. In the past now and no different to what very many have experienced.
I only raised it because I was incensed by what I read the other day. Wish I hadn't now as it is not about me.
'Like' is ok.
Indeed, 'kjh', these dreadful things happen in life, but one moves on. IMHO it's understandable you were incensed. Best of.
Cheers. There were some very funny moments as a consequence as well which we try and focus on.
We were going to make cuts - don't forget that the Labour manifesto in 2010 would have spent slightly less than the coalition did.
As I have been pointing out the problem wasn't cutting spending but what was cut and how.
When the Tory PM writes to his Tory council leader saying look here, why are you cutting front line services when we have made all this money available to you, the council leader details no you haven't, and number 10 responds yes we have that's the austerity problem in a single example.
It's not enough to say "we spent more on the NHS". What did you spend it on in the NHS? More money spent but savage cuts to provision shows money being syphoned off to more traditional Tory causes like consultants and lawyers and pointless layers of management.
The fact was that the Government didn't notice they had both increased the demands on the council and yet decreased the money available. As a simplified example to show the actual issue:-
Previously: Government Adult Social care £10m Council expenditure £10m Total available £20m
After reforms: Council Expenditure £15m Total available: £15m
Osbourne and Cameron's Government sat there and said we've given you £5m more a year but ignored the fact they are increased Council required Expenditure by £10m.
Are Councils required to pay themselves more than the Prime Minister gets paid?
Ever heard of market powers? Once one council starts paying over the odds to poach a leader from another council it becomes inevitable...
Guess what happened in the market for competent Council leaders.
If you consider that very few people switch from the public to the private sector, the Government should set national pay bands for councils and force top salaries down.
I thought Conservatives believed in free market capitalism? I’m confused.
Absolutely. We believe in capitalism.
There is no free market there. People taking taxes by force of the law and giving it in largesse to themselves while whining they haven't got enough money and cutting services is not free market capitalism.
If it was a free market company that was slashing its services while paying over the odds to its Chief Executives a competitor that was leaner would arise and people would take their consumption and expenditure to that one. That can't happen with taxes though. Appeals to some 'market' are absurd.
A good Council leader would be one who lives within the budget they have, getting their best results possible and being paid accordingly. Not slashing services and being paid well over the odds.
You assume there is an infinite supply of people able to put up with crap from Councillors and willing to lead councils. My view is that there is a finite supply of such people, and an even smaller supply of competent and the demand for such competent people is far greater than the actual supply.
And what evidence do you have for that proposition?
My view is that it is a pampered, unaffordable luxury to be paying county staff more than the Prime Minister of the country - and if you can afford to do that then there hasn't been enough austerity yet.
I would suggest thinking about what the job entails and then deciding that. A lot of the highest paid chief executives are actually running 2 or more councils.
Oh and remember the only reason why the PM's pay is what it is, is because Gordon Brown pulled a fast one in the days before the 2010 election and hadn't taken the full amount before then.
Yeah I personally think the Prime Minister is criminally underpaid. Should be at least hitting 500k. It is arguably the most important job in the country.
I would certainly raise the PM's pay to at least £162 000 which would put them in the top 1% of earners but at the same time the PM is still in a public service, public sector role not a private sector role creating wealth so I wouldn't go as far as paying them £500k which is even more than the US President gets paid
PM is a Top Job - none topper - and IMO the occupant should receive a hefty financial reward for doing it. Not sure about this current one though. Anything north of £75k looks excessive for Boris Johnson. He seems to be forever either electioneering, on holiday, off sick, or otherwise incommunicado and trying to sort out his private life. True or not, this is the perception of many shrewd observers. Perhaps it's harsh, I sense it might be, but perception really matters in politics - especially the perception of shrewd observers.
The lazy slob will get gazillions for his book when he is booted out.
Book and a blockbuster film, I'd have thought. No doubt called simply "Boris" and with some ridiculously flattering and unsuitable choice such as Idris Elba playing the eponymous. One doesn't look forward to it.
It'll be one of the poshos that seem to make up the acting fraternity nowadays, eg Damian Lewis in a fright wig.
Re the study that commented on Super Spreaders and Hyper Connectedness.
This sounds important. I'm trying to get my head around it.
A greater proportion of hyper connected people than the average rate for the population will have already caught the virus simply because of their increased connectedness. The hyper infectious ones will have been super spreaders. Most of these will now largely be immune and so they have been taken out of the pool. Are we saying/hoping that maybe a majority of hyper connected individuals will have already caught the virus?
However, there are still a large majority of people who have yet to be infected and some of these will prove to be hyper infectious when they get infected. Some of these will also be hyper connected individuals as a result of their jobs and so they will be another group pf super spreaders. Some will, by chance, happen to be hyper connected at the time they become infectious, e.g by attending a large gathering of people at the time they happen to be infected. So they will also be super spreaders.
Does the above make sense?
One obvious conclusion seems to be to avoid hyper connected people unless you know them to be immune and to avoid large gatherings. But I guess we already know that. Also avoid potentially hyper infectious people. But of course these aren't identifiable until after the fact.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Yes. Had an email from Google about my monthly travel/location history that managed to place me in Tokyo for 15 minutes during a month when I hadn't left Britannia.
The time before, and immediately after had me correctly located, near enough, so one of the major problems is being able to prove that the data is shit when some official is treating it as gospel and making decisions on the basis of it.
Yes, on the one hand the data these providers hold is terrifying, on the other the Google thinks I work at an Italian restaurant, and if you buy one toilet, the whole internet concludes that you're really, really into buying toilets.
Exactly, and that's funny until the government uses the same data to fine you for working in a restaurant without mandatory food safety training, or not declaring all your taxable income.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Not bad. But then what?
If MI6 started actively tracking me, they'd be bitterly disappointed. And I [presumably wouldn't even know they were there.
I guess I might notice that passport control starting taking longer?
You could find your bank accounts frozen with no right of appeal as to why. Some bank did this to an Iranian family with a small business recently.
Wait, the bank did that, or the government asked the bank to do that?
In the latter case I guess I should probably concede defeat. In the former, it's just another argument that we should be more careful allowing businesses access to our data - not just the government.
My (probably imperfect) memory of the case is that the bank told the family that the closure was the result of 'government regulations' and refused to discuss further.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Yes. Had an email from Google about my monthly travel/location history that managed to place me in Tokyo for 15 minutes during a month when I hadn't left Britannia.
The time before, and immediately after had me correctly located, near enough, so one of the major problems is being able to prove that the data is shit when some official is treating it as gospel and making decisions on the basis of it.
Yes, on the one hand the data these providers hold is terrifying, on the other the Google thinks I work at an Italian restaurant, and if you buy one toilet, the whole internet concludes that you're really, really into buying toilets.
Why remarketing companies don't have a stop trying to sell me this item button is something I've never understood.
I've done consulting for a pretty big purchase intent data company before, the way they gauge it is quite simplistic. Not sure they could implement such a button.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Not bad. But then what?
If MI6 started actively tracking me, they'd be bitterly disappointed. And I [presumably wouldn't even know they were there.
I guess I might notice that passport control starting taking longer?
You could find your bank accounts frozen with no right of appeal as to why. Some bank did this to an Iranian family with a small business recently.
Wait, the bank did that, or the government asked the bank to do that?
In the latter case I guess I should probably concede defeat. In the former, it's just another argument that we should be more careful allowing businesses access to our data - not just the government.
My (probably imperfect) memory of the case is that the bank told the family that the closure was the result of 'government regulations' and refused to discuss further.
Yes, and every other bank they approached refused to deal with them, on the basis that the first bank had closed their account.
I’ve been relistening to a lot of Roger Waters era Pink Floyd (73-83) recently, and watching interviews with him about the band, and really enjoying it. Then I listened to a few other bits he’s done, that I didn’t like so much, and recent political interviews that are a bit OTT, and found myself having an argument in my head with myself saying he was a genius for his 73-83 era Floyd work, and people on here posting YouTube’s of some of the not so good stuff and saying “What THIS Roger Waters?” & “So you’re saying The Pros and Cons of Hitchiking’ is a work of genius” etc
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Just think, in an alternate timeline the UK voted to remain and we'd be having an election this Thursday.
Or if the "Remain Alliance" had put Corbyn in as minority PM last summer with a mandate to hold Ref2, around about now could well have been the target date for it.
Alien space bats required for that one, m8y
It was an option. Never saw it myself, but it was most definitely an option. As it is, fear and loathing of Corbyn trumped fear and loathing of Brexit. And here we are.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
In London probably yes.
Worth remembering that an R even slightly above 1 means increasing cases. R needs to be below 1. Getting it from 3 to 1.5 is good but insufficient.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Yes. Had an email from Google about my monthly travel/location history that managed to place me in Tokyo for 15 minutes during a month when I hadn't left Britannia.
The time before, and immediately after had me correctly located, near enough, so one of the major problems is being able to prove that the data is shit when some official is treating it as gospel and making decisions on the basis of it.
Yes, on the one hand the data these providers hold is terrifying, on the other the Google thinks I work at an Italian restaurant, and if you buy one toilet, the whole internet concludes that you're really, really into buying toilets.
Why remarketing companies don't have a stop trying to sell me this item button is something I've never understood.
I've done consulting for a pretty big purchase intent data company before, the way they gauge it is quite simplistic. Not sure they could implement such a button.
google ads offer the option but it's not fed back to the advertiser in a meaningful way.
And yes most systems are idiotic because more complex systems usually fail for different reasons.
Re the study that commented on Super Spreaders and Hyper Connectedness.
This sounds important. I'm trying to get my head around it.
A greater proportion of hyper connected people than the average rate for the population will have already caught the virus simply because of their increased connectedness. The hyper infectious ones will have been super spreaders. Most of these will now largely be immune and so they have been taken out of the pool. Are we saying/hoping that maybe a majority of hyper connected individuals will have already caught the virus?
However, there are still a large majority of people who have yet to be infected and some of these will prove to be hyper infectious when they get infected. Some of these will also be hyper connected individuals as a result of their jobs and so they will be another group pf super spreaders. Some will, by chance, happen to be hyper connected at the time they become infectious, e.g by attending a large gathering of people at the time they happen to be infected. So they will also be super spreaders.
Does the above make sense?
One obvious conclusion seems to be to avoid hyper connected people unless you know them to be immune and to avoid large gatherings. But I guess we already know that. Also avoid potentially hyper infectious people. But of course these aren't identifiable until after the fact.
Yesterday's hyperconnected superspreaders were travelling salesmen who went to Wuhan, then Shanghai, Singapore, Dubai and home to the UK for a couple of days before heading off on the annual Italian ski holiday at half term.
Tomorrow's hyperconnected superspreaders, with most international travel shut down, are the supermarket checkout worker and the bus driver living in a densely-populated household of other such workers.
Re the study that commented on Super Spreaders and Hyper Connectedness.
This sounds important. I'm trying to get my head around it.
A greater proportion of hyper connected people than the average rate for the population will have already caught the virus simply because of their increased connectedness. The hyper infectious ones will have been super spreaders. Most of these will now largely be immune and so they have been taken out of the pool. Are we saying/hoping that maybe a majority of hyper connected individuals will have already caught the virus?
However, there are still a large majority of people who have yet to be infected and some of these will prove to be hyper infectious when they get infected. Some of these will also be hyper connected individuals as a result of their jobs and so they will be another group pf super spreaders. Some will, by chance, happen to be hyper connected at the time they become infectious, e.g by attending a large gathering of people at the time they happen to be infected. So they will also be super spreaders.
Does the above make sense?
One obvious conclusion seems to be to avoid hyper connected people unless you know them to be immune and to avoid large gatherings. But I guess we already know that. Also avoid potentially hyper infectious people. But of course these aren't identifiable until after the fact.
All it takes really is a couple of those hyper infections super spreaders from the same country to catch it and pass it on to a care home worker each, and one country’s death rate/approach to combatting the disease is lampooned while another, whose super spreaders didn’t catch it, is lauded
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Not bad. But then what?
If MI6 started actively tracking me, they'd be bitterly disappointed. And I [presumably wouldn't even know they were there.
I guess I might notice that passport control starting taking longer?
You could find your bank accounts frozen with no right of appeal as to why. Some bank did this to an Iranian family with a small business recently.
Wait, the bank did that, or the government asked the bank to do that?
In the latter case I guess I should probably concede defeat. In the former, it's just another argument that we should be more careful allowing businesses access to our data - not just the government.
My (probably imperfect) memory of the case is that the bank told the family that the closure was the result of 'government regulations' and refused to discuss further.
Yes, and every other bank they approached refused to deal with them, on the basis that the first bank had closed their account.
Well, based on that article, this has precisely nothing to do with cases of mistaken identity due to misuse of data. No-one was incorrectly identified as having connections to Iran; the banks were just being overzealous in their interpretations of the sanctions.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
Your graph seems to show that the R number was falling before any advice was given
For my part, my last day in the office before being sent home as the only person covering my area was March 4th.
Does anyone have the chart of mobility as per Google tracking for the UK for March, because to a fair extent lockdown merely formalised the situation that had already developed.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
In London probably yes.
Worth remembering that an R even slightly above 1 means increasing cases. R needs to be below 1. Getting it from 3 to 1.5 is good but insufficient.
Moth du Jour: Privet Hawkmoth. These are big beasts! Not uncommon - fair chance of attracting these to a suburban moth trap on a warm June/July evening.
While other outlets have Readers' Wives, we have a daily moth. Much more uplifting
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Yes. Had an email from Google about my monthly travel/location history that managed to place me in Tokyo for 15 minutes during a month when I hadn't left Britannia.
The time before, and immediately after had me correctly located, near enough, so one of the major problems is being able to prove that the data is shit when some official is treating it as gospel and making decisions on the basis of it.
Yes, on the one hand the data these providers hold is terrifying, on the other the Google thinks I work at an Italian restaurant, and if you buy one toilet, the whole internet concludes that you're really, really into buying toilets.
Why remarketing companies don't have a stop trying to sell me this item button is something I've never understood.
I've done consulting for a pretty big purchase intent data company before, the way they gauge it is quite simplistic. Not sure they could implement such a button.
google ads offer the option but it's not fed back to the advertiser in a meaningful way.
And yes most systems are idiotic because more complex systems usually fail for different reasons.
Yes there's a huge disconnect between the display advertising markets and what the user actually wants to see. They all buy different purchase intent data and none of it matches up.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Or you're a journalist (or whistleblower) who has recently leaked material that has embarrassed the government, and an angry minister wants to find out who has leaked it.
Or you're the member of a minority that has been historically persecuted with substantial fears about the state becoming hostile again, e.g. if a hard right figure is elected.
Or you're someone who occasionally smokes a harmless plant at home instead of getting blind drunk down spoons, but the purchase of said plant isn't technically legal (even if the coppers do turn a blind eye)...
There are many, many reasons why you don't want the government tracking your every move.
If it becomes normalised now, it will be very, very hard to roll back.
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Assuming the article is technically accurate then it is a devastating take down of the NHS plans.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Moth du Jour: Privet Hawkmoth. These are big beasts! Not uncommon - fair chance of attracting these to a suburban moth trap on a warm June/July evening.
While other outlets have Readers' Wives, we have a daily moth. Much more uplifting
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Assuming the article is technically accurate then it is a devastating take down of the NHS plans.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Wow. Hancock is brave.
That article is 100% accurate - it describes exactly how bluetooth is restricted in the modern world (it's why you never see bluetooth advertising on phones as it was shut down on it's inception by those changes).
Unless you are using Apple / Googles approved approach you have nothing.
It's a shame the issue is too complex for a technophobe journalist to ask in the Daily press conference.
I've been thinking, and I can't identify a single negative outcome from the government knowing where I am at any one specific moment in time.
What about when some 10 quid/hour contractor presses the wrong button and your location data gets swapped for that of a regular at the Finsbury Park mosque who has a timeshare in Raqqa.
Yes. Had an email from Google about my monthly travel/location history that managed to place me in Tokyo for 15 minutes during a month when I hadn't left Britannia.
The time before, and immediately after had me correctly located, near enough, so one of the major problems is being able to prove that the data is shit when some official is treating it as gospel and making decisions on the basis of it.
Yes, on the one hand the data these providers hold is terrifying, on the other the Google thinks I work at an Italian restaurant, and if you buy one toilet, the whole internet concludes that you're really, really into buying toilets.
Amazon are terrible at that - and they are the ones that actually *know* you just bought the toilet.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
I don't think this plot is correct. The advice was the R was still above 2 the day the lockdown was announced.
11:08am Sage warned London ICU could have breached in 7 days The lockdown decision was taken by the Prime Minister after Sage was presented with modelling evidence suggesting intensive care units across the country would be swamped.
At the March 23 meeting of Sage, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, experts considered a summary of the coronavirus modelling which warned "it is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today".
"The rest of the UK is one-two weeks behind London. In the absence of additional measures being put into place in the next few days, it is likely that we will breach ICU capacity in other regions."
The modelling suggested the rapid increase in intensive care admissions suggested the reproduction number - the R rate - was higher than the 2.4 previously estimated and could have been more than three.
The lockdown was a decision taken on balance of risk and IMO was the correct one. If anything it should have come earlier. However, as to R being above 2 on 23rd March when it was announced, this seems unlikely to me if deaths peaked on or around 8th April.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
I think that without the lockdown, elements 3 and 4 would not really have stuck. To be honest, 4 is probably the most important one as it contains the furlough rules and the closure of schools (for most pupils). Without the lockdown, more people would be working (I guess) and more children would need to go to school.
And an Rt over 1 means that we never reach a peak; it keeps on climbing.
Lockdown started on 24th March. So if deaths peaked on 8th April new infections probably peaked before the start of lockdown - does that not follow?
Impossible to tell.
There are 14 days between 24/3 and 8/4 which is enough to get sick and die. But it doesn't follow the same timetable for everyone.
Peak infections was probably around 24/3 give or take a few days.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
I don't think this plot is correct. The advice was the R was still above 2 the day the lockdown was announced.
11:08am Sage warned London ICU could have breached in 7 days The lockdown decision was taken by the Prime Minister after Sage was presented with modelling evidence suggesting intensive care units across the country would be swamped.
At the March 23 meeting of Sage, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, experts considered a summary of the coronavirus modelling which warned "it is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today".
"The rest of the UK is one-two weeks behind London. In the absence of additional measures being put into place in the next few days, it is likely that we will breach ICU capacity in other regions."
The modelling suggested the rapid increase in intensive care admissions suggested the reproduction number - the R rate - was higher than the 2.4 previously estimated and could have been more than three.
The lockdown was a decision taken on balance of risk and IMO was the correct one. If anything it should have come earlier. However, as to R being above 2 on 23rd March when it was announced, this seems unlikely to me if deaths peaked on or around 8th April.
I think we established yesterday that the peak was about a week later than that when care home deaths are taken into account.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The thing is that the long lockdowners cannot be wrong, whatever the evidence against them.
If they are wrong, then that is tantamount to admitting they have, in effect, been amongst the biggest and most gullible dupes in history. They would be right up there with those who maintained that Stalin did not know about the purges and the gulags, and if he did would have stopped them immediately.
Citing Stalin is such a refreshing change from Hitler. Top marks for innovation.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
I don't think this plot is correct. The advice was the R was still above 2 the day the lockdown was announced.
11:08am Sage warned London ICU could have breached in 7 days The lockdown decision was taken by the Prime Minister after Sage was presented with modelling evidence suggesting intensive care units across the country would be swamped.
At the March 23 meeting of Sage, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, experts considered a summary of the coronavirus modelling which warned "it is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today".
"The rest of the UK is one-two weeks behind London. In the absence of additional measures being put into place in the next few days, it is likely that we will breach ICU capacity in other regions."
The modelling suggested the rapid increase in intensive care admissions suggested the reproduction number - the R rate - was higher than the 2.4 previously estimated and could have been more than three.
The lockdown was a decision taken on balance of risk and IMO was the correct one. If anything it should have come earlier. However, as to R being above 2 on 23rd March when it was announced, this seems unlikely to me if deaths peaked on or around 8th April.
They didn't peak then, in all settings the peak was later.
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Assuming the article is technically accurate then it is a devastating take down of the NHS plans.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Wow. Hancock is brave.
Hancock has previous form with Apple and Google. I'm sure that's played its role in the decision to ignore their efforts. I honestly hope this works because I hate this lockdown but I'm pretty sure it won't.
I've been told that our app also won't be internationally compatible which means British people will need to install multiple apps if they go overseas while the others can be made interoperable.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
In London probably yes.
Worth remembering that an R even slightly above 1 means increasing cases. R needs to be below 1. Getting it from 3 to 1.5 is good but insufficient.
Buys the NHS a hell of a lot of time though.
At 1.5 it doesn't buy that much. It still means cases roughly doubling every week which given London hospitals came close to capacity would not have been viable.
Re the study that commented on Super Spreaders and Hyper Connectedness.
This sounds important. I'm trying to get my head around it.
A greater proportion of hyper connected people than the average rate for the population will have already caught the virus simply because of their increased connectedness. The hyper infectious ones will have been super spreaders. Most of these will now largely be immune and so they have been taken out of the pool. Are we saying/hoping that maybe a majority of hyper connected individuals will have already caught the virus?
However, there are still a large majority of people who have yet to be infected and some of these will prove to be hyper infectious when they get infected. Some of these will also be hyper connected individuals as a result of their jobs and so they will be another group pf super spreaders. Some will, by chance, happen to be hyper connected at the time they become infectious, e.g by attending a large gathering of people at the time they happen to be infected. So they will also be super spreaders.
Does the above make sense?
One obvious conclusion seems to be to avoid hyper connected people unless you know them to be immune and to avoid large gatherings. But I guess we already know that. Also avoid potentially hyper infectious people. But of course these aren't identifiable until after the fact.
All it takes really is a couple of those hyper infections super spreaders from the same country to catch it and pass it on to a care home worker each, and one country’s death rate/approach to combatting the disease is lampooned while another, whose super spreaders didn’t catch it, is lauded
The key point is that the hyper connected get (then recover from and become immune) very early in the pandemic. If that isn't factored into the models they will be very wrong.
A toy model might help. Imagine a population of 100 people who never see anyone except the one hyper connected person. She, the hyper, visits 20 of them at random every week and infects 5 in week 1, 5 in week 2 then recovers and carries on their business infecting no one else. The case graph goes nuts in weeks 1 and 2, then declines all on it's own with no behavioural change.
There are many straight up and declared assumptions in epidemiological modesl (Ferguson etc), but this is a more subtle methodological bear trap. The other super important one highlighted was pre-existing immunity (for whatever reason). Some (a lot) of people simply won't get it. Taken together these both give me hope that this is not going to be the two year grind that the worst early predictions suggested.
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Assuming the article is technically accurate then it is a devastating take down of the NHS plans.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Wow. Hancock is brave.
I have been warning about this for a while now.
I should add though Google / Apple are being dickheads as well. So wedded to their "privacy" concerns, they are the ones playing god and deciding for the world what will be allowed and what won't. There are big downsides to their approach in terms of government management of this pandemic.
We were going to make cuts - don't forget that the Labour manifesto in 2010 would have spent slightly less than the coalition did.
As I have been pointing out the problem wasn't cutting spending but what was cut and how.
When the Tory PM writes to his Tory council leader saying look here, why are you cutting front line services when we have made all this money available to you, the council leader details no you haven't, and number 10 responds yes we have that's the austerity problem in a single example.
It's not enough to say "we spent more on the NHS". What did you spend it on in the NHS? More money spent but savage cuts to provision shows money being syphoned off to more traditional Tory causes like consultants and lawyers and pointless layers of management.
The fact was that the Government didn't notice they had both increased the demands on the council and yet decreased the money available. As a simplified example to show the actual issue:-
Previously: Government Adult Social care £10m Council expenditure £10m Total available £20m
After reforms: Council Expenditure £15m Total available: £15m
Osbourne and Cameron's Government sat there and said we've given you £5m more a year but ignored the fact they are increased Council required Expenditure by £10m.
Are Councils required to pay themselves more than the Prime Minister gets paid?
Ever heard of market powers? Once one council starts paying over the odds to poach a leader from another council it becomes inevitable...
Guess what happened in the market for competent Council leaders.
If you consider that very few people switch from the public to the private sector, the Government should set national pay bands for councils and force top salaries down.
I thought Conservatives believed in free market capitalism? I’m confused.
Absolutely. We believe in capitalism.
There is no free market there. People taking taxes by force of the law and giving it in largesse to themselves while whining they haven't got enough money and cutting services is not free market capitalism.
If it was a free market company that was slashing its services while paying over the odds to its Chief Executives a competitor that was leaner would arise and people would take their consumption and expenditure to that one. That can't happen with taxes though. Appeals to some 'market' are absurd.
A good Council leader would be one who lives within the budget they have, getting their best results possible and being paid accordingly. Not slashing services and being paid well over the odds.
You assume there is an infinite supply of people able to put up with crap from Councillors and willing to lead councils. My view is that there is a finite supply of such people, and an even smaller supply of competent and the demand for such competent people is far greater than the actual supply.
And what evidence do you have for that proposition?
My view is that it is a pampered, unaffordable luxury to be paying county staff more than the Prime Minister of the country - and if you can afford to do that then there hasn't been enough austerity yet.
I would suggest thinking about what the job entails and then deciding that. A lot of the highest paid chief executives are actually running 2 or more councils.
Oh and remember the only reason why the PM's pay is what it is, is because Gordon Brown pulled a fast one in the days before the 2010 election and hadn't taken the full amount before then.
Yeah I personally think the Prime Minister is criminally underpaid. Should be at least hitting 500k. It is arguably the most important job in the country.
I would certainly raise the PM's pay to at least £162 000 which would put them in the top 1% of earners but at the same time the PM is still in a public service, public sector role not a private sector role creating wealth so I wouldn't go as far as paying them £500k which is even more than the US President gets paid
PM is a Top Job - none topper - and IMO the occupant should receive a hefty financial reward for doing it. Not sure about this current one though. Anything north of £75k looks excessive for Boris Johnson. He seems to be forever either electioneering, on holiday, off sick, or otherwise incommunicado and trying to sort out his private life. True or not, this is the perception of many shrewd observers. Perhaps it's harsh, I sense it might be, but perception really matters in politics - especially the perception of shrewd observers.
The lazy slob will get gazillions for his book when he is booted out.
Book and a blockbuster film, I'd have thought. No doubt called simply "Boris" and with some ridiculously flattering and unsuitable choice such as Idris Elba playing the eponymous. One doesn't look forward to it.
It'll be one of the poshos that seem to make up the acting fraternity nowadays, eg Damian Lewis in a fright wig.
Yes - if we bring in the highly unusual casting rule for our "Boris" blockbuster biopic that 'our hero' must be played by an actor who attended the same school as him, we would not be exactly boxing ourselves in.
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Assuming the article is technically accurate then it is a devastating take down of the NHS plans.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Wow. Hancock is brave.
Hancock has previous form with Apple and Google. I'm sure that's played its role in the decision to ignore their efforts. I honestly hope this works because I hate this lockdown but I'm pretty sure it won't.
I've been told that our app also won't be internationally compatible which means British people will need to install multiple apps if they go overseas while the others can be made interoperable.
Don't know how multiple apps (that use their privacy-driven bluetooth solution) will work if you travel, Apple have said one per country or US state.
When my friend's mother was suffering from dementia, she became convinced that "They are diluting my water!"
Dementia means never having to explain - with what?
As I said there are always funny moments. We had quite a few.
Unfortunately they go thru' the 'with what?' question in their own mind and then get angry because they have competing contradictory evidence.
We apparently had a full blown cinema in our basement (we don't have a basement). We spent ages with my Mum trying to find the stairs.
One night when I had to coax my mother back to the house from a neighbour I sat down for hours explaining to my mother what was happening and got to the point where she understood (it doesn't last). She then asked me whether she was going to get better. My stomach churned.
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Assuming the article is technically accurate then it is a devastating take down of the NHS plans.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Wow. Hancock is brave.
Hancock has previous form with Apple and Google. I'm sure that's played its role in the decision to ignore their efforts. I honestly hope this works because I hate this lockdown but I'm pretty sure it won't.
I've been told that our app also won't be internationally compatible which means British people will need to install multiple apps if they go overseas while the others can be made interoperable.
If this app fails like it looks like it will because of the problem of when the phone is asleep, then Hancock will have to resign. He is done.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
I don't think this plot is correct. The advice was the R was still above 2 the day the lockdown was announced.
11:08am Sage warned London ICU could have breached in 7 days The lockdown decision was taken by the Prime Minister after Sage was presented with modelling evidence suggesting intensive care units across the country would be swamped.
At the March 23 meeting of Sage, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, experts considered a summary of the coronavirus modelling which warned "it is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today".
"The rest of the UK is one-two weeks behind London. In the absence of additional measures being put into place in the next few days, it is likely that we will breach ICU capacity in other regions."
The modelling suggested the rapid increase in intensive care admissions suggested the reproduction number - the R rate - was higher than the 2.4 previously estimated and could have been more than three.
The lockdown was a decision taken on balance of risk and IMO was the correct one. If anything it should have come earlier. However, as to R being above 2 on 23rd March when it was announced, this seems unlikely to me if deaths peaked on or around 8th April.
An alternative would have been to lock down people in vulnerable categories and allow healthy people to continue running the economy.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
I think that without the lockdown, elements 3 and 4 would not really have stuck. To be honest, 4 is probably the most important one as it contains the furlough rules and the closure of schools (for most pupils). Without the lockdown, more people would be working (I guess) and more children would need to go to school.
And an Rt over 1 means that we never reach a peak; it keeps on climbing.
Lockdown started on 24th March. So if deaths peaked on 8th April new infections probably peaked before the start of lockdown - does that not follow?
I don`t think so, no. Sunil clarified yesterday that peak was (from memory) 17/4 when all deaths are taken into account. So it looks like new infections peaked whilst we were well into lockdown.
Had to chuckle at Ed Conway, he of the dodgy graphs, now claiming well some people deaths in all setting would continue to rise, but they aren't...yes you, you massive bellend. Sticking trendlines through the wrong data (again not using date of death).
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Assuming the article is technically accurate then it is a devastating take down of the NHS plans.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Wow. Hancock is brave.
Hancock has previous form with Apple and Google. I'm sure that's played its role in the decision to ignore their efforts. I honestly hope this works because I hate this lockdown but I'm pretty sure it won't.
I've been told that our app also won't be internationally compatible which means British people will need to install multiple apps if they go overseas while the others can be made interoperable.
Don't know how multiple apps (that use their privacy-driven bluetooth solution) will work if you travel, Apple have said one per country or US state.
If you're using the Apple/Google solution they can be made to talk to each other. Our solution won't. So you need one app from NY but it can talk to an app from NJ, for example.
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
Apparently small differences in R 1.4 and R 0.8 are night and day too. If the virus has a 5 day turnaround in financial terms R1.4 would be 46 trillion % APR whereas 0.8 would reduce a billion quid to less than a hundred quid.
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
I don't think this plot is correct. The advice was the R was still above 2 the day the lockdown was announced.
11:08am Sage warned London ICU could have breached in 7 days The lockdown decision was taken by the Prime Minister after Sage was presented with modelling evidence suggesting intensive care units across the country would be swamped.
At the March 23 meeting of Sage, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, experts considered a summary of the coronavirus modelling which warned "it is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today".
"The rest of the UK is one-two weeks behind London. In the absence of additional measures being put into place in the next few days, it is likely that we will breach ICU capacity in other regions."
The modelling suggested the rapid increase in intensive care admissions suggested the reproduction number - the R rate - was higher than the 2.4 previously estimated and could have been more than three.
The lockdown was a decision taken on balance of risk and IMO was the correct one. If anything it should have come earlier. However, as to R being above 2 on 23rd March when it was announced, this seems unlikely to me if deaths peaked on or around 8th April.
They didn't peak then, in all settings the peak was later.
Ah OK. What is the approx consensus date for peak UK deaths then?
BigRich posted an interesting comment about why Sweden has probably done the right thing, and nearly all of the replies were to do with a grammar dispute.
Sometimes people do not seem willing to engage in sciientific discussion on this site.The graph yesterday showing that the R figure was below 1 before the lockdown and that the reduction coincided with the hand washing advice I thought was really striking. Yet alI I got was abuse for discussing it and no one seemed interested in it. If science does not agree with someones opinion then it seems it is not worthy.
The method of calculation of R in that graph is, almost certainly, not valid.
No error bars on the R values is a warning sign that this is not valid, as well.
Very spiky as well, which looks very strange.
Using a median incubation period of 5 days and time to fatality median/interquartile ranges from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/ , and the hospital deaths data from public health England, with some five-day smoothing and pulling out interquartile ranges over those five days) I got something that looked like this (bearing in mind that I'm not at all confident about the methodology):
Putting on dates of significant interventions, I got this:
1 - Handwashing advice given 2 - Premier Leaguse suspended and much other sport, elections deferred 3 - PM advises everyone against non-essential travel, avoiding pubs/restaurants/clubs, wfh if possible. Vulnerable people advised to self-isolate. 4 - Pubs, cafes, restaurants ordered to close immediately; nightclubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, leisure entres told to close as soon as possible; last day of schools for most pupils. Furlough rules announced by Sunak. 5 - Announcement of lockdown with immediate effect
To be fair, the handwashing advice does seem to have been helpful to a degree...
The handwashing advice seems massively significant to me. I guess the question becomes this: was lockdown (Event 5 in your graph (or perhaps 4?)) necessary to ensure that the NHS was not overwhelmed (given that was the reason given for the lockdown in the first place).
In London probably yes.
Worth remembering that an R even slightly above 1 means increasing cases. R needs to be below 1. Getting it from 3 to 1.5 is good but insufficient.
Spot on. Also worth thinking about an exponential rise with a built in 14 day delay.
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Assuming the article is technically accurate then it is a devastating take down of the NHS plans.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Wow. Hancock is brave.
Hancock has previous form with Apple and Google. I'm sure that's played its role in the decision to ignore their efforts. I honestly hope this works because I hate this lockdown but I'm pretty sure it won't.
I've been told that our app also won't be internationally compatible which means British people will need to install multiple apps if they go overseas while the others can be made interoperable.
If this app fails like it looks like it will because of the problem of when the phone is asleep, then Hancock will have to resign. He is done.
If the app doesn't work while the phone is asleep then why not get IT bods to patch the app so that it does?
Comments
A roulette wheel or FOBT based on one is basically a device with R 0.97 for your money. Expert card counters get banned for pushing their cash R from 0.98 on the blackjack tables to 1.01 or 1.02.
Another area I found distressing is the anger experienced by the person in the early stages as they try and reconcile what they see and experience with the irrationality of it. My Mum was a very docile person. She became angry and even violent with her experiences. Fortunately she was too small to do any harm but she would hit my father.
You cannot justify your obnoxious comment to kjh
Any decent minded person would apologise
You can still do it you know
Sorry.
11:08am
Sage warned London ICU could have breached in 7 days
The lockdown decision was taken by the Prime Minister after Sage was presented with modelling evidence suggesting intensive care units across the country would be swamped.
At the March 23 meeting of Sage, the day Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, experts considered a summary of the coronavirus modelling which warned "it is very likely that we will see ICU capacity in London breached by the end of the month, even if additional measures are put in place today".
"The rest of the UK is one-two weeks behind London. In the absence of additional measures being put into place in the next few days, it is likely that we will breach ICU capacity in other regions."
The modelling suggested the rapid increase in intensive care admissions suggested the reproduction number - the R rate - was higher than the 2.4 previously estimated and could have been more than three.
And an Rt over 1 means that we never reach a peak; it keeps on climbing.
A Low-Cost and High-Efficiency Integrated Device toward Solar-Driven Water Splitting
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.9b09053#
Achieving the spontaneous evolution of fuel from integrated devices by solar-driven water splitting is an attractive method for renewable energy conversion. However, their widespread implementation is hindered by their immature architectures and inferior performances. Here, we propose a real integrated device consisting of two series-connected perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and two CoP catalyst electrodes, which can be immersed into the aqueous solution directly for solar-driven water splitting. Benefiting from the low-cost and facile encapsulation technique, this integrated device possesses a compact structure and well-connected circuits for the process of charge carriers generation, transfer, and storage. Moreover, although all expensive components in this integrated device are eliminated, the two series-connected carbon-based PSCs still exhibit a high solar-to-electric efficiency of 10.6% as well as the integrated devices display a solar-to-hydrogen efficiency of as high as 6.7%. This integrated device serves as a model architecture toward future development and optimization of the integrated device that can be immersed into the aqueous solution directly for water splitting...
Instead, we have people complaining about the big white elephant Nightingale in the Docklands.
The call was made at pretty much exactly the right time, on the available evidence.
Getting out is going to be much more difficult, and the decisions much more nuanced and political in nature with several possible approaches available. .
I only raised it because I was incensed by what I read the other day. Wish I hadn't now as it is not about me.
'Like' is ok.
The thing is that the long lockdowners cannot be wrong, whatever the evidence against them.
If they are wrong, then that is tantamount to admitting they have, in effect, been amongst the biggest and most gullible dupes in history. They would be right up there with those who maintained that Stalin did not know about the purges and the gulags, and if he did would have stopped them immediately.
People going to the gym had stopped earlier as well.
Fortunately my wife and I managed to keep it self contained but the last few weeks were unbearable, especially when he was the most caring, kind and generous person you could ever want to meet
He did die in our home with us all round his bed and it was peaceful and a release
I cannot express my dismay why any poster on here would not respond to your original post with empathy but ignorance and intolerance is everywhere sadly
In the latter case I guess I should probably concede defeat. In the former, it's just another argument that we should be more careful allowing businesses access to our data - not just the government.
Best of.
This sounds important. I'm trying to get my head around it.
A greater proportion of hyper connected people than the average rate for the population will have already caught the virus simply because of their increased connectedness. The hyper infectious ones will have been super spreaders. Most of these will now largely be immune and so they have been taken out of the pool. Are we saying/hoping that maybe a majority of hyper connected individuals will have already caught the virus?
However, there are still a large majority of people who have yet to be infected and some of these will prove to be hyper infectious when they get infected. Some of these will also be hyper connected individuals as a result of their jobs and so they will be another group pf super spreaders. Some will, by chance, happen to be hyper connected at the time they become infectious, e.g by attending a large gathering of people at the time they happen to be infected. So they will also be super spreaders.
Does the above make sense?
One obvious conclusion seems to be to avoid hyper connected people unless you know them to be immune and to avoid large gatherings. But I guess we already know that. Also avoid potentially hyper infectious people. But of course these aren't identifiable until after the fact.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/28/iranians-uk-banks-closed-accounts-claim-racial-discrimination
Proof that I’m on here too much
Basically unless the program is running in the foreground all the time (the phone switched on and enabled, display on, NHS app on display, rather than twitter, whatsapp, facebook) the phone won't be broadcasting it's details to other people.
Worth remembering that an R even slightly above 1 means increasing cases. R needs to be below 1. Getting it from 3 to 1.5 is good but insufficient.
And yes most systems are idiotic because more complex systems usually fail for different reasons.
Tomorrow's hyperconnected superspreaders, with most international travel shut down, are the supermarket checkout worker and the bus driver living in a densely-populated household of other such workers.
Dementia means never having to explain - with what?
Does anyone have the chart of mobility as per Google tracking for the UK for March, because to a fair extent lockdown merely formalised the situation that had already developed.
https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1257487701017653248
Or you're the member of a minority that has been historically persecuted with substantial fears about the state becoming hostile again, e.g. if a hard right figure is elected.
Or you're someone who occasionally smokes a harmless plant at home instead of getting blind drunk down spoons, but the purchase of said plant isn't technically legal (even if the coppers do turn a blind eye)...
There are many, many reasons why you don't want the government tracking your every move.
If it becomes normalised now, it will be very, very hard to roll back.
I did predict on here last week that this would be a disaster, but I had no idea it would be as big a disaster as it now appears.
Wow. Hancock is brave.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52526554
Unless you are using Apple / Googles approved approach you have nothing.
It's a shame the issue is too complex for a technophobe journalist to ask in the Daily press conference.
There are 14 days between 24/3 and 8/4 which is enough to get sick and die. But it doesn't follow the same timetable for everyone.
Peak infections was probably around 24/3 give or take a few days.
I've been told that our app also won't be internationally compatible which means British people will need to install multiple apps if they go overseas while the others can be made interoperable.
A toy model might help. Imagine a population of 100 people who never see anyone except the one hyper connected person. She, the hyper, visits 20 of them at random every week and infects 5 in week 1, 5 in week 2 then recovers and carries on their business infecting no one else. The case graph goes nuts in weeks 1 and 2, then declines all on it's own with no behavioural change.
There are many straight up and declared assumptions in epidemiological modesl (Ferguson etc), but this is a more subtle methodological bear trap. The other super important one highlighted was pre-existing immunity (for whatever reason). Some (a lot) of people simply won't get it. Taken together these both give me hope that this is not going to be the two year grind that the worst early predictions suggested.
I should add though Google / Apple are being dickheads as well. So wedded to their "privacy" concerns, they are the ones playing god and deciding for the world what will be allowed and what won't. There are big downsides to their approach in terms of government management of this pandemic.
Unfortunately they go thru' the 'with what?' question in their own mind and then get angry because they have competing contradictory evidence.
We apparently had a full blown cinema in our basement (we don't have a basement). We spent ages with my Mum trying to find the stairs.
One night when I had to coax my mother back to the house from a neighbour I sat down for hours explaining to my mother what was happening and got to the point where she understood (it doesn't last). She then asked me whether she was going to get better. My stomach churned.
Hancock must now be very short.
Also worth thinking about an exponential rise with a built in 14 day delay.