I think the lockdown is stupid and pointless and is probably killing or harming more people than the virus. I am amazed at the almost total lack of questioning of the policy and how readily people submit themselves to these rules. Now the bloke who recommended it is caught breaking his own policy. We have empty hospitals, idle doctors, vulnerable people isolated, mental health problems soaring, urgent treatments cancelled, people too scared to go to the doctor, businesses folding, unemployment surging. And yet virtually no one outside the twittersphere (maybe Peter Hitchens) has seriously asked WTF?
I am also surprised people just accept that the lockdown as the panacea to prevent Covid 19 spread, especially as our R figure was likely below 1 when we went into lockdown (based on the hospital admission peak on the 2nd April 2020). Maybe this much talked about enquiry will find that the lockdown only had a marginal impact on Covid-19 and that the other negative impacts of it were greater than its positives.
I really don't believe that graph as you can make it say whatever you want by picking different lag times. The government's advice was R was around 2 when the lockdown started.
I am not basing it on that graph at all because I don't know what parameters he used to produce it. I am just using basic common sense. If the peak of hospital admissions was the 2nd April then logically the peak of infections must have been 10-15 days before that..
So, err, the 23 of March then? When lockdown was enacted?
Absolutely, so that means the biggest reductions in the R figure were before lockdown.
Your 10-15 day estimate is simply wrong. It's exactly the same logic that was used to make the graph from a few days ago. The advice from the boffins at the time was R was above two at the time of the lockdown.
Wait, no, I tried reading it and gave up after he complained that we don't have a functioning free press, on the basis that they won't all write what he wants them to write.
I think his point is more that they seem to write what the government wants them to write. The best bit of the article for me was - regarding the Ferguson thing - his saying how tacky and inappropriate it was to splash the WOMAN'S face all over the front pages. I'm glad I'm not alone in finding that completely outrageous.
Well, part of the problem with story-by-chewing-up-press-releases is that you are still writing a story based on the press release. However much you chew. Hence the New Labour realisation of press control - simply embed some nice chewy stories in the press releases and the press will play good dog.
I'm reading the Campbell diaries atm. Seems so long ago now.
On the topic of digging into stories, technicalities etc. WMDs and Iraq - what if someone had asked the question, that seemed obvious to me at the time, about the 45 minute thing...
"What is it that they can deploy, in 45 minutes?"
Quite. The Iraq War offers a good example of how neither the press nor the Opposition should disarm for the sake of national unity.
More importantly it is an example of where that pesky technical detail nonsense is important.
Too many people in this country think that understanding the technical details (even at a high level) is beneath them, icky and/or nerdy.
I had an interesting conversation with a major historian, a while ago. He was basically horrified by my proposed thesis - the technical issues which blocked/delayed switching production between sectors in WWII. Apparently this wasn't interesting. It was quite clear, that to him, the details of specialist machine tools (for example) was trade, yucky and generally should be reserved for people like the tank restorers at Bovington.
I agree. And more generally "Big Picture vs Details" is a false dichotomy. If you don't understand the details you probably don't understand the big picture. We saw that writ large with the bank crash.
Back on Neil Ferguson for a bit; the worst thing he's done during this epidemic in my view was his statement to the Science and Technology Committee that half to two thirds of all victims would have died anyway this year. This didn't feel right at the time, and has since been comprehensively debunked; most recently here:
BoE suggesting that future quarters will have some of the biggest growth the country has ever seen.
Yes. But you do know what the end result on the numbers are if something decreases by 90% and then increases by 90%...
The BoE seemed were more optimistic than that, weren't they?
Much more. 14% decline followed by 15% growth.
So let me get this straight on views on the BoE:
a) Brexit: useless, politically motivated, all remainers, forecasts should be ignored; and b) CV-19: seers of our age, got it about right, sounds sensible, yes we'll take those forecasts.
Is that it?
Absolutely not!
It's an initial estimate to be taken with a mountain of salt. However Scott posting that preposterous Tweet suggesting that the BoE was contradictory with what Boris was saying when it's not they're saying the same thing.
As it happens I think the BoE and Boris are being optimistic here but I also think that's the outward projection they should give now. People need hope and confidence.
I've got a radical idea - lets tell people what they can and cannot do. And then empower the police to enforce it. That way everyone is clear what we can do.
Instead of saying x but in reality its y and the police are making a nuisance trying to stop people for z
That is a terrible, terrible idea.
X should be greater than Y should be greater than Z.
I personally think the economy will come roaring back.
It has done in every other recession except the one where we throttled off recovery in the Act of self harm called austerity.
I disagree because of Raab's 'new normal' ie the hectoring nanny state regulations that the government is going to insist on to avoid a second spike and a second lockdown.
apparently a second lockdown would be an economic disaster.
Well the fearmongering surrounding one will create a far, far bigger disaster.
In two months Sunak is going to be sitting there pondering why businesses aren;t re-employing all these workers he's subsidising. Can;t you take these six million off my hands?
I doubt there's a time when the private sector has every felt so unloved. The government arbitrarily smashed their businesses and then made doubly sure a maximum number would to the wall to square a few blowhards in the media via their long, utterly complacent lockdown.
Ministers now lecture employers on what they can and cannot do and expect them to perform miracles to get the country out of an enormous hole. What a bunch of teenagers and cowards.
Some people clap the NHS as heroes, but they will soon find out the real heroes are the private sector workers who entirely pay their salaries.
I've got a radical idea - lets tell people what they can and cannot do. And then empower the police to enforce it. That way everyone is clear what we can do.
Instead of saying x but in reality its y and the police are making a nuisance trying to stop people for z
Why not trust people to do the right thing and not involve the police at all? The lockdown has been followed by a far greater percentage of the population that the government was privately expecting (although you wouldn't know this from their public pronouncements).
BoE suggesting that future quarters will have some of the biggest growth the country has ever seen.
Yes. But you do know what the end result on the numbers are if something decreases by 90% and then increases by 90%...
The BoE seemed were more optimistic than that, weren't they?
They were. But we are talking baseline economic size here and the bounce back has to be pretty incredible to reach the status quo ante.
Within 2 years is the BoE projection. Quite incredible if so.
Take off the missed growth and we will have an economy about 4% lower than we might have expected by the end of 2021.
Yes, but that's not the worst result ever, I think it's going to be a lot worse if there's no vaccine by the end of this year as people are hoping for.
I think we will be very lucky if there's a vaccine for the end of next year. I also expect we will see second waves of infection, and it will be bloody difficult to deal with during the flu season. Way too many people are talking as though it will all be over soon.
I’m back suffice to say diarrhea and chemo still in hospital so won’t bore everybody
Very glad to hear it. Hope you continue to improve and that your wife is managing OK. All that going on in the middle of a real lockdown, you have my sympathy.
I think that there has been too much emphasis on we did what seemed right on the evidence we had at the time and not enough on well, if we knew what we know now... On that I agree.
Nonsense, it's a novel virus, to not go as precautionary as possible was always wildly irresponsible.
So you think we should have closed the economy down for SARS? Or H1N1 or bird flu? Novel virus is not the criteria, nor is there any absolutes.
International flights from any region with cases when SARS 1 was going round ? Yes.
We live in a globalised world. The damage that would cause would outweigh the benefits by an order of magnitude.
Plus what do we do with the potentially millions of Britons abroad?
If the incidence of the virus is similar in the place from where the flight started, it makes no difference to the UK. Mixing two pots (albeit unequal in size) of the same temperature water makes no difference to the temperature of the combined pot.
No transmission during a long distance flight occurs ?
A curious theory.
YMMV but IIUC it seems like no, there aren't a lot of (any?) clusters traceable to planes. I can't find the link now but from memory, there was a writeup mentioning that there was a cluster traced to a stewardess, but she apparently managed to infect loads of people at a wedding (or similar) she went to, but not on the plane.
One possible explanation is that air gets changed pretty fast, via a hefty HEPA filter, and flows mostly vertically from top to bottom, so you don't get much air coming at you from the person next to you.
I've got a radical idea - lets tell people what they can and cannot do. And then empower the police to enforce it. That way everyone is clear what we can do.
Instead of saying x but in reality its y and the police are making a nuisance trying to stop people for z
Why not trust people to do the right thing and not involve the police at all? The lockdown has been followed by a far greater percentage of the population that the government was privately expecting (although you wouldn't know this from their public pronouncements).
Indeed. It is deeply authoritarian and troubling to want everything proscribed by law and enforced.
BoE suggesting that future quarters will have some of the biggest growth the country has ever seen.
Yes. But you do know what the end result on the numbers are if something decreases by 90% and then increases by 90%...
The BoE seemed were more optimistic than that, weren't they?
They were. But we are talking baseline economic size here and the bounce back has to be pretty incredible to reach the status quo ante.
Within 2 years is the BoE projection. Quite incredible if so.
Take off the missed growth and we will have an economy about 4% lower than we might have expected by the end of 2021.
Yes, but that's not the worst result ever, I think it's going to be a lot worse if there's no vaccine by the end of this year as people are hoping for.
I think we will be very lucky if there's a vaccine for the end of next year. I also expect we will see second waves of infection, and it will be bloody difficult to deal with during the flu season. Way too many people are talking as though it will all be over soon.
I really hope the Oxford team gets it in one try. The sooner we get this under control the better. Also glad to see the government taking vaccine manufacturing seriously rather than partnering with some Senegal outfit.
Wait, no, I tried reading it and gave up after he complained that we don't have a functioning free press, on the basis that they won't all write what he wants them to write.
I think his point is more that they seem to write what the government wants them to write. The best bit of the article for me was - regarding the Ferguson thing - his saying how tacky and inappropriate it was to splash the WOMAN'S face all over the front pages. I'm glad I'm not alone in finding that completely outrageous.
Well, part of the problem with story-by-chewing-up-press-releases is that you are still writing a story based on the press release. However much you chew. Hence the New Labour realisation of press control - simply embed some nice chewy stories in the press releases and the press will play good dog.
I'm reading the Campbell diaries atm. Seems so long ago now.
On the topic of digging into stories, technicalities etc. WMDs and Iraq - what if someone had asked the question, that seemed obvious to me at the time, about the 45 minute thing...
"What is it that they can deploy, in 45 minutes?"
Quite. The Iraq War offers a good example of how neither the press nor the Opposition should disarm for the sake of national unity.
More importantly it is an example of where that pesky technical detail nonsense is important.
Too many people in this country think that understanding the technical details (even at a high level) is beneath them, icky and/or nerdy.
I had an interesting conversation with a major historian, a while ago. He was basically horrified by my proposed thesis - the technical issues which blocked/delayed switching production between sectors in WWII. Apparently this wasn't interesting. It was quite clear, that to him, the details of specialist machine tools (for example) was trade, yucky and generally should be reserved for people like the tank restorers at Bovington.
Possibly, though remember it was once thought the First World War could be explained by the railway timetables of the main powers. ETA and Napoleon's retreat from Moscow by the chemistry of French uniform buttons.
I've just followed up my covid test as it is now 6 days since I had it and the email said that in some circumstances it might take up to 5 days. It's easy to get through but some of the virtual call centre staff are very new and don't know what they're doing. The first was working her first shift and didn't know how to address the system to find out about tests that had previously taken place. The second said she needed my barcode number which is on a piece of paper you find in the test kit, so I scurried off to find it in the recycling. The third then used my personal data to raise a query without needing the barcode number! However she said it was taking up to 10 days in some cases as there is a backlog due to the number of tests sent out at the end of last week.
Anecdote comparison with the situation in Germany (Berlin). A friend had flu symptoms on Sunday and Monday. There was good reason for her to get tested before this weekend, so she went to have a test on Monday. She got the result in under 24 hours. Thankfully negative. She does not have any fast-track status such as working in a hospital.
Not getting test result within 5 days is just crazy, the whole "test as much as possible" strategy is undervalued by slow processing of results.
Rather than the arbitrary 100k a day target, Hancock would have been far better promising lesser numbers, but with time targets e.g. all NHS staff & hospital admissions within 24hrs, plebs 48hrs. With this disease speed of diagnosis is key, especially if you are in a position to spread it to a lot of people or needes on the frontline.
Once the 100k by May 1st target was rather stupidly plucked from the air it then became the priority to meet that target for political rather than health reasons.
I picked up a bit of Italian when inter-railing as a youth.
e pericoloso sporgersi - it means "do not lean out of the window".
Not quite.
It means "it's dangerous to lean out of the window" - which always struck me as an interesting contrast to the nannyish "Do Not" of Britain or the authoritarian "Verboten" or "Interdit" (forbidden) of Germany and France.
Yes, true. So technically "it's dangerous but if you must." Not that I ever did, but there is a subtle difference there.
I think the lockdown is stupid and pointless and is probably killing or harming more people than the virus. I am amazed at the almost total lack of questioning of the policy and how readily people submit themselves to these rules. Now the bloke who recommended it is caught breaking his own policy. We have empty hospitals, idle doctors, vulnerable people isolated, mental health problems soaring, urgent treatments cancelled, people too scared to go to the doctor, businesses folding, unemployment surging. And yet virtually no one outside the twittersphere (maybe Peter Hitchens) has seriously asked WTF?
I am also surprised people just accept that the lockdown as the panacea to prevent Covid 19 spread, especially as our R figure was likely below 1 when we went into lockdown (based on the hospital admission peak on the 2nd April 2020). Maybe this much talked about enquiry will find that the lockdown only had a marginal impact on Covid-19 and that the other negative impacts of it were greater than its positives.
I really don't believe that graph as you can make it say whatever you want by picking different lag times. The government's advice was R was around 2 when the lockdown started.
I am not basing it on that graph at all because I don't know what parameters he used to produce it. I am just using basic common sense. If the peak of hospital admissions was the 2nd April then logically the peak of infections must have been 10-15 days before that..
So, err, the 23 of March then? When lockdown was enacted?
Absolutely, so that means the biggest reductions in the R figure were before lockdown.
Your 10-15 day estimate is simply wrong. It's exactly the same logic that was used to make the graph from a few days ago. The advice from the boffins at the time was R was above two at the time of the lockdown.
Why is the 10-15 day estimate wrong? Boris showed it was about that.
It does seem likely that there is some substantial genetic effect here, or at least some quite big effect which is not simply social deprivation and pre-existing conditions. If that is correct, then it is further reason to be cautious about international comparisons.
They're not taking the fact they tend to live in densely-populated urban areas into account though.
Yes I think they are:
We find that adjusting for region of residence and the rural and urban classification improves the model fit and reduces substantially the odds ratios for all ethnic groups. Ethnic minority groups are also more likely to live in London and in an urban area compared with the White population. The probability to be infected by COVID-19 is likely to vary by region of residence and to be higher in more densely populated urban areas
Is it more finely granulated than "rural" and "urban"?
They adjust by region, so effectively yes.
Obviously more research is needed, but it seems to me that, as with many other diseases, there's a high chance that genetic factors correlated with race are significant.
Perhaps, and of course there are genetic differences between India and Pakistan, but it is such a mishmash of different groups that I remain mildly sceptical. If the same ethnic differences are found overseas, that might change things.
I think the lockdown is stupid and pointless and is probably killing or harming more people than the virus. I am amazed at the almost total lack of questioning of the policy and how readily people submit themselves to these rules. Now the bloke who recommended it is caught breaking his own policy. We have empty hospitals, idle doctors, vulnerable people isolated, mental health problems soaring, urgent treatments cancelled, people too scared to go to the doctor, businesses folding, unemployment surging. And yet virtually no one outside the twittersphere (maybe Peter Hitchens) has seriously asked WTF?
I am also surprised people just accept that the lockdown as the panacea to prevent Covid 19 spread, especially as our R figure was likely below 1 when we went into lockdown (based on the hospital admission peak on the 2nd April 2020). Maybe this much talked about enquiry will find that the lockdown only had a marginal impact on Covid-19 and that the other negative impacts of it were greater than its positives.
I really don't believe that graph as you can make it say whatever you want by picking different lag times. The government's advice was R was around 2 when the lockdown started.
I am not basing it on that graph at all because I don't know what parameters he used to produce it. I am just using basic common sense. If the peak of hospital admissions was the 2nd April then logically the peak of infections must have been 10-15 days before that..
So, err, the 23 of March then? When lockdown was enacted?
Absolutely, so that means the biggest reductions in the R figure were before lockdown.
Your 10-15 day estimate is simply wrong. It's exactly the same logic that was used to make the graph from a few days ago. The advice from the boffins at the time was R was above two at the time of the lockdown.
Why is the 10-15 day estimate wrong? Boris showed it was about that.
Wait, no, I tried reading it and gave up after he complained that we don't have a functioning free press, on the basis that they won't all write what he wants them to write.
I think his point is more that they seem to write what the government wants them to write. The best bit of the article for me was - regarding the Ferguson thing - his saying how tacky and inappropriate it was to splash the WOMAN'S face all over the front pages. I'm glad I'm not alone in finding that completely outrageous.
Is there any evidence to the claim the government wanted them to write that?
And anyway his whole thesis is nonsense since he's spinning the claim that the UK's death toll is higher than Italy's when we know that is factually incorrect given Italy's death toll isn't trying to include the care home deaths of which we know there have been a lot.
So he's complaining the press aren't lying. What a shame.
Can I link to a memo from the government asking for the papers to lead with a massive photo of Ferguson's girlfriend rather than our Covid-19 death toll becoming the highest in Europe?
Let me have a root around. I'll be back.
Thanks. Let me know when you are back.
Again feat toll being highest in Europe is nonsense unless you look per capita (Belgium are worse) or like for like with accurate stats (Italy and Spain are worse)
It's a landmark that ought to trigger debate and introspection. The debate to include points of context and mitigation such as "apples and pears" and the introspection to focus on the lives lost, mistakes made, the way forward. That's what I would expect. Not a foaming laceration of the government. Not an airbrushing of the big picture in favour of sexist trivia.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of those involved in leading our response is not sexist trivia. It wasn't with NZ's health minister, it wasn't with Scotland's CSO and it isn't with Ferguson. Pointing out hypocrisy is part of what a free press should be doing and airbrushing that out to hyperventilate over fake comparisons isn't progress.
Why was the woman's face splashed bigger than anything else?
Men seem to like that watching that sort of thing. So people tell me.
Sure, but this wasn't a celeb. Just a bog standard faithless woman. Imagine the embarrassment for her and her family. Just not on.
It’s also pretty cynical to wait until Sunday to make the official announcement given the review is today. It’s going to be a lovely day tomorrow (and may well be all weekend) and people want to know if they can go out and enjoy it.
I can’t imagine that’s a coincidence. They fear big VE Day crowds, but I think that’s misplaced.
I think it was a knee-jerk reaction from Boris. He was being mullered by Starmer at PMQs. Swirling around his head would have been tomorrow's negative headlines, and then the lightbulb moment! By saying something about easing lockdown all the bad headlines go away and PMQs is a default Boris win! Boom! And then everything runs away from him and the furious backpedaling begins.
They've been floating ideas about lifting the lockdown all week in the press. It was always going to happen. Although I think most changes won't happen until the end of the next three week review period. Maybe we'll be allowed out at Whitsun
I no longer consider myself bound by these stupid rules. They’ve lost all credibility with me.
I will maintain social distancing, sure, but otherwise (when I’m not working - rare) I’ll go out whenever I want to do whatever I want with my family.
It may surprise you to know that this girl, on the Left, is in wholehearted agreement.
I guess in this age of self identification we must take your word for it in spite of a mass of contrary evidence.
My furlough has been extended by another two weeks. I just wish I could do something with the time other than sit at home. So far I've started learning Italian, become a pretty decent baker, learned how to make pasta without a pasta machine and started researching how to brew my own beer. I'm running out of things to do.
I picked up a bit of Italian when inter-railing as a youth.
e pericoloso sporgersi - it means "do not lean out of the window".
And I'll go with your perp Covid bonds - very good idea - so long as you consider my property tax. Year 1 quite big then annually at a low enough rate to avoid that "negative feedback loop" we were rather worried about.
I'd only have a wealth tax on non-primary residences and increase CGT on property investments and increase income taxes. I'd also have punitive taxation on property owned by people/companies that aren't resident for tax purposes. No more using London property as a bank account for oligarchs and tax evaders based in the Virgin Islands.
I've just followed up my covid test as it is now 6 days since I had it and the email said that in some circumstances it might take up to 5 days. It's easy to get through but some of the virtual call centre staff are very new and don't know what they're doing. The first was working her first shift and didn't know how to address the system to find out about tests that had previously taken place. The second said she needed my barcode number which is on a piece of paper you find in the test kit, so I scurried off to find it in the recycling. The third then used my personal data to raise a query without needing the barcode number! However she said it was taking up to 10 days in some cases as there is a backlog due to the number of tests sent out at the end of last week.
Anecdote comparison with the situation in Germany (Berlin). A friend had flu symptoms on Sunday and Monday. There was good reason for her to get tested before this weekend, so she went to have a test on Monday. She got the result in under 24 hours. Thankfully negative. She does not have any fast-track status such as working in a hospital.
Not getting test result within 5 days is just crazy, the whole "test as much as possible" strategy is undervalued by slow processing of results.
Rather than the arbitrary 100k a day target, Hancock would have been far better promising lesser numbers, but with time targets e.g. all NHS staff & hospital admissions within 24hrs, plebs 48hrs. With this disease speed of diagnosis is key, especially if you are in a position to spread it to a lot of people or needes on the frontline.
Once the 100k by May 1st target was rather stupidly plucked from the air it then became the priority to meet that target for political rather than health reasons.
I think the lockdown is stupid and pointless and is probably killing or harming more people than the virus. I am amazed at the almost total lack of questioning of the policy and how readily people submit themselves to these rules. Now the bloke who recommended it is caught breaking his own policy. We have empty hospitals, idle doctors, vulnerable people isolated, mental health problems soaring, urgent treatments cancelled, people too scared to go to the doctor, businesses folding, unemployment surging. And yet virtually no one outside the twittersphere (maybe Peter Hitchens) has seriously asked WTF?
I am also surprised people just accept that the lockdown as the panacea to prevent Covid 19 spread, especially as our R figure was likely below 1 when we went into lockdown (based on the hospital admission peak on the 2nd April 2020). Maybe this much talked about enquiry will find that the lockdown only had a marginal impact on Covid-19 and that the other negative impacts of it were greater than its positives.
I really don't believe that graph as you can make it say whatever you want by picking different lag times. The government's advice was R was around 2 when the lockdown started.
I am not basing it on that graph at all because I don't know what parameters he used to produce it. I am just using basic common sense. If the peak of hospital admissions was the 2nd April then logically the peak of infections must have been 10-15 days before that..
So, err, the 23 of March then? When lockdown was enacted?
Absolutely, so that means the biggest reductions in the R figure were before lockdown.
Well, yes. It had the biggest possibility of reduction when it started higher and when the low-hanging fruit was picked first. It still needed to be pushed below 1.0, though, and that's where the lockdown has helped. It does look as though Rt has averaged about 0.8 over the period since the peak, which doesn't give us a great deal of flex - but does give us some flex.
A useful graph is that of transport activity, which started coming down from about the 13th, hurtled downwards in the week before the lockdown (which we all pretty well knew was coming) and was held down by the lockdown:
The analysis combines data on Covid-19 deaths with information on ethnicity from the 2011 Census.
It takes account of age, where people live and some measures of deprivation, disadvantage and health. After adjusting for all these factors, black men and women were 90% more likely to die with Covid-19 than white people.
Men and women from Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities were also at higher risk than white people, though not by as much with the data showing their increased risk was between 30- 80%.
"But an analysis based on the census data cannot fully explain the reasons for the higher risk because it does not take into account people’s current health, if they are in more crowded living conditions, are exposed to the virus through front-line roles - or other differences between communities that can increase risk."
Why can't they list one of the obvious potential reasons, a genetic difference? It already well known there are difference between ethnicity when it comes to a number of diseases, it wouldn't be that surprising if it was the case with coronavirus. Its not racist to say so.
Also, there appears to be a clear difference between genders. Again, suggesting some sort of genetic difference.
I think the lockdown is stupid and pointless and is probably killing or harming more people than the virus. I am amazed at the almost total lack of questioning of the policy and how readily people submit themselves to these rules. Now the bloke who recommended it is caught breaking his own policy. We have empty hospitals, idle doctors, vulnerable people isolated, mental health problems soaring, urgent treatments cancelled, people too scared to go to the doctor, businesses folding, unemployment surging. And yet virtually no one outside the twittersphere (maybe Peter Hitchens) has seriously asked WTF?
I am also surprised people just accept that the lockdown as the panacea to prevent Covid 19 spread, especially as our R figure was likely below 1 when we went into lockdown (based on the hospital admission peak on the 2nd April 2020). Maybe this much talked about enquiry will find that the lockdown only had a marginal impact on Covid-19 and that the other negative impacts of it were greater than its positives.
I really don't believe that graph as you can make it say whatever you want by picking different lag times. The government's advice was R was around 2 when the lockdown started.
I am not basing it on that graph at all because I don't know what parameters he used to produce it. I am just using basic common sense. If the peak of hospital admissions was the 2nd April then logically the peak of infections must have been 10-15 days before that..
So, err, the 23 of March then? When lockdown was enacted?
Absolutely, so that means the biggest reductions in the R figure were before lockdown.
Well, yes. It had the biggest possibility of reduction when it started higher and when the low-hanging fruit was picked first. It still needed to be pushed below 1.0, though, and that's where the lockdown has helped. It does look as though Rt has averaged about 0.8 over the period since the peak, which doesn't give us a great deal of flex - but does give us some flex.
A useful graph is that of transport activity, which started coming down from about the 13th, hurtled downwards in the week before the lockdown (which we all pretty well knew was coming) and was held down by the lockdown:
Well indeed. The alternative to a formal lockdown was not business as normal it was an informal one.
I’m back suffice to say diarrhea and chemo still in hospital so won’t bore everybody
Very glad to hear it. Hope you continue to improve and that your wife is managing OK. All that going on in the middle of a real lockdown, you have my sympathy.
Agreed welcome back nichomar and best wishes to you
I think the lockdown is stupid and pointless and is probably killing or harming more people than the virus. I am amazed at the almost total lack of questioning of the policy and how readily people submit themselves to these rules. Now the bloke who recommended it is caught breaking his own policy. We have empty hospitals, idle doctors, vulnerable people isolated, mental health problems soaring, urgent treatments cancelled, people too scared to go to the doctor, businesses folding, unemployment surging. And yet virtually no one outside the twittersphere (maybe Peter Hitchens) has seriously asked WTF?
I am also surprised people just accept that the lockdown as the panacea to prevent Covid 19 spread, especially as our R figure was likely below 1 when we went into lockdown (based on the hospital admission peak on the 2nd April 2020). Maybe this much talked about enquiry will find that the lockdown only had a marginal impact on Covid-19 and that the other negative impacts of it were greater than its positives.
I really don't believe that graph as you can make it say whatever you want by picking different lag times. The government's advice was R was around 2 when the lockdown started.
I am not basing it on that graph at all because I don't know what parameters he used to produce it. I am just using basic common sense. If the peak of hospital admissions was the 2nd April then logically the peak of infections must have been 10-15 days before that..
So, err, the 23 of March then? When lockdown was enacted?
Absolutely, so that means the biggest reductions in the R figure were before lockdown.
Well, yes. It had the biggest possibility of reduction when it started higher and when the low-hanging fruit was picked first. It still needed to be pushed below 1.0, though, and that's where the lockdown has helped. It does look as though Rt has averaged about 0.8 over the period since the peak, which doesn't give us a great deal of flex - but does give us some flex.
A useful graph is that of transport activity, which started coming down from about the 13th, hurtled downwards in the week before the lockdown (which we all pretty well knew was coming) and was held down by the lockdown:
Sturgeon currently confirming that the rate is around 1.0 in Scotland. The likelihood of this also being the similar in areas of Northern England is clear, given the figures.
I think the lockdown is stupid and pointless and is probably killing or harming more people than the virus. I am amazed at the almost total lack of questioning of the policy and how readily people submit themselves to these rules. Now the bloke who recommended it is caught breaking his own policy. We have empty hospitals, idle doctors, vulnerable people isolated, mental health problems soaring, urgent treatments cancelled, people too scared to go to the doctor, businesses folding, unemployment surging. And yet virtually no one outside the twittersphere (maybe Peter Hitchens) has seriously asked WTF?
I am also surprised people just accept that the lockdown as the panacea to prevent Covid 19 spread, especially as our R figure was likely below 1 when we went into lockdown (based on the hospital admission peak on the 2nd April 2020). Maybe this much talked about enquiry will find that the lockdown only had a marginal impact on Covid-19 and that the other negative impacts of it were greater than its positives.
I really don't believe that graph as you can make it say whatever you want by picking different lag times. The government's advice was R was around 2 when the lockdown started.
I am not basing it on that graph at all because I don't know what parameters he used to produce it. I am just using basic common sense. If the peak of hospital admissions was the 2nd April then logically the peak of infections must have been 10-15 days before that..
So, err, the 23 of March then? When lockdown was enacted?
Absolutely, so that means the biggest reductions in the R figure were before lockdown.
Your 10-15 day estimate is simply wrong. It's exactly the same logic that was used to make the graph from a few days ago. The advice from the boffins at the time was R was above two at the time of the lockdown.
Why is the 10-15 day estimate wrong? Boris showed it was about that.
Boris was within the window of median times. Exposure to symptoms: Interquartile range 2-8 days; median 4 days (can be longer; up to 12 days has been recorded, of course). Symptoms to hospitalisation: Interquartile range 4-8 days; median 7 days.
It does seem likely that there is some substantial genetic effect here, or at least some quite big effect which is not simply social deprivation and pre-existing conditions. If that is correct, then it is further reason to be cautious about international comparisons.
Eastern Europe has a very low death rate
Yes, and Germany and Austria of course. Maybe there is some genetic or cultural factor here, overlaying the differences in government and healthcare-system response.
What are the adjustments the ONS make to create the level playing field between ethnicities, Richard?
Obviously there are many uncertainties (hence the error bars), but this is about as authoritative as any analysis can be on the data currently available.
Are the ethnicities that are disproportionately dying from covid also disproportionally catching it?
It does seem likely that there is some substantial genetic effect here, or at least some quite big effect which is not simply social deprivation and pre-existing conditions. If that is correct, then it is further reason to be cautious about international comparisons.
Eastern Europe has a very low death rate
Yes, and Germany and Austria of course. Maybe there is some genetic or cultural factor here, overlaying the differences in government and healthcare-system response.
What are the adjustments the ONS make to create the level playing field between ethnicities, Richard?
Obviously there are many uncertainties (hence the error bars), but this is about as authoritative as any analysis can be on the data currently available.
Are the ethnicities that are disproportionately dying from covid also disproportionally catching it?
its been a busy few days with work so not had much chance to even look at PB let alone post. But just wanted to say what a fantastic thread header Cyclefree wrote for the previous thread. Extremely well presented and informative.
PB at its best.
I agree. Just read it. Very good. As was Alastair's WW2 one.
Thank you both.
I hope the government reads, understands and follows!
We will see.
Did I detect just a touch of special pleading for your daughter in there?
Yes. Unashamedly so. Watching her trying to build up and maintain the business and her concern for her employees and the effect this is having on her and others in her situation in this area has given me an insight I did not have before. At least not at such a visceral level. I am, frankly, desperately worried. If it is not viable - and I don’t see how it will be for a while yet - its closure will have a terrible effect on lots of people, directly and indirectly, and there are not many alternatives available.
And do not forget my sons either. Or me, come to that. My work is not really feasible if people cannot meet. The entire Cyclefree family could very soon be permanently unemployed unless we can get jobs with the NHS which will likely soon be the only employer left in the country.
Tough times. Those outside the public sector and large safe companies are very exposed.
I am not sure there are many safe companies left.
As long as there are burglars, people will always need safes.
BoE suggesting that future quarters will have some of the biggest growth the country has ever seen.
Yes. But you do know what the end result on the numbers are if something decreases by 90% and then increases by 90%...
The BoE seemed were more optimistic than that, weren't they?
Much more. 14% decline followed by 15% growth.
So let me get this straight on views on the BoE:
a) Brexit: useless, politically motivated, all remainers, forecasts should be ignored; and b) CV-19: seers of our age, got it about right, sounds sensible, yes we'll take those forecasts.
Is that it?
Given that Brexit was an extremely loaded political issue and Coronavirus is an act of God, it would not be illogical to place more trust in the BOE's analysis of the latter than in its analysis of the former. I'm not saying it is the case, but the two views are not inconsistent with each other.
Wait, no, I tried reading it and gave up after he complained that we don't have a functioning free press, on the basis that they won't all write what he wants them to write.
I think his point is more that they seem to write what the government wants them to write. The best bit of the article for me was - regarding the Ferguson thing - his saying how tacky and inappropriate it was to splash the WOMAN'S face all over the front pages. I'm glad I'm not alone in finding that completely outrageous.
Is there any evidence to the claim the government wanted them to write that?
And anyway his whole thesis is nonsense since he's spinning the claim that the UK's death toll is higher than Italy's when we know that is factually incorrect given Italy's death toll isn't trying to include the care home deaths of which we know there have been a lot.
So he's complaining the press aren't lying. What a shame.
Can I link to a memo from the government asking for the papers to lead with a massive photo of Ferguson's girlfriend rather than our Covid-19 death toll becoming the highest in Europe?
Let me have a root around. I'll be back.
Thanks. Let me know when you are back.
Again feat toll being highest in Europe is nonsense unless you look per capita (Belgium are worse) or like for like with accurate stats (Italy and Spain are worse)
It's a landmark that ought to trigger debate and introspection. The debate to include points of context and mitigation such as "apples and pears" and the introspection to focus on the lives lost, mistakes made, the way forward. That's what I would expect. Not a foaming laceration of the government. Not an airbrushing of the big picture in favour of sexist trivia.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of those involved in leading our response is not sexist trivia. It wasn't with NZ's health minister, it wasn't with Scotland's CSO and it isn't with Ferguson. Pointing out hypocrisy is part of what a free press should be doing and airbrushing that out to hyperventilate over fake comparisons isn't progress.
Why was the woman's face splashed bigger than anything else?
It does seem likely that there is some substantial genetic effect here, or at least some quite big effect which is not simply social deprivation and pre-existing conditions. If that is correct, then it is further reason to be cautious about international comparisons.
Eastern Europe has a very low death rate
Yes, and Germany and Austria of course. Maybe there is some genetic or cultural factor here, overlaying the differences in government and healthcare-system response.
What are the adjustments the ONS make to create the level playing field between ethnicities, Richard?
Obviously there are many uncertainties (hence the error bars), but this is about as authoritative as any analysis can be on the data currently available.
Are the ethnicities that are disproportionately dying from covid also disproportionally catching it?
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have spread to greater China. There was a piece on the World Service last night on how poaching has gone through the roof because tourist money has disappeared with the resultant effect on security. The 'worthless medicine based on the parts of hapless animals' sector seems more voracious than ever.
Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have spread to greater China. There was a piece on the World Service last night on how poaching has gone through the roof because tourist money has disappeared with the resultant effect on security. The 'worthless medicine based on the parts of hapless animals' sector seems more voracious than ever.
Ironic, since that's how we (probably) got into this position in the first place. You'd have hoped that would drive an improvement in food safety standards and wildlife protections, not the reverse.
My furlough has been extended by another two weeks. I just wish I could do something with the time other than sit at home. So far I've started learning Italian, become a pretty decent baker, learned how to make pasta without a pasta machine and started researching how to brew my own beer. I'm running out of things to do.
Are you in town? How about birds and birdsong; cloud types; tree types; counting paving stones; 8hr plank; learning the harppenny whistlelead guitarpiano recorder online; War & Peace; A la recherche du temps perdu; Catcher in the Rye; the entire Alex Rider back catalogue; the entire Asterix back catalogue; etc
Trouble with Catcher in the Rye is it only takes 3 hours. Although it can consume far more time if you read it and then spend months pretending to be Holden Caulfield - as I did.
Rather than Catcher In The Rye, may I recommend The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler. It's a sort of Canadian version, set in Montreal. I like both books, but think Kravitz is better (that's not very controversial) and that Richler was a better writer than Salinger (that's a little more so but far from untenable.)
There is a distant PB connection in that MR's daughter contributes here from time to time as Marf the cartoonist. She likes it when people mention her Dad's books.
Today should have been one of the highlights of my political year - local elections. I would normally have been actively campaigning and analysing the results. It appears that the official position is that the elections will be deferred for a year and that we will have double elections in 2021. But councillors and other elected officials can die, resign, or be removed under the 6 month rule at any time, I believe there are over 100 such vacancies at the moment, We could be in a position where local people are entirely unrepresented. Should we be looking at other options. These might include all postal ballots, the party holding the seat able to nominate a replacement, the chief executive to nominate a replacement ( for example is an Independent held the seat). Thoughts?
The analysis combines data on Covid-19 deaths with information on ethnicity from the 2011 Census.
It takes account of age, where people live and some measures of deprivation, disadvantage and health. After adjusting for all these factors, black men and women were 90% more likely to die with Covid-19 than white people.
Men and women from Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities were also at higher risk than white people, though not by as much with the data showing their increased risk was between 30- 80%.
"But an analysis based on the census data cannot fully explain the reasons for the higher risk because it does not take into account people’s current health, if they are in more crowded living conditions, are exposed to the virus through front-line roles - or other differences between communities that can increase risk."
Why can't they list one of the obvious potential reasons, a genetic difference? It already well known there are difference between ethnicity when it comes to a number of diseases, it wouldn't be that surprising if it was the case with coronavirus. Its not racist to say so.
Also, there appears to be a clear difference between genders. Again, suggesting some sort of genetic difference.
Maybe it isn't politically correct to talk about possible genetic differences.
And when I said if we tried the South Korea approach here it wouldn't fly...some on here said, but no this is exceptional times, of course we can....
Even the UK approach, which doesn't collect anywhere near the level of information and not in the same universe of the SK survillence system, gets this response.
Wait, no, I tried reading it and gave up after he complained that we don't have a functioning free press, on the basis that they won't all write what he wants them to write.
I think his point is more that they seem to write what the government wants them to write. The best bit of the article for me was - regarding the Ferguson thing - his saying how tacky and inappropriate it was to splash the WOMAN'S face all over the front pages. I'm glad I'm not alone in finding that completely outrageous.
Is there any evidence to the claim the government wanted them to write that?
And anyway his whole thesis is nonsense since he's spinning the claim that the UK's death toll is higher than Italy's when we know that is factually incorrect given Italy's death toll isn't trying to include the care home deaths of which we know there have been a lot.
So he's complaining the press aren't lying. What a shame.
Can I link to a memo from the government asking for the papers to lead with a massive photo of Ferguson's girlfriend rather than our Covid-19 death toll becoming the highest in Europe?
Let me have a root around. I'll be back.
Thanks. Let me know when you are back.
Again feat toll being highest in Europe is nonsense unless you look per capita (Belgium are worse) or like for like with accurate stats (Italy and Spain are worse)
It's a landmark that ought to trigger debate and introspection. The debate to include points of context and mitigation such as "apples and pears" and the introspection to focus on the lives lost, mistakes made, the way forward. That's what I would expect. Not a foaming laceration of the government. Not an airbrushing of the big picture in favour of sexist trivia.
Pointing out the hypocrisy of those involved in leading our response is not sexist trivia. It wasn't with NZ's health minister, it wasn't with Scotland's CSO and it isn't with Ferguson. Pointing out hypocrisy is part of what a free press should be doing and airbrushing that out to hyperventilate over fake comparisons isn't progress.
Why was the woman's face splashed bigger than anything else?
My furlough has been extended by another two weeks. I just wish I could do something with the time other than sit at home. So far I've started learning Italian, become a pretty decent baker, learned how to make pasta without a pasta machine and started researching how to brew my own beer. I'm running out of things to do.
Are you in town? How about birds and birdsong; cloud types; tree types; counting paving stones; 8hr plank; learning the harppenny whistlelead guitarpiano recorder online; War & Peace; A la recherche du temps perdu; Catcher in the Rye; the entire Alex Rider back catalogue; the entire Asterix back catalogue; etc
Trouble with Catcher in the Rye is it only takes 3 hours. Although it can consume far more time if you read it and then spend months pretending to be Holden Caulfield - as I did.
Rather than Catcher In The Rye, may I recommend The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz by Mordecai Richler. It's a sort of Canadian version, set in Montreal. I like both books, but think Kravitz is better (that's not very controversial) and that Richler was a better writer than Salinger (that's a little more so but far from untenable.)
There is a distant PB connection in that MR's daughter contributes here from time to time as Marf the cartoonist. She likes it when people mention her Dad's books.
The analysis combines data on Covid-19 deaths with information on ethnicity from the 2011 Census.
It takes account of age, where people live and some measures of deprivation, disadvantage and health. After adjusting for all these factors, black men and women were 90% more likely to die with Covid-19 than white people.
Men and women from Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities were also at higher risk than white people, though not by as much with the data showing their increased risk was between 30- 80%.
"But an analysis based on the census data cannot fully explain the reasons for the higher risk because it does not take into account people’s current health, if they are in more crowded living conditions, are exposed to the virus through front-line roles - or other differences between communities that can increase risk."
Why can't they list one of the obvious potential reasons, a genetic difference? It already well known there are difference between ethnicity when it comes to a number of diseases, it wouldn't be that surprising if it was the case with coronavirus. Its not racist to say so.
Also, there appears to be a clear difference between genders. Again, suggesting some sort of genetic difference.
Maybe it isn't politically correct to talk about possible genetic differences.
It is interesting that they cannot find any elevated risk in the mixed race sample.
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
We can argue until we are blue in the face about the stats. As I explained in detail yesterday, I think they show that the UK is probably already the third worst in the world on a per capita death rate. But that is besides the point. What matters is I think is that the general public will have in the main accepted that the UK's performance on the health aspects of the crisis has been at the very least pretty poor compared with most other countries.
This perception poses particular risks for the Government if the lockdown is extended. We now watching a series of countries easing back significantly on their restrictive measures, to the extent that life elsewhere is starting to return to some sort of normality. It's reasonable for the public to ask: "why isn't the UK in a position to follow suit?" The answer is not the one the Government tried to spin over a week ago, echoing Merkel's words designed to guard against complacency to imply that German easing was premature and we were wise to hang fire here. It is instead simply that our performance here has been so much worse such that we are nowhere near the position where we could let go significantly.
This means that, either way, the government could lose out following the decision on Sunday. If the easing is fairly superficial, as it should be for at least another week or two, it will only reinforce the view that we are seriously out of step with the rest of the world's success and that our government's failures are impacting directly on everyone's lives. Yet if the easing is much wider, it will seen by many as a premature decision driven by the politics rather than the public health reality, and if the limited progress to date starts to be compromised they will suffer the political consequences.
It does seem likely that there is some substantial genetic effect here, or at least some quite big effect which is not simply social deprivation and pre-existing conditions. If that is correct, then it is further reason to be cautious about international comparisons.
AFAICT the virus is racist, sexist, and ageist. If it could speak and use the wrong pronouns that would be a full house.
A double lung transplant that conveniently matched with a dead donor on the very same day....with a country that has hardly anybody on a donor lists....
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
It's not, but it's also on the government for not releasing the stats by date of death and compiling their own graphs by reporting date. You can't blame journalists for using the government's own graphs.
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
It's not, but it's also on the government for not releasing the stats by date of death and compiling their own graphs by reporting date. You can't blame journalists for using the government's own graphs.
I have said for weeks the government charts are stupid and I don't know why they don't use the date of death (as they release all the data in excel spreadsheet every day), but I also expect by now that journalists have informed themselves with these issues properly.
The whole point of such a job is to cut through the BS and get to the truth, no? We aren't asking them to read Ferguson's model code* and form a criticism of that, we are asking them to create some very simple charts.
* BTW, I wasted an hour last night looking at the "cleaned up" version on github. Still a shitshow and stuck in the dark ages. No use of standard modern maths libraries like Eigen or MKL.
Today should have been one of the highlights of my political year - local elections. I would normally have been actively campaigning and analysing the results. It appears that the official position is that the elections will be deferred for a year and that we will have double elections in 2021. But councillors and other elected officials can die, resign, or be removed under the 6 month rule at any time, I believe there are over 100 such vacancies at the moment, We could be in a position where local people are entirely unrepresented. Should we be looking at other options. These might include all postal ballots, the party holding the seat able to nominate a replacement, the chief executive to nominate a replacement ( for example is an Independent held the seat). Thoughts?
I was wondering on what authority the elections were cancelled. I can sees it made obvious sense, but where does one draw the line in cancelling democracy. We can already see the fear in the USA re the Presidential election being cancelled or delayed.
Who decides what the line is between taking common sense measures and ceasing power? (I know a bit dramatic!). I assume there are some laws in place, but I have no idea what they are.
Today should have been one of the highlights of my political year - local elections. I would normally have been actively campaigning and analysing the results. It appears that the official position is that the elections will be deferred for a year and that we will have double elections in 2021. But councillors and other elected officials can die, resign, or be removed under the 6 month rule at any time, I believe there are over 100 such vacancies at the moment, We could be in a position where local people are entirely unrepresented. Should we be looking at other options. These might include all postal ballots, the party holding the seat able to nominate a replacement, the chief executive to nominate a replacement ( for example is an Independent held the seat). Thoughts?
I was wondering on what authority the elections were cancelled. I can sees it made obvious sense, but where does one draw the line in cancelling democracy. We can already see the fear in the USA re the Presidential election being cancelled or delayed.
Who decides what the line is between taking common sense measures and ceasing power? (I know a bit dramatic!). I assume there are some laws in place, but I have no idea what they are.
Local government exists at the pleasure of central government.
And when I said if we tried the South Korea approach here it wouldn't fly...some on here said, but no this is exceptional times, of course we can....
Even the UK approach, which doesn't collect anywhere near the level of information and not in the same universe of the SK survillence system, gets this response.
If you read the article the committee's saying they *don't* object to the government using the data for this purpose, but it should pass a law to ban it from doing the things it's already pinky-swearing it's not going to do.
IIUC South Korea passed legislation about what data it can use for contract tracing, the UK government has a huge majority, it's had plenty of notice, and it's already been passing related legislation very fast. Why can't it pass legislation to make its promises binding?
I think the lockdown is stupid and pointless and is probably killing or harming more people than the virus. I am amazed at the almost total lack of questioning of the policy and how readily people submit themselves to these rules. Now the bloke who recommended it is caught breaking his own policy. We have empty hospitals, idle doctors, vulnerable people isolated, mental health problems soaring, urgent treatments cancelled, people too scared to go to the doctor, businesses folding, unemployment surging. And yet virtually no one outside the twittersphere (maybe Peter Hitchens) has seriously asked WTF?
I am also surprised people just accept that the lockdown as the panacea to prevent Covid 19 spread, especially as our R figure was likely below 1 when we went into lockdown (based on the hospital admission peak on the 2nd April 2020). Maybe this much talked about enquiry will find that the lockdown only had a marginal impact on Covid-19 and that the other negative impacts of it were greater than its positives.
I really don't believe that graph as you can make it say whatever you want by picking different lag times. The government's advice was R was around 2 when the lockdown started.
I am not basing it on that graph at all because I don't know what parameters he used to produce it. I am just using basic common sense. If the peak of hospital admissions was the 2nd April then logically the peak of infections must have been 10-15 days before that..
So, err, the 23 of March then? When lockdown was enacted?
Absolutely, so that means the biggest reductions in the R figure were before lockdown.
Well, yes. It had the biggest possibility of reduction when it started higher and when the low-hanging fruit was picked first. It still needed to be pushed below 1.0, though, and that's where the lockdown has helped. It does look as though Rt has averaged about 0.8 over the period since the peak, which doesn't give us a great deal of flex - but does give us some flex.
A useful graph is that of transport activity, which started coming down from about the 13th, hurtled downwards in the week before the lockdown (which we all pretty well knew was coming) and was held down by the lockdown:
Well indeed. The alternative to a formal lockdown was not business as normal it was an informal one.
Exactly. And the hospitality sector was downright angry with Boris and the Government on the 16th of March with their "avoid restaurants and bars" advice, but without making it binding (and with travel advice). It meant that they were in the position of being allowed to operate, but with all their customers told "Don't go there - you may die!"
No support, no legal cover, no chance of claiming on any insurances because they were still allowed to operate. Just in an incredibly hostile business atmosphere.
The lockdown formalising it and coming with business support for the duration unwound a lot of the anger.
One trouble with easing the lockdown is that it is hard to do it in a way that does not draw attention to its arbitrary nature. The front pages in the header mention picnics and country visits, which of course caught many people out when they were first banned -- even pb was unsure if some activities were actually verboten or if the police were overreaching. Still, four years before an election.
I don’t buy this “we’re 4 years away from an election so no need to worry” meme.
The Tories lost the 1997 election in autumn 1992 when they cocked up massively on Black Wednesday over the ERM. How they dealt with that and its aftermath and their tin ear for its effect on people was fatal to their chances at the next election.
How the government deals with the virus and its economic effects will determine the next election. People who lose jobs, businesses, homes, futures because of government decisions now will not forget this in 4 years time.
I don't really disagree , but the counterevidence is there from the 1992 election. Despite the severe recession which had taken hold in 1990 - and which was continuing at the time of Polling Day in April 1992 - the Tories were reelected.
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
You don';t even need to Prof Cricket it all, the information to date is all perfectly accessible on the NHS Covid website.
Took me about 1/2 an hour to knock up the correct graph and also calculate the English hospital death halving time since the peak.
I know, that's what I said down thread. They just aren't doing their job, it is simple as that. But the fact there is a number of reputable people on twitter doing this, means they don't even have to lift a finger. There is just no excuse. Prof Cricket has even been on R4 to explain this.
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
It's not, but it's also on the government for not releasing the stats by date of death and compiling their own graphs by reporting date. You can't blame journalists for using the government's own graphs.
I have said for weeks the government charts are stupid and I don't know why they don't use the date of death, but I also expect by now that journalists have informed themselves with these issues properly.
The whole point of such a job is to cut through the BS and get to the truth, no? We aren't asking them to read Ferguson's model code* and form a criticism of that, we are asking them to create some very simple charts.
* BTW, I wasted an hour last night looking at the "cleaned up" version on github. Still a shitshow and stuck in the dark ages. No use of standard modern maths libraries like Eigen or MKL.
Again, I agree with all of that but it's the government's fault for not actually providing a single source of truth for this data. We should already have a BQ public dataset with all of the case data sufficiently anonymised. All 200k positive test results and 1.5m actual tests should be an a bunch of tables that Joe public can access as well as academics, journalists and the tech sector. It would legitimately put us ahead of the game but no one in government has the vision to push this angle. The current data releases are both insufficient and badly organised.
Today should have been one of the highlights of my political year - local elections. I would normally have been actively campaigning and analysing the results. It appears that the official position is that the elections will be deferred for a year and that we will have double elections in 2021. But councillors and other elected officials can die, resign, or be removed under the 6 month rule at any time, I believe there are over 100 such vacancies at the moment, We could be in a position where local people are entirely unrepresented. Should we be looking at other options. These might include all postal ballots, the party holding the seat able to nominate a replacement, the chief executive to nominate a replacement ( for example is an Independent held the seat). Thoughts?
I was wondering on what authority the elections were cancelled. I can sees it made obvious sense, but where does one draw the line in cancelling democracy. We can already see the fear in the USA re the Presidential election being cancelled or delayed.
Who decides what the line is between taking common sense measures and ceasing power? (I know a bit dramatic!). I assume there are some laws in place, but I have no idea what they are.
Local government exists at the pleasure of central government.
OK that makes sense. What if we came to end of a 5 year term of parliament? I assume parliament could legislate to continue. Can it? But again potentially one hell of a precedent.
Today should have been one of the highlights of my political year - local elections. I would normally have been actively campaigning and analysing the results. It appears that the official position is that the elections will be deferred for a year and that we will have double elections in 2021. But councillors and other elected officials can die, resign, or be removed under the 6 month rule at any time, I believe there are over 100 such vacancies at the moment, We could be in a position where local people are entirely unrepresented. Should we be looking at other options. These might include all postal ballots, the party holding the seat able to nominate a replacement, the chief executive to nominate a replacement ( for example is an Independent held the seat). Thoughts?
I was wondering on what authority the elections were cancelled. I can sees it made obvious sense, but where does one draw the line in cancelling democracy. We can already see the fear in the USA re the Presidential election being cancelled or delayed.
Who decides what the line is between taking common sense measures and ceasing power? (I know a bit dramatic!). I assume there are some laws in place, but I have no idea what they are.
Local government exists at the pleasure of central government.
OK that makes sense. What if we came to end of a 5 year term of parliament? I assume parliament could legislate to continue. Can it? But again potentially one hell of a precedent.
Acts were passed in WW2 extending the life of a Parliament. It could do that indefinitely, although the peasants may get restless.
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
It's not, but it's also on the government for not releasing the stats by date of death and compiling their own graphs by reporting date. You can't blame journalists for using the government's own graphs.
I have said for weeks the government charts are stupid and I don't know why they don't use the date of death, but I also expect by now that journalists have informed themselves with these issues properly.
The whole point of such a job is to cut through the BS and get to the truth, no? We aren't asking them to read Ferguson's model code* and form a criticism of that, we are asking them to create some very simple charts.
* BTW, I wasted an hour last night looking at the "cleaned up" version on github. Still a shitshow and stuck in the dark ages. No use of standard modern maths libraries like Eigen or MKL.
Again, I agree with all of that but it's the government's fault for not actually providing a single source of truth for this data. We should already have a BQ public dataset with all of the case data sufficiently anonymised. All 200k positive test results and 1.5m actual tests should be an a bunch of tables that Joe public can access as well as academics, journalists and the tech sector. It would legitimately put us ahead of the game but no one in government has the vision to push this angle. The current data releases are both insufficient and badly organised.
Absolutely. So much for Big Dom and his love of tech. And again, I am going to be really interested what if anything the likes of Demis from Deepmind have said during SAGE.
Deepmind route to profitability is all about processing big health data, you would have thought he might be saying you know what you should do with this....not stick it 250 different excel spreadsheets.
The name given to VE Day in Germany is "Tag der Befreiung" meaning "Day of liberation", which sums up the view here very well. It was the day that the evil of the Nazi government was removed. There are many sad personal stories of soldiers and civillians who died, people who were also victims os the Nazi regime even though they were fighting for them.
Tomorrow is a public holiday in Berlin (not the rest of the country) and only for this year because of the 75th anniversary.
Calling it the Day of Liberation is a bit odd when you consider what happened to Berlin between 1945 and 1989. But from our point of view, it is right that we celebrate our triumph over Nazism, not the German people. We should also have a holiday to celebrate beating that other scourge of the 20th century - Marxism (VM day?). November 9th - the day the Berlin Wall came down - is probably the best day to do that.
Certainly a better day for a holiday than the second May Bank Holiday. Nobody knows what that is there for (Whitsun, apparently).
Not just Berlin but the whole of eastern Europe. From one malicious dictatorship to another all the way to 1989. I still find it staggering that so many thought that that brutal regime was admirable or anything other than contemptible in any sense. The fact that apparently clever people were apologists for such evil shows that there is nothing new about fake news or alternative facts.
Much like the deaf ear or blind eye shown by people like Thatcher to Pinochet's fascist regine in Chile - long after the evidence of atrocities and human rights abuses had become indisputable.
One trouble with easing the lockdown is that it is hard to do it in a way that does not draw attention to its arbitrary nature. The front pages in the header mention picnics and country visits, which of course caught many people out when they were first banned -- even pb was unsure if some activities were actually verboten or if the police were overreaching. Still, four years before an election.
I don’t buy this “we’re 4 years away from an election so no need to worry” meme.
The Tories lost the 1997 election in autumn 1992 when they cocked up massively on Black Wednesday over the ERM. How they dealt with that and its aftermath and their tin ear for its effect on people was fatal to their chances at the next election.
How the government deals with the virus and its economic effects will determine the next election. People who lose jobs, businesses, homes, futures because of government decisions now will not forget this in 4 years time.
I don't really disagree , but the counterevidence is there from the 1992 election. Despite the severe recession which had taken hold in 1990 - and which was continuing at the time of Polling Day in April 1992 - the Tories were reelected.
I think the Tories lost the 1997 election on the day they won the 1992 election. It was the worst thing that could have happened to them. If they had lost in 1992 they would probably have been back by 1996.
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
It's not, but it's also on the government for not releasing the stats by date of death and compiling their own graphs by reporting date. You can't blame journalists for using the government's own graphs.
I have said for weeks the government charts are stupid and I don't know why they don't use the date of death, but I also expect by now that journalists have informed themselves with these issues properly.
The whole point of such a job is to cut through the BS and get to the truth, no? We aren't asking them to read Ferguson's model code* and form a criticism of that, we are asking them to create some very simple charts.
* BTW, I wasted an hour last night looking at the "cleaned up" version on github. Still a shitshow and stuck in the dark ages. No use of standard modern maths libraries like Eigen or MKL.
Again, I agree with all of that but it's the government's fault for not actually providing a single source of truth for this data. We should already have a BQ public dataset with all of the case data sufficiently anonymised. All 200k positive test results and 1.5m actual tests should be an a bunch of tables that Joe public can access as well as academics, journalists and the tech sector. It would legitimately put us ahead of the game but no one in government has the vision to push this angle. The current data releases are both insufficient and badly organised.
Absolutely. So much for Big Dom and his love of tech. And again, I am going to be really interested what if anything the likes of Demis from Deepmind have said during SAGE.
Deepmind route to profitability is all about processing big health data, you would have thought he might be saying you know what you should do with this....not stick it 250 different excel spreadsheets.
I've actually contacted someone I know to ask if this can be achieved. Honestly, I don't mind doing it for free, using GCP the process is a piece of piss and would probably take 3-4 days to set up and automate.
Today should have been one of the highlights of my political year - local elections. I would normally have been actively campaigning and analysing the results. It appears that the official position is that the elections will be deferred for a year and that we will have double elections in 2021. But councillors and other elected officials can die, resign, or be removed under the 6 month rule at any time, I believe there are over 100 such vacancies at the moment, We could be in a position where local people are entirely unrepresented. Should we be looking at other options. These might include all postal ballots, the party holding the seat able to nominate a replacement, the chief executive to nominate a replacement ( for example is an Independent held the seat). Thoughts?
I was wondering on what authority the elections were cancelled. I can sees it made obvious sense, but where does one draw the line in cancelling democracy. We can already see the fear in the USA re the Presidential election being cancelled or delayed.
Who decides what the line is between taking common sense measures and ceasing power? (I know a bit dramatic!). I assume there are some laws in place, but I have no idea what they are.
Local government exists at the pleasure of central government.
OK that makes sense. What if we came to end of a 5 year term of parliament? I assume parliament could legislate to continue. Can it? But again potentially one hell of a precedent.
Acts were passed in WW2 extending the life of a Parliament. It could do that indefinitely, although the peasants may get restless.
I've just followed up my covid test as it is now 6 days since I had it and the email said that in some circumstances it might take up to 5 days. It's easy to get through but some of the virtual call centre staff are very new and don't know what they're doing. The first was working her first shift and didn't know how to address the system to find out about tests that had previously taken place. The second said she needed my barcode number which is on a piece of paper you find in the test kit, so I scurried off to find it in the recycling. The third then used my personal data to raise a query without needing the barcode number! However she said it was taking up to 10 days in some cases as there is a backlog due to the number of tests sent out at the end of last week.
Anecdote comparison with the situation in Germany (Berlin). A friend had flu symptoms on Sunday and Monday. There was good reason for her to get tested before this weekend, so she went to have a test on Monday. She got the result in under 24 hours. Thankfully negative. She does not have any fast-track status such as working in a hospital.
Not getting test result within 5 days is just crazy, the whole "test as much as possible" strategy is undervalued by slow processing of results.
Rather than the arbitrary 100k a day target, Hancock would have been far better promising lesser numbers, but with time targets e.g. all NHS staff & hospital admissions within 24hrs, plebs 48hrs. With this disease speed of diagnosis is key, especially if you are in a position to spread it to a lot of people or needes on the frontline.
Once the 100k by May 1st target was rather stupidly plucked from the air it then became the priority to meet that target for political rather than health reasons.
One trouble with easing the lockdown is that it is hard to do it in a way that does not draw attention to its arbitrary nature. The front pages in the header mention picnics and country visits, which of course caught many people out when they were first banned -- even pb was unsure if some activities were actually verboten or if the police were overreaching. Still, four years before an election.
I don’t buy this “we’re 4 years away from an election so no need to worry” meme.
The Tories lost the 1997 election in autumn 1992 when they cocked up massively on Black Wednesday over the ERM. How they dealt with that and its aftermath and their tin ear for its effect on people was fatal to their chances at the next election.
How the government deals with the virus and its economic effects will determine the next election. People who lose jobs, businesses, homes, futures because of government decisions now will not forget this in 4 years time.
I don't really disagree , but the counterevidence is there from the 1992 election. Despite the severe recession which had taken hold in 1990 - and which was continuing at the time of Polling Day in April 1992 - the Tories were reelected.
Recessions aren't the big negative for governments in subsequent elections that seems widely assumed.
In addition, the early 90s recession was neither severe nor local.
and its telling that the economic bit that did for the Tories in the early 90s wasn't the recession (Q3 1990 to Q3 1991) but something that happened in the following year (Q3 1992), and is perhaps more to do with the perception of what they did and the issues of leadership than specific economic losses. The following years saw UK more than recover, the Tories got precisely none of the credit.
Perhaps I'm not following the logic here. But even if the restrictions will be eased next week, how is that going to affect the ability to sunbathe over the weekend?
I've just followed up my covid test as it is now 6 days since I had it and the email said that in some circumstances it might take up to 5 days. It's easy to get through but some of the virtual call centre staff are very new and don't know what they're doing. The first was working her first shift and didn't know how to address the system to find out about tests that had previously taken place. The second said she needed my barcode number which is on a piece of paper you find in the test kit, so I scurried off to find it in the recycling. The third then used my personal data to raise a query without needing the barcode number! However she said it was taking up to 10 days in some cases as there is a backlog due to the number of tests sent out at the end of last week.
Anecdote comparison with the situation in Germany (Berlin). A friend had flu symptoms on Sunday and Monday. There was good reason for her to get tested before this weekend, so she went to have a test on Monday. She got the result in under 24 hours. Thankfully negative. She does not have any fast-track status such as working in a hospital.
Not getting test result within 5 days is just crazy, the whole "test as much as possible" strategy is undervalued by slow processing of results.
Rather than the arbitrary 100k a day target, Hancock would have been far better promising lesser numbers, but with time targets e.g. all NHS staff & hospital admissions within 24hrs, plebs 48hrs. With this disease speed of diagnosis is key, especially if you are in a position to spread it to a lot of people or needes on the frontline.
Once the 100k by May 1st target was rather stupidly plucked from the air it then became the priority to meet that target for political rather than health reasons.
Repeat for 200k target set by Boris yesterday
Goodhart's law. Did any of you listen to 'More or less' on this, this week. Tim Harford was rather good as usual.
Today should have been one of the highlights of my political year - local elections. I would normally have been actively campaigning and analysing the results. It appears that the official position is that the elections will be deferred for a year and that we will have double elections in 2021. But councillors and other elected officials can die, resign, or be removed under the 6 month rule at any time, I believe there are over 100 such vacancies at the moment, We could be in a position where local people are entirely unrepresented. Should we be looking at other options. These might include all postal ballots, the party holding the seat able to nominate a replacement, the chief executive to nominate a replacement ( for example is an Independent held the seat). Thoughts?
I was wondering on what authority the elections were cancelled. I can sees it made obvious sense, but where does one draw the line in cancelling democracy. We can already see the fear in the USA re the Presidential election being cancelled or delayed.
Who decides what the line is between taking common sense measures and ceasing power? (I know a bit dramatic!). I assume there are some laws in place, but I have no idea what they are.
Local government exists at the pleasure of central government.
OK that makes sense. What if we came to end of a 5 year term of parliament? I assume parliament could legislate to continue. Can it? But again potentially one hell of a precedent.
Acts were passed in WW2 extending the life of a Parliament. It could do that indefinitely, although the peasants may get restless.
Thank you.
The Prolongation of Parliament Act 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944:
Journalists making tw@ts of themselves again...just how dense are they still don't understand the "DATE OF DEATH"...this is literally a daily occurrence, that a journalist picks some graph or stat and then has to be corrected. Its not f##king rocket science.
It's not, but it's also on the government for not releasing the stats by date of death and compiling their own graphs by reporting date. You can't blame journalists for using the government's own graphs.
I have said for weeks the government charts are stupid and I don't know why they don't use the date of death, but I also expect by now that journalists have informed themselves with these issues properly.
The whole point of such a job is to cut through the BS and get to the truth, no? We aren't asking them to read Ferguson's model code* and form a criticism of that, we are asking them to create some very simple charts.
* BTW, I wasted an hour last night looking at the "cleaned up" version on github. Still a shitshow and stuck in the dark ages. No use of standard modern maths libraries like Eigen or MKL.
Again, I agree with all of that but it's the government's fault for not actually providing a single source of truth for this data. We should already have a BQ public dataset with all of the case data sufficiently anonymised. All 200k positive test results and 1.5m actual tests should be an a bunch of tables that Joe public can access as well as academics, journalists and the tech sector. It would legitimately put us ahead of the game but no one in government has the vision to push this angle. The current data releases are both insufficient and badly organised.
Absolutely. So much for Big Dom and his love of tech. And again, I am going to be really interested what if anything the likes of Demis from Deepmind have said during SAGE.
Deepmind route to profitability is all about processing big health data, you would have thought he might be saying you know what you should do with this....not stick it 250 different excel spreadsheets.
I've actually contacted someone I know to ask if this can be achieved. Honestly, I don't mind doing it for free, using GCP the process is a piece of piss and would probably take 3-4 days to set up and automate.
If we are to prepare for a return in the Autumn of this, there are so many tasks that the tech industry could / should be assisting with.
The issue is that it's only England and only hospital data. It's extremely hard work getting the same stats for the whole nation and include deaths in non-hospital settings. The ONS is the only real source of truth, but he data runs two weeks in arrears.
We can argue until we are blue in the face about the stats. As I explained in detail yesterday, I think they show that the UK is probably already the third worst in the world on a per capita death rate. But that is besides the point. What matters is I think is that the general public will have in the main accepted that the UK's performance on the health aspects of the crisis has been at the very least pretty poor compared with most other countries.
This perception poses particular risks for the Government if the lockdown is extended. We now watching a series of countries easing back significantly on their restrictive measures, to the extent that life elsewhere is starting to return to some sort of normality. It's reasonable for the public to ask: "why isn't the UK in a position to follow suit?" The answer is not the one the Government tried to spin over a week ago, echoing Merkel's words designed to guard against complacency to imply that German easing was premature and we were wise to hang fire here. It is instead simply that our performance here has been so much worse such that we are nowhere near the position where we could let go significantly.
This means that, either way, the government could lose out following the decision on Sunday. If the easing is fairly superficial, as it should be for at least another week or two, it will only reinforce the view that we are seriously out of step with the rest of the world's success and that our government's failures are impacting directly on everyone's lives. Yet if the easing is much wider, it will seen by many as a premature decision driven by the politics rather than the public health reality, and if the limited progress to date starts to be compromised they will suffer the political consequences.
The danger for the government is if the narrative takes hold that we have done worse than the rest of Europe. I feel that narrative is beginning to take hold despite HUFYD's best efforts.
For a short while it will be credible to say we locked down later so will re-open later but the response to that might well become "but why did we lock down later?"
Politically the government is entering dangerous times. We have the highest death toll in Europe, that is a fact but it also true to say that we have less deaths per head of population than a handful of European countries. What happens if and when we overtake those countries in terms of deaths per million as well?
I think the government has handled the economic aspects of the crisis well but the handling of the health aspects are not looking good at all.
The issue is that it's ou England and oy hospital data. It's extremely hard work getting the same stats for the whole nation and include deaths in non-hospital settings. The ONS is the only real source of truth, but he data runs two weeks in arrears.
Yes - critically important since (for example) today's data includes ~130 backdated cases (primarily from two hospitals) almost all from before 21 April...
The issue of Scotland, Wales etc. suggesting that they will depart from UK government line is for one main reason, that figures have been distorted by the London effect. This has been clear for some days now and very little has been said about it. Not all areas of the country are the same. Not all areas can afford the laxity that seems to be coming from central government (and don't get me started on those horrendous press headlines today, they are dangerous and irresponsible and the owners of these papers must be called to account for their actions over the past few weeks).
We can argue until we are blue in the face about the stats. As I explained in detail yesterday, I think they show that the UK is probably already the third worst in the world on a per capita death rate. But that is besides the point. What matters is I think is that the general public will have in the main accepted that the UK's performance on the health aspects of the crisis has been at the very least pretty poor compared with most other countries.
This perception poses particular risks for the Government if the lockdown is extended. We now watching a series of countries easing back significantly on their restrictive measures, to the extent that life elsewhere is starting to return to some sort of normality. It's reasonable for the public to ask: "why isn't the UK in a position to follow suit?" The answer is not the one the Government tried to spin over a week ago, echoing Merkel's words designed to guard against complacency to imply that German easing was premature and we were wise to hang fire here. It is instead simply that our performance here has been so much worse such that we are nowhere near the position where we could let go significantly.
This means that, either way, the government could lose out following the decision on Sunday. If the easing is fairly superficial, as it should be for at least another week or two, it will only reinforce the view that we are seriously out of step with the rest of the world's success and that our government's failures are impacting directly on everyone's lives. Yet if the easing is much wider, it will seen by many as a premature decision driven by the politics rather than the public health reality, and if the limited progress to date starts to be compromised they will suffer the political consequences.
The danger for the government is if the narrative takes hold that we have done worse than the rest of Europe. I feel that narrative is beginning to take hold despite HUFYD's best efforts.
For a short while it will be credible to say we locked down later so will re-open later but the response to that might well become "but why did we lock down later?"
Politically the government is entering dangerous times. We have the highest death toll in Europe, that is a fact but it also true to say that we have less deaths per head of population than a handful of European countries. What happens if and when we overtake those countries in terms of deaths per million as well?
I think the government has handled the economic aspects of the crisis well but the handling of the health aspects are not looking good at all.
Is that a fact? I thought the numbers from each country were incomplete.
Tbf, the data collection aspects of the app approach are extremely troubling. Especially when there was a route to achieve the results without that.
I think we all concerned by the direction of the app, but this boogeyman Peter Thiel, Brexit stuff. GMG Ventures (the Guardian investment arm) also have a significant stake in Faculty AI.
Should I be worried about Guardian / Carole Conspiracy connection to this and therefore not download it?
The issue is that it's ou England and oy hospital data. It's extremely hard work getting the same stats for the whole nation and include deaths in non-hospital settings. The ONS is the only real source of truth, but he data runs two weeks in arrears.
Yes - critically important since (for example) today's data includes ~130 backdated cases (primarily from two hospitals) almost all from before 21 April...
But I really don't understand why the government aren't releasing the data by date of death and having the daily chart reflect that instead of reporting date which is worse than useless.
The issue is that it's ou England and oy hospital data. It's extremely hard work getting the same stats for the whole nation and include deaths in non-hospital settings. The ONS is the only real source of truth, but he data runs two weeks in arrears.
Yes - critically important since (for example) today's data includes ~130 backdated cases (primarily from two hospitals) almost all from before 21 April...
But I really don't understand why the government aren't releasing the data by date of death and having the daily chart reflect that instead of reporting date which is worse than useless.
It when the government eggheads stick their 7 day trend-line through it. They know they are presenting garbage, I am surprised they are willing to do so.
We can argue until we are blue in the face about the stats. As I explained in detail yesterday, I think they show that the UK is probably already the third worst in the world on a per capita death rate. But that is besides the point. What matters is I think is that the general public will have in the main accepted that the UK's performance on the health aspects of the crisis has been at the very least pretty poor compared with most other countries.
This perception poses particular risks for the Government if the lockdown is extended. We now watching a series of countries easing back significantly on their restrictive measures, to the extent that life elsewhere is starting to return to some sort of normality. It's reasonable for the public to ask: "why isn't the UK in a position to follow suit?" The answer is not the one the Government tried to spin over a week ago, echoing Merkel's words designed to guard against complacency to imply that German easing was premature and we were wise to hang fire here. It is instead simply that our performance here has been so much worse such that we are nowhere near the position where we could let go significantly.
This means that, either way, the government could lose out following the decision on Sunday. If the easing is fairly superficial, as it should be for at least another week or two, it will only reinforce the view that we are seriously out of step with the rest of the world's success and that our government's failures are impacting directly on everyone's lives. Yet if the easing is much wider, it will seen by many as a premature decision driven by the politics rather than the public health reality, and if the limited progress to date starts to be compromised they will suffer the political consequences.
The danger for the government is if the narrative takes hold that we have done worse than the rest of Europe. I feel that narrative is beginning to take hold despite HUFYD's best efforts.
For a short while it will be credible to say we locked down later so will re-open later but the response to that might well become "but why did we lock down later?"
Politically the government is entering dangerous times. We have the highest death toll in Europe, that is a fact but it also true to say that we have less deaths per head of population than a handful of European countries. What happens if and when we overtake those countries in terms of deaths per million as well?
I think the government has handled the economic aspects of the crisis well but the handling of the health aspects are not looking good at all.
Lockdown later also means lockdown longer, nobody is going anywhere near that uncomfortable fact. Look at countries that locked down early and more harshly, they are now open for business and in a much better position than the UK. The delay and toying with herd immunity has condemned us to hurt our people more and also to hurt our economy more.
Comments
https://www.theactuary.com/features/2020/05/07/co-morbidity-question
For fans of Stuart McDonald's twitter feed, this is him in his more "natural" habitat. Slightly techy but I think pretty accessible.
X should be greater than Y should be greater than Z.
apparently a second lockdown would be an economic disaster.
Well the fearmongering surrounding one will create a far, far bigger disaster.
In two months Sunak is going to be sitting there pondering why businesses aren;t re-employing all these workers he's subsidising. Can;t you take these six million off my hands?
I doubt there's a time when the private sector has every felt so unloved. The government arbitrarily smashed their businesses and then made doubly sure a maximum number would to the wall to square a few blowhards in the media via their long, utterly complacent lockdown.
Ministers now lecture employers on what they can and cannot do and expect them to perform miracles to get the country out of an enormous hole. What a bunch of teenagers and cowards.
Some people clap the NHS as heroes, but they will soon find out the real heroes are the private sector workers who entirely pay their salaries.
One possible explanation is that air gets changed pretty fast, via a hefty HEPA filter, and flows mostly vertically from top to bottom, so you don't get much air coming at you from the person next to you.
ETA and Napoleon's retreat from Moscow by the chemistry of French uniform buttons.
It had the biggest possibility of reduction when it started higher and when the low-hanging fruit was picked first.
It still needed to be pushed below 1.0, though, and that's where the lockdown has helped. It does look as though Rt has averaged about 0.8 over the period since the peak, which doesn't give us a great deal of flex - but does give us some flex.
A useful graph is that of transport activity, which started coming down from about the 13th, hurtled downwards in the week before the lockdown (which we all pretty well knew was coming) and was held down by the lockdown:
It takes account of age, where people live and some measures of deprivation, disadvantage and health. After adjusting for all these factors, black men and women were 90% more likely to die with Covid-19 than white people.
Men and women from Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities were also at higher risk than white people, though not by as much with the data showing their increased risk was between 30- 80%.
"But an analysis based on the census data cannot fully explain the reasons for the higher risk because it does not take into account people’s current health, if they are in more crowded living conditions, are exposed to the virus through front-line roles - or other differences between communities that can increase risk."
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-52568948
Why can't they list one of the obvious potential reasons, a genetic difference? It already well known there are difference between ethnicity when it comes to a number of diseases, it wouldn't be that surprising if it was the case with coronavirus. Its not racist to say so.
Also, there appears to be a clear difference between genders. Again, suggesting some sort of genetic difference.
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7095212/
Boris was within the window of median times.
Exposure to symptoms: Interquartile range 2-8 days; median 4 days (can be longer; up to 12 days has been recorded, of course).
Symptoms to hospitalisation: Interquartile range 4-8 days; median 7 days.
So that's what the Prof enjoys.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/revealed-the-secret-report-that-gave-ministers-warning-of-care-home-coronavirus-crisis
https://twitter.com/JohnSimpsonNews/status/1258349816943386625?s=20
There is a distant PB connection in that MR's daughter contributes here from time to time as Marf the cartoonist. She likes it when people mention her Dad's books.
https://twitter.com/GlennBBC/status/1258361167573069827
Even the UK approach, which doesn't collect anywhere near the level of information and not in the same universe of the SK survillence system, gets this response.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/07/uk-coronavirus-contract-tracing-app-could-fall-foul-of-privacy-law-government-told
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1258285796869709824?s=20
https://twitter.com/TonyHinton2016/status/1258288622362595334?s=20
https://twitter.com/cricketwyvern/status/1258347895570542592?s=20
This perception poses particular risks for the Government if the lockdown is extended. We now watching a series of countries easing back significantly on their restrictive measures, to the extent that life elsewhere is starting to return to some sort of normality. It's reasonable for the public to ask: "why isn't the UK in a position to follow suit?" The answer is not the one the Government tried to spin over a week ago, echoing Merkel's words designed to guard against complacency to imply that German easing was premature and we were wise to hang fire here. It is instead simply that our performance here has been so much worse such that we are nowhere near the position where we could let go significantly.
This means that, either way, the government could lose out following the decision on Sunday. If the easing is fairly superficial, as it should be for at least another week or two, it will only reinforce the view that we are seriously out of step with the rest of the world's success and that our government's failures are impacting directly on everyone's lives. Yet if the easing is much wider, it will seen by many as a premature decision driven by the politics rather than the public health reality, and if the limited progress to date starts to be compromised they will suffer the political consequences.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8293433/Wuhan-doctors-save-critically-ill-coronavirus-patient-65-giving-double-lung-transplant.html
https://twitter.com/JamesCleverly/status/1257604481669312512?s=20
The whole point of such a job is to cut through the BS and get to the truth, no? We aren't asking them to read Ferguson's model code* and form a criticism of that, we are asking them to create some very simple charts.
* BTW, I wasted an hour last night looking at the "cleaned up" version on github. Still a shitshow and stuck in the dark ages. No use of standard modern maths libraries like Eigen or MKL.
Who decides what the line is between taking common sense measures and ceasing power? (I know a bit dramatic!). I assume there are some laws in place, but I have no idea what they are.
IIUC South Korea passed legislation about what data it can use for contract tracing, the UK government has a huge majority, it's had plenty of notice, and it's already been passing related legislation very fast. Why can't it pass legislation to make its promises binding?
No support, no legal cover, no chance of claiming on any insurances because they were still allowed to operate. Just in an incredibly hostile business atmosphere.
The lockdown formalising it and coming with business support for the duration unwound a lot of the anger.
Took me about 1/2 an hour to knock up the correct graph and also calculate the English hospital death halving time since the peak.
The team compiling all that info must bang their heads against the wall when everyone insists on using the reported day of death graph.
Deepmind route to profitability is all about processing big health data, you would have thought he might be saying you know what you should do with this....not stick it 250 different excel spreadsheets.
https://twitter.com/aral/status/1258352589223141376?s=20
In addition, the early 90s recession was neither severe nor local.
[Covid19 total deaths chart] tab
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septennial_Act_1716
For a short while it will be credible to say we locked down later so will re-open later but the response to that might well become "but why did we lock down later?"
Politically the government is entering dangerous times. We have the highest death toll in Europe, that is a fact but it also true to say that we have less deaths per head of population than a handful of European countries. What happens if and when we overtake those countries in terms of deaths per million as well?
I think the government has handled the economic aspects of the crisis well but the handling of the health aspects are not looking good at all.
Should I be worried about Guardian / Carole Conspiracy connection to this and therefore not download it?