Just a few musings this fine Friday evening - well, it is here in downtown East Ham.
The US jobs numbers seem to have taken everyone by surprise. Will the same happen here? Why has this happened in the US and what is going on?
I presume the individual states have taken the decision, virus notwithstanding, to re-open their economies and as the period of shutdown has been relatively short (if at all in some states), it's been possible for temporarily laid off staff to be re-hired.
I presume the notion of temporary laid off is equivalent to our furlough and buried under the avalanche of positivity is the fact that permanent job losses actually rose by nearly 300,000.
The US unemployment rate is still 13.3% which should be a reason not to break open the champagne as Wall Street seems to have done.
As a comparison, US Services PMI went from 26.7 in April to 37.5 in May while UK Services PMI went from 13.4 in April to 29.0 in May.
I must say I was confused as to why the markets were expecting a rise in unemployment. Quite obviously a large amount of restrictions have been lifted and a frankly huge amount laid off. Therefore a significant number to be rehired. Am not aware of anywhere in the US tightening policy recently.
I shifted my portfolio to 90% cash in early Feb, then back into equities at the end of March. So far so good, but this market rally looks absurdly peaky. Holding for now though...
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Amateur. I bought 10 FFP3 masks on 25 January, and have the Amazon receipts to prove it
The REAL question is - where are the stylish, high quality masks that will both effectively protect the wearer and overcome the British horror of looking like a pillock in public? That's the real gap in the market, and I remain astounded that no one has rushed to fill it.
This might suit you
It will help others keep their more-than-social distance, fo' sho'!
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Amateur. I bought 10 FFP3 masks on 25 January, and have the Amazon receipts to prove it
The REAL question is - where are the stylish, high quality masks that will both effectively protect the wearer and overcome the British horror of looking like a pillock in public? That's the real gap in the market, and I remain astounded that no one has rushed to fill it.
This might suit you
As if @BluestBlue would be seen outside wearing red.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
No.
The treatment is not zinc and hydroxychloroquine, it's azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine.
Furthermore, hydroxychloroquine - which has retroviral properties - is the main actor, while azithromycin is a common antibiotic.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
The abstract and the comment thread below it are well worth reading.
Results: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration. In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
I'm glad it's showing a benefit, but those OR numbers are not that exciting.
Just a few musings this fine Friday evening - well, it is here in downtown East Ham.
The US jobs numbers seem to have taken everyone by surprise. Will the same happen here? Why has this happened in the US and what is going on?
I presume the individual states have taken the decision, virus notwithstanding, to re-open their economies and as the period of shutdown has been relatively short (if at all in some states), it's been possible for temporarily laid off staff to be re-hired.
I presume the notion of temporary laid off is equivalent to our furlough and buried under the avalanche of positivity is the fact that permanent job losses actually rose by nearly 300,000.
The US unemployment rate is still 13.3% which should be a reason not to break open the champagne as Wall Street seems to have done.
As a comparison, US Services PMI went from 26.7 in April to 37.5 in May while UK Services PMI went from 13.4 in April to 29.0 in May.
I must say I was confused as to why the markets were expecting a rise in unemployment. Quite obviously a large amount of restrictions have been lifted and a frankly huge amount laid off. Therefore a significant number to be rehired. Am not aware of anywhere in the US tightening policy recently.
I shifted my portfolio to 90% cash in early Feb, then back into equities at the end of March. So far so good, but this market rally looks absurdly peaky. Holding for now though...
90% cash is aggressive, well done, how does that put you? 20-30% up?
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Amateur. I bought 10 FFP3 masks on 25 January, and have the Amazon receipts to prove it
The REAL question is - where are the stylish, high quality masks that will both effectively protect the wearer and overcome the British horror of looking like a pillock in public? That's the real gap in the market, and I remain astounded that no one has rushed to fill it.
This might suit you
As if @BluestBlue would be seen outside wearing red.
The run-up to the GE was particularly painful after Corbie tweeted out that people should wear red to show their support...
Here in Georgia we are open, except for social distancing. It's on a state by state basis.Southern parts of New York are still closed
I understand the economics and @Sandpit has referenced the politics which is all about the pain in one burst. The question for me is whether all these people who have gone back will stay back - is economic activity back to pre-Covid 19 levels? The US Services PMI for May was 37.5 which is still a long way from growth.
If the consumers don't return what will that mean and as I said earlier behind the froth of the headline numbers, 295.000 jobs were permanently lost among those who were not temporarily laid off.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Not only is it a total volte face but, if the reports I've just been catching up on are anything like accurate, the revised advice is impossible to comply with. Medical grade masks for everybody over 60 (in the UK that's around 15 million people) and some three layered thing that can allegedly be made at home (if you just happen to have cotton sheeting, polypropylene and something fluid repellent lying around the house and the means to stitch it all together effectively) for most of the rest of us, infants and some ill and disabled people excepted.
What universe do these people inhabit? They might just as well have recommended that we each wear a necklace fashioned from Hydra's teeth to ward off the evil. We'd have about as much chance of obtaining those as an inexhaustible supply of N95 masks for every pensioner in the land.
Hopefully we won't see mask shortages in clinical settings as a result of the general public trying to get hold of the things in a panic. But if we get another couple of weeks down the line and NHS staff start screaming about a lack of PPE again, then this time we shall definitely know who is responsible.
The WHO and just about every epidemiologist and every nation on Earth has a completely different set of ideas about exactly what works and what direction this thing is moving in. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say they are all as clueless as each other - there have been some better guesses and clearly some better leadership in some places than others, and luck or lack thereof has probably also played its part - but fundamentally they give a very good impression of making the whole thing up as they go along.
Here in Georgia we are open, except for social distancing. It's on a state by state basis.Southern parts of New York are still closed
I understand the economics and @Sandpit has referenced the politics which is all about the pain in one burst. The question for me is whether all these people who have gone back will stay back - is economic activity back to pre-Covid 19 levels? The US Services PMI for May was 37.5 which is still a long way from growth.
If the consumers don't return what will that mean and as I said earlier behind the froth of the headline numbers, 295.000 jobs were permanently lost among those who were not temporarily laid off.
There's also likely to be a big gap in the types of jobs gained and lost - chances are that a lot of the jobs gained this month are low-wage, in service sector which has started to reopen, whereas the jobs lost will be at companies who are looking strategically to the future having paid people to do nothing for a couple of months.
When there's a 10m difference between the expected and actual monthly payroll numbers...
Up 5% over the last 12 months doesnt reflect the economy! Not sure its sustainable even if some of the biggest DOW companies are not particularly impacted by covid.
Just a few musings this fine Friday evening - well, it is here in downtown East Ham.
The US jobs numbers seem to have taken everyone by surprise. Will the same happen here? Why has this happened in the US and what is going on?
I presume the individual states have taken the decision, virus notwithstanding, to re-open their economies and as the period of shutdown has been relatively short (if at all in some states), it's been possible for temporarily laid off staff to be re-hired.
I presume the notion of temporary laid off is equivalent to our furlough and buried under the avalanche of positivity is the fact that permanent job losses actually rose by nearly 300,000.
The US unemployment rate is still 13.3% which should be a reason not to break open the champagne as Wall Street seems to have done.
As a comparison, US Services PMI went from 26.7 in April to 37.5 in May while UK Services PMI went from 13.4 in April to 29.0 in May.
I must say I was confused as to why the markets were expecting a rise in unemployment. Quite obviously a large amount of restrictions have been lifted and a frankly huge amount laid off. Therefore a significant number to be rehired. Am not aware of anywhere in the US tightening policy recently.
I shifted my portfolio to 90% cash in early Feb, then back into equities at the end of March. So far so good, but this market rally looks absurdly peaky. Holding for now though...
90% cash is aggressive, well done, how does that put you? 20-30% up?
About 17% at present.
I avoided retail, travel and housing, so missed some dramatic recoveries, but I can't see those being sustained.
Mind you, have lost an equivalent sum through lost income and having to support Fox Jr, so swings and roundabouts.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
Maybe a bit like AIDS; a very nasty virus if unstopped, but paradoxically easy to stop if you do the right things. Heck, handwashing to "Happy Birthday" had a meaningful impact, though not enough to stop the epidemic. Get in early enough, and soft interventions might be enough. Which might make for awkward questions in the enquiry to come.
Yes, exactly. Smaller early measures have an exponential effect later on. Hand washing, quarantining of arrivals, mask wearing, test and trace.
None of them is sufficient but all of them are necessary,
We did barely one and a quarter. Hand washing plus a bit of testing (testing which we then abandoned).
As a result we are screwed and praying for dumb British luck to save us.
Countries which did all four have nailed it. Yes they may face a 2nd wave but they start from a much better position and they can now open their economies with more brio
Besides, it wouldn't be that surprising if those actions together were enough to stop the virus going viral (so to speak). And none of them are that burdensome, really. Otherwise, your choice is a short hard lockdown or a long soft lockdown. Or an apparent miracle.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
No.
The treatment is not zinc and hydroxychloroquine, it's azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine.
Furthermore, hydroxychloroquine - which has retroviral properties - is the main actor, while azithromycin is a common antibiotic.
But there's a reason we use randomised trials. Simply, if you give people a sugar pill and tell them it's an experimental treatment, then more of them will get better than if you give them nothing at all.
Fingers crossed for hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc as a combination treatment. I really hope it works.
But I am always reminded of this xkcd, especially given the modesty of the benefits in the one academic study. If you test enough things with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, one of them will appear to work, just by the laws of probability.
So I wandered out tonight to collect Pizzas from the nicer Pizza shop in town and while I was waiting inside I was offered a beer (long standing customer, sat nowhere near anyone else, it was a gift so no charge and it would be very rude and impolite to turn down).
Until now I really hasn't thought about pubs needing to open, now I remember what we are missing.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
But in any potentially crowded indoor space - shops, buses, trains, taxis - yes you should be wearing a face covering. To limit the potential transmission (personal protection is a lesser issue, but still a factor).
I fear this is a very basic national IQ test which several western nations have failed, and the British have been amongst the worst. This is a national DERRRRR
I'm not sure even with masks (or face coverings) the Underground is a good idea.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Not only is it a total volte face but, if the reports I've just been catching up on are anything like accurate, the revised advice is impossible to comply with. Medical grade masks for everybody over 60 (in the UK that's around 15 million people) and some three layered thing that can allegedly be made at home (if you just happen to have cotton sheeting, polypropylene and something fluid repellent lying around the house and the means to stitch it all together effectively) for most of the rest of us, infants and some ill and disabled people excepted.
What universe do these people inhabit? They might just as well have recommended that we each wear a necklace fashioned from Hydra's teeth to ward off the evil. We'd have about as much chance of obtaining those as an inexhaustible supply of N95 masks for every pensioner in the land.
Hopefully we won't see mask shortages in clinical settings as a result of the general public trying to get hold of the things in a panic. But if we get another couple of weeks down the line and NHS staff start screaming about a lack of PPE again, then this time we shall definitely know who is responsible.
The WHO and just about every epidemiologist and every nation on Earth has a completely different set of ideas about exactly what works and what direction this thing is moving in. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say they are all as clueless as each other - there have been some better guesses and clearly some better leadership in some places than others, and luck or lack thereof has probably also played its part - but fundamentally they give a very good impression of making the whole thing up as they go along.
Don't let great be the enemy of good. Even the most basic of face coverings have benefits.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
The abstract and the comment thread below it are well worth reading.
Results: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration. In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
I'm glad it's showing a benefit, but those OR numbers are not that exciting.
My understanding of the process is that hydroxychloroquine (other drugs could be used) acts as an 'ionophore' allowing zinc to enter the cell, where the zinc inhibits virus replication. This has apparently been shown to work in cell cultures. Therefore, looking at hydroxychloroquine's efficacy without zinc is clearly a mischievous nonsense.
It is notable that the one study that actually uses zinc shows solid benefits over a protocol without zinc.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
The most likely reason is a lack of supply.
Wearing masks in public might be useful to some extent, but not a fraction as useful as making sure hospitals and care homes have enough to go around.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
The abstract and the comment thread below it are well worth reading.
Results: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration. In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
I'm glad it's showing a benefit, but those OR numbers are not that exciting.
My understanding of the process is that hydroxychloroquine (other drugs could be used) acts as an 'ionophore' allowing zinc to enter the cell, where the zinc inhibits virus replication. This has apparently been shown to work in cell cultures. Therefore, looking at hydroxychloroquine's efficacy without zinc is clearly a mischievous nonsense.
It is notable that the one study that actually uses zinc shows solid benefits over a protocol without zinc.
Hang on: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration
However, After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744).
Those benefits are mild enough that it might simply be chance, and are significantly less than Remedsivir - albeit with a much cheaper drug.
That is an unfair comparison though, because in 1992 and 1996 Ross Perot ran a strong campaign taking 18.9% and 8.4% of the vote respectively. It is impossible for the losing Dem/Rep candidate to win 43% of the vote if there is a third place candidate getting 18% of the vote.
On job numbers, I will point out that I forecast economies would bounce back faster than people expected, and was roundly abused for my prescience.
I'm not so sure, I suspect numbers will bounce back in countries where people have little choice but to go back to work, but where things exist long enough to create a new normal, companies may decide they don't need their furloughed staff.
At the moment I'm starting to see people who thought they were essential being shocked as they discover they are surplus to requirements as others have stepped up to the plate. For a fair number of people the furlough may result in accidentally redundancy as companies discovery they need fewer staff at the moment.
I thought IDS picking Bill Cash to be Shadow Attorney General was the worst choice ever made in selecting someone to be AG/Shadow AG, but Boris Johnson has outdone that with the appointment of Suella Braverman.
Is she actually a lawyer? Or can they just shove anyone into that role?
She's a lawyer, she read law at Queens', I think Queens might end up outdoing St John's for shite admissions, and St John's let in Richard Burgon.
A tennis club seems like a strange place to study law.
Mark Kelly, the former astronaut, is up 13 points in a Fox News poll from this week.
Why the Republicans put up Martha McSally (beaten by Kyrsten Sinema in 2018) again is beyond me. She ran an appalling campaign last time around, and appears to be performing even worse this time around.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
No.
The treatment is not zinc and hydroxychloroquine, it's azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine.
Furthermore, hydroxychloroquine - which has retroviral properties - is the main actor, while azithromycin is a common antibiotic.
But there's a reason we use randomised trials. Simply, if you give people a sugar pill and tell them it's an experimental treatment, then more of them will get better than if you give them nothing at all.
Fingers crossed for hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc as a combination treatment. I really hope it works.
But I am always reminded of this xkcd, especially given the modesty of the benefits in the one academic study. If you test enough things with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, one of them will appear to work, just by the laws of probability.
I love that XKCD strip! It's not just giving people a sugar pill.... People in a double blind trial who are assigned to the current treatment group will have better results than patients recieving the same treatment but not in any study. In other words just being in a clinical trial brings a benefit.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Not only is it a total volte face but, if the reports I've just been catching up on are anything like accurate, the revised advice is impossible to comply with. Medical grade masks for everybody over 60 (in the UK that's around 15 million people) and some three layered thing that can allegedly be made at home (if you just happen to have cotton sheeting, polypropylene and something fluid repellent lying around the house and the means to stitch it all together effectively) for most of the rest of us, infants and some ill and disabled people excepted.
What universe do these people inhabit? They might just as well have recommended that we each wear a necklace fashioned from Hydra's teeth to ward off the evil. We'd have about as much chance of obtaining those as an inexhaustible supply of N95 masks for every pensioner in the land.
Hopefully we won't see mask shortages in clinical settings as a result of the general public trying to get hold of the things in a panic. But if we get another couple of weeks down the line and NHS staff start screaming about a lack of PPE again, then this time we shall definitely know who is responsible.
The WHO and just about every epidemiologist and every nation on Earth has a completely different set of ideas about exactly what works and what direction this thing is moving in. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say they are all as clueless as each other - there have been some better guesses and clearly some better leadership in some places than others, and luck or lack thereof has probably also played its part - but fundamentally they give a very good impression of making the whole thing up as they go along.
Don't let great be the enemy of good. Even the most basic of face coverings have benefits.
Then why don't the bloody morons just tell everyone to wear some kind of face covering in confined spaces like buses, and leave the finite supply of proper masks to medical and care settings? Such advice would be unambiguous, achievable and promote the correct distribution of finite resources.
Although FWIW if we're going to start treating the WHO as God then perhaps we could also junk the 2m rule and adopt the 1m rule whilst we're at it?
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
No.
The treatment is not zinc and hydroxychloroquine, it's azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine.
Furthermore, hydroxychloroquine - which has retroviral properties - is the main actor, while azithromycin is a common antibiotic.
But there's a reason we use randomised trials. Simply, if you give people a sugar pill and tell them it's an experimental treatment, then more of them will get better than if you give them nothing at all.
Fingers crossed for hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc as a combination treatment. I really hope it works.
But I am always reminded of this xkcd, especially given the modesty of the benefits in the one academic study. If you test enough things with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, one of them will appear to work, just by the laws of probability.
I think you've got it the wrong way around. Zinc is the active partner - HCQ is an enabler. It also happens to be true that most of us are very deficient in zinc due to the widespread use of nitrogen fertilisers. Diabetics can be more zinc deficient due to the mineral being used up by high blood sugar. Personally if I had symptoms I would choose to take zinc at very high levels alone over taking HCQ alone.
So I wandered out tonight to collect Pizzas from the nicer Pizza shop in town and while I was waiting inside I was offered a beer (long standing customer, sat nowhere near anyone else, it was a gift so no charge and it would be very rude and impolite to turn down).
Until now I really hasn't thought about pubs needing to open, now I remember what we are missing.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Not only is it a total volte face but, if the reports I've just been catching up on are anything like accurate, the revised advice is impossible to comply with. Medical grade masks for everybody over 60 (in the UK that's around 15 million people) and some three layered thing that can allegedly be made at home (if you just happen to have cotton sheeting, polypropylene and something fluid repellent lying around the house and the means to stitch it all together effectively) for most of the rest of us, infants and some ill and disabled people excepted.
What universe do these people inhabit? They might just as well have recommended that we each wear a necklace fashioned from Hydra's teeth to ward off the evil. We'd have about as much chance of obtaining those as an inexhaustible supply of N95 masks for every pensioner in the land.
Hopefully we won't see mask shortages in clinical settings as a result of the general public trying to get hold of the things in a panic. But if we get another couple of weeks down the line and NHS staff start screaming about a lack of PPE again, then this time we shall definitely know who is responsible.
The WHO and just about every epidemiologist and every nation on Earth has a completely different set of ideas about exactly what works and what direction this thing is moving in. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say they are all as clueless as each other - there have been some better guesses and clearly some better leadership in some places than others, and luck or lack thereof has probably also played its part - but fundamentally they give a very good impression of making the whole thing up as they go along.
Don't let great be the enemy of good. Even the most basic of face coverings have benefits.
Then why don't the bloody morons just tell everyone to wear some kind of face covering in confined spaces like buses, and leave the finite supply of proper masks to medical and care settings? Such advice would be unambiguous, achievable and promote the correct distribution of finite resources.
Although FWIW if we're going to start treating the WHO as God then perhaps we could also junk the 2m rule and adopt the 1m rule whilst we're at it?
In California, it's the law. Face coverings in shops, and on public transport.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
That's only an issue when worn in winter with a head scarf.
BTB head scarfs are useful when you want to continue chatting on the phone while also dispensing pharmaceutical goods as the demonstrated by my local asian pharmacist.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
There should be a German compound noun for this feeling: “the dismay upon discovering that you are governed by people much less intelligent than yourself, and you already consider yourself to be an idiot”
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
There should be a German compound noun for this feeling: “the dismay upon discovering that you are governed by people much less intelligent than yourself, and you already consider yourself to be an idiot”
The Germans do have a word for that, it's called 'Brexit'.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Not only is it a total volte face but, if the reports I've just been catching up on are anything like accurate, the revised advice is impossible to comply with. Medical grade masks for everybody over 60 (in the UK that's around 15 million people) and some three layered thing that can allegedly be made at home (if you just happen to have cotton sheeting, polypropylene and something fluid repellent lying around the house and the means to stitch it all together effectively) for most of the rest of us, infants and some ill and disabled people excepted.
What universe do these people inhabit? They might just as well have recommended that we each wear a necklace fashioned from Hydra's teeth to ward off the evil. We'd have about as much chance of obtaining those as an inexhaustible supply of N95 masks for every pensioner in the land.
Hopefully we won't see mask shortages in clinical settings as a result of the general public trying to get hold of the things in a panic. But if we get another couple of weeks down the line and NHS staff start screaming about a lack of PPE again, then this time we shall definitely know who is responsible.
The WHO and just about every epidemiologist and every nation on Earth has a completely different set of ideas about exactly what works and what direction this thing is moving in. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say they are all as clueless as each other - there have been some better guesses and clearly some better leadership in some places than others, and luck or lack thereof has probably also played its part - but fundamentally they give a very good impression of making the whole thing up as they go along.
Don't let great be the enemy of good. Even the most basic of face coverings have benefits.
Then why don't the bloody morons just tell everyone to wear some kind of face covering in confined spaces like buses, and leave the finite supply of proper masks to medical and care settings? Such advice would be unambiguous, achievable and promote the correct distribution of finite resources.
Although FWIW if we're going to start treating the WHO as God then perhaps we could also junk the 2m rule and adopt the 1m rule whilst we're at it?
A 2m rule means most people keep at least 1m away from anyone else. Create a 1m rule and people will be 50 cms or less away from one another.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
You’ve changed your view on Boris. From fan, to wanting him locked up.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
The abstract and the comment thread below it are well worth reading.
Results: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration. In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
I'm glad it's showing a benefit, but those OR numbers are not that exciting.
My understanding of the process is that hydroxychloroquine (other drugs could be used) acts as an 'ionophore' allowing zinc to enter the cell, where the zinc inhibits virus replication. This has apparently been shown to work in cell cultures. Therefore, looking at hydroxychloroquine's efficacy without zinc is clearly a mischievous nonsense.
It is notable that the one study that actually uses zinc shows solid benefits over a protocol without zinc.
My wife is taking Zinc. £8 for 100 tablets which is not too bad.
There's a risk of spending a lot on this type of thing, though, if you're not careful.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
You’ve changed your view on Boris. From fan, to wanting him locked up.
It is "Bad Eadric" month. "Good Eadric" is next month
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
I think the initial imputes to dis-incentive's masked was mostly a dicsier to not run out of the 'proper' ones that doctors and nurses needed.
However in the hand of government (any government) good intentions result in bad outcomes.
It became a idiom of superoraty, 'I'm important so I get a mask' and you would not know how to use one anyway!!!
And now its politicised,
My opinion:
1) In the early days government could and should have been honest, and sead: a) the sicance on this is not clear b) please don't try to get hold of medical masks stolen from hospitals c) but better safe than sorry, if you can make you own or buy a non medical go ahead.
2) Assuming that the WHO and others are correct, in that it does make things slightly better its probably a small to negotiable, if it allows us to open up the economy again - great. but if it just makes people think 'we are in the end of days' it may slow down the return to normality.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not wearing one while walking around outside in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s fair enough, I’m the same
But in any potentially crowded indoor space - shops, buses, trains, taxis - yes you should be wearing a face covering. To limit the potential transmission (personal protection is a lesser issue, but still a factor).
I fear this is a very basic national IQ test which several western nations have failed, and the British have been amongst the worst. This is a national DERRRRR
If >50% wear one I will wear one.
If <50% wear I will not wear one.
Its as simple as that and no I can't explain why my level of intelligence and education reduces my thought process to that either.
That is, let me point out, for shops - I would be far more likely to wear a mask on public transport.
I'm keeping track of items proposed by Cotton that have subsequently been taken up by Trump: withdrawing from the Iran agreement, blaming China for Covid, using the military to quell riots. If we count Cotton saying "US jets" should be withdrawn from Europe because of Huawei and G5, followed by Trump's announcement of a reduction in the number of US service personnel in Germany by more than a quarter, we're now up to four. The betting market says Cotton is 13 times less likely than Hillary Clinton to win the presidency as a result of the 2020 election. The betting market is an ass!
Heer essentially views Cotton as a sane and therefore much more dangerous version of Trump.
FPT HYUFD said 'Heath won in 1970 in the TV age against the more charismatic Wilson as the economy was in an awful state, the pound devalued etc and Major won in 1992 over Kinnock as he was seen as more centrist and Kinnock not trusted on the economy, also in the TV age.'
In what way was the economy in an awful state in 1970? Wilson bequeathed a Balance of Payments surplus to Heath - and a Budget Surplus. When was the last time a Tory Government managed to do either - never mind both - tpoa Labour Government? The economy was in pretty good shape in 1970 - far better than in March 1974 when Wilson returned to office in the aftermath of the 3 Day Week.Far better than the economy left by Thatcher in November 1990 when inflation was circa 10%.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
There should be a German compound noun for this feeling: “the dismay upon discovering that you are governed by people much less intelligent than yourself, and you already consider yourself to be an idiot”
I call it being a Libertarian, and it hold no matter what the government is.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
You’ve changed your view on Boris. From fan, to wanting him locked up.
It is "Bad Eadric" month. "Good Eadric" is next month
In the part of Herefordshire I am from he was always known as "Eadric the Wild".
"These are great numbers. I'm sure George is looking down right now and celebrating them too. This is a great great day for our country."
Utterly sickening.
Can any person with a shred of decency listen to this and fail to recognize the need for a Dem landslide in November?
I think not. Which means it's coming.
I’m reminded, again, of Adlai Stevenson’s riposte when he was told that all thinking people were voting for him.
Yeah I know. And it's a good one.
But I sense America is not totally gone.
They will do the necessary in November.
An American friend of mine who is a of Republican persuasion says the only way Trump wins this year is if one the Supremes drops dead between now and election day.
Their theory was Trump was on course to lose in 2016 but enough GOPers held their nose to vote for Trump to stop Hillary Clinton picking Scalia's replacement.
Do ordinary voting folk actually think like that?
Republican voters do. It is a bizarre blind spot of the average Dem voters to the importance of federal judicial apoointments not just the Supreme Court.
But GOP voters, mianly the white evangelicals are fanatical in their judge focus. In many ways they see judge positions as mor eimportant that their congressianal representatives.
That's why the GOP losing the Wisconsin Supreme Court election recently was seen as such a shock.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
You’ve changed your view on Boris. From fan, to wanting him locked up.
I’ve been this way for a while. In case you hadn’t noticed.
I think he had a very good skill set for being a good Brexit premier. Ballsy, insouciant, clever, narcissistic. Allied with Dom Cummings they could (and still might) Have bluffed, lied and tricked a now-divided EU into a good Brexit deal.
Sadly, he has precisely the wrong skill set when confronted with a pandemic. Handshaking, head shrugging, Oh I’ll be fine, let’s all have a party, this is the opposite of what you want in a plague.
He is the Merrie Monarch in a very unmerrie time.
He is lucky that he still has 4 years to turn it around - if he lasts that long.
What should be clear is that the UK's public institutions ** are mediocre and that our scientific Sir Humphreys are as crap as our civil service Sir Humphreys.
** Though surprisingly the Treasury and HMRC have done pretty good.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
The abstract and the comment thread below it are well worth reading.
Results: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration. In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
I'm glad it's showing a benefit, but those OR numbers are not that exciting.
My understanding of the process is that hydroxychloroquine (other drugs could be used) acts as an 'ionophore' allowing zinc to enter the cell, where the zinc inhibits virus replication. This has apparently been shown to work in cell cultures. Therefore, looking at hydroxychloroquine's efficacy without zinc is clearly a mischievous nonsense.
It is notable that the one study that actually uses zinc shows solid benefits over a protocol without zinc.
My wife is taking Zinc. £8 for 100 tablets which is not too bad.
There's a risk of spending a lot on this type of thing, though, if you're not careful.
I started taking moderate amounts of zinc and then after getting symptoms took some more, after a few days I worried that it was making things worse and stopped taking it.
Now I don't know if zinc helped, made things worse or had no effect at all.
FPT HYUFD said 'Heath won in 1970 in the TV age against the more charismatic Wilson as the economy was in an awful state, the pound devalued etc and Major won in 1992 over Kinnock as he was seen as more centrist and Kinnock not trusted on the economy, also in the TV age.'
In what way was the economy in an awful state in 1970? Wilson bequeathed a Balance of Payments surplus to Heath - and a Budget Surplus. When was the last time a Tory Government managed to do either - never mind both - tpoa Labour Government? The economy was in pretty good shape in 1970 - far better than in March 1974 when Wilson returned to office in the aftermath of the 3 Day Week.Far better than the economy left by Thatcher in November 1990 when inflation was circa 10%.
Inflation and unemployment was rising in 1970 and he had been forced to devalue the pound as the balance of payments was so bad.
The Thatcher Major governments cut inflation and Thatcher also cut the number of strikes and increased GDP per capita
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
The most likely reason is a lack of supply.
Wearing masks in public might be useful to some extent, but not a fraction as useful as making sure hospitals and care homes have enough to go around.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not wearing one while walking around outside in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s fair enough, I’m the same
But in any potentially crowded indoor space - shops, buses, trains, taxis - yes you should be wearing a face covering. To limit the potential transmission (personal protection is a lesser issue, but still a factor).
I fear this is a very basic national IQ test which several western nations have failed, and the British have been amongst the worst. This is a national DERRRRR
If >50% wear one I will wear one.
If <50% wear I will not wear one.
Its as simple as that and no I can't explain why my level of intelligence and education reduces my thought process to that either.
That is, let me point out, for shops - I would be far more likely to wear a mask on public transport.</p>
It's a good idea to wear one on public transport. The government should have imposed that rule about 3 months ago.
Here's a quote from the Wiki on the well-known phenomenon "risk compensation":
"Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected.[2] Although usually small in comparison to the fundamental benefits of safety interventions, it may result in a lower net benefit than expected."
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not wearing one while walking around outside in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s fair enough, I’m the same
But in any potentially crowded indoor space - shops, buses, trains, taxis - yes you should be wearing a face covering. To limit the potential transmission (personal protection is a lesser issue, but still a factor).
I fear this is a very basic national IQ test which several western nations have failed, and the British have been amongst the worst. This is a national DERRRRR
If >50% wear one I will wear one.
If <50% wear I will not wear one.
Its as simple as that and no I can't explain why my level of intelligence and education reduces my thought process to that either.
That is, let me point out, for shops - I would be far more likely to wear a mask on public transport.</p>
Why not be a sheep dog rather than a sheep?
I’m sorry, but your attitude is pathetic. If the overwhelming evidence convinces you, wear one, for the sake of your fellow citizens. If it does not, tell us why, when there are now no significant bodies on planet earth which are not advising the wearing of face coverings.
Because I don't want to look like a prat - either one way or another - and yes it is pathetic.
Now if the government wants people to wear masks in the shops then give them 10p off their bill and they will - the reverse of the plastic bag charge.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not wearing one while walking around outside in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s fair enough, I’m the same
But in any potentially crowded indoor space - shops, buses, trains, taxis - yes you should be wearing a face covering. To limit the potential transmission (personal protection is a lesser issue, but still a factor).
I fear this is a very basic national IQ test which several western nations have failed, and the British have been amongst the worst. This is a national DERRRRR
If >50% wear one I will wear one.
If <50% wear I will not wear one.
Its as simple as that and no I can't explain why my level of intelligence and education reduces my thought process to that either.
That is, let me point out, for shops - I would be far more likely to wear a mask on public transport.</p>
It's a good idea to wear one on public transport. The government should have imposed that rule about 3 months ago.
Most buses I have seen for the last 3 months have less than 5 people on them.
I started taking moderate amounts of zinc and then after getting symptoms took some more, after a few days I worried that it was making things worse and stopped taking it.
Now I don't know if zinc helped, made things worse or had no effect at all.
Zinc is alright up to a point, but too much is bad for you. @Foxy may be able to opine on safe levels. I do take a supplement that gives 100% of my RDA for Zinc and also for Vit.s D & K
You know all those FT reports showing how badly the UK has done compared to elsewhere well um
I'm just pissed off with the FT posting charts on Twitter where there is literally a five week difference between reporting dates. When you see the Tweet you think it is for a like to like comparison, when you view the chart at full size you realise it is not. It is definitely misleading, but whether or not it is done deliberately I do not know. Either way it reflects very poorly on the person posting and the FT.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not wearing one while walking around outside in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s fair enough, I’m the same
But in any potentially crowded indoor space - shops, buses, trains, taxis - yes you should be wearing a face covering. To limit the potential transmission (personal protection is a lesser issue, but still a factor).
I fear this is a very basic national IQ test which several western nations have failed, and the British have been amongst the worst. This is a national DERRRRR
If >50% wear one I will wear one.
If <50% wear I will not wear one.
Its as simple as that and no I can't explain why my level of intelligence and education reduces my thought process to that either.
That is, let me point out, for shops - I would be far more likely to wear a mask on public transport.</p>
Just wear one in shops. Don't be antisocial.
And that isn't enough. The handles of supermarket trolleys are probably an important vector of infection. In the supermarkets I go to, about half the shoppers take a quick squirt of the crappy "anti-bacterial" spray that's provided and cursorily clean their hands with it, usually not bothering with their thumbs, the other half don't even do that, and I'm the only person who bothers wiping the trolley handle with ANYTHING (namely the 80% isopropanol solution I made at home, using isopropanol and aloe vera gel). This isn't difficult. Trolley handles are touched by many people. Practically all of us touch our faces a lot. Someone who's got this virus who uses a trolley will spread the virus to the handle. It's not over the top or consuming of hours of time to take the precaution of wiping the handle with a proper virus killer.
If Tesco's etc. provided proper cleaner and put up signs saying "Clean your hands or we won't let you in", with a cartoon board showing how to clean your hands properly, that would be much more useful than the strictness with which gauleiter-like staff enforce rules such as how to position your trolley at the checkout.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
There should be a German compound noun for this feeling: “the dismay upon discovering that you are governed by people much less intelligent than yourself, and you already consider yourself to be an idiot”
Being intelligent is no guarantee of being a good PM.
Of our post-war PMs with 1st class degrees, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Brown and Cameron it is a mixed bag in terms of record.
None of our best PMs in the last 100 years, Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher had a first class degree and Churchill did not even go to university
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
The abstract and the comment thread below it are well worth reading.
Results: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration. In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
I'm glad it's showing a benefit, but those OR numbers are not that exciting.
My understanding of the process is that hydroxychloroquine (other drugs could be used) acts as an 'ionophore' allowing zinc to enter the cell, where the zinc inhibits virus replication. This has apparently been shown to work in cell cultures. Therefore, looking at hydroxychloroquine's efficacy without zinc is clearly a mischievous nonsense.
It is notable that the one study that actually uses zinc shows solid benefits over a protocol without zinc.
Hang on: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration
However, After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744).
Those benefits are mild enough that it might simply be chance, and are significantly less than Remedsivir - albeit with a much cheaper drug.
A treatment that stops the virus replicating is clearly better used early on, before other complications develop. Once someone is in the ICU the horse has bolted - though I doubt it harmed anyone treated with it there either.
I started taking moderate amounts of zinc and then after getting symptoms took some more, after a few days I worried that it was making things worse and stopped taking it.
Now I don't know if zinc helped, made things worse or had no effect at all.
Zinc is alright up to a point, but too much is bad for you. @Foxy may be able to opine on safe levels. I do take a supplement that gives 100% of my RDA for Zinc and also for Vit.s D & K
That's why I stopped taking it - the problem with many supplements is that they can be too strong and don't take into account how much you might be getting from food.
I'm keeping track of items proposed by Cotton that have subsequently been taken up by Trump: withdrawing from the Iran agreement, blaming China for Covid, using the military to quell riots. If we count Cotton saying "US jets" should be withdrawn from Europe because of Huawei and G5, followed by Trump's announcement of a reduction in the number of US service personnel in Germany by more than a quarter, we're now up to four. The betting market says Cotton is 13 times less likely than Hillary Clinton to win the presidency as a result of the 2020 election. The betting market is an ass!
Heer essentially views Cotton as a sane and therefore much more dangerous version of Trump.
Sane? Based upon some of his recent statements he appears to be a raving looney.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Not only is it a total volte face but, if the reports I've just been catching up on are anything like accurate, the revised advice is impossible to comply with. Medical grade masks for everybody over 60 (in the UK that's around 15 million people) and some three layered thing that can allegedly be made at home (if you just happen to have cotton sheeting, polypropylene and something fluid repellent lying around the house and the means to stitch it all together effectively) for most of the rest of us, infants and some ill and disabled people excepted.
What universe do these people inhabit? They might just as well have recommended that we each wear a necklace fashioned from Hydra's teeth to ward off the evil. We'd have about as much chance of obtaining those as an inexhaustible supply of N95 masks for every pensioner in the land.
Hopefully we won't see mask shortages in clinical settings as a result of the general public trying to get hold of the things in a panic. But if we get another couple of weeks down the line and NHS staff start screaming about a lack of PPE again, then this time we shall definitely know who is responsible.
The WHO and just about every epidemiologist and every nation on Earth has a completely different set of ideas about exactly what works and what direction this thing is moving in. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say they are all as clueless as each other - there have been some better guesses and clearly some better leadership in some places than others, and luck or lack thereof has probably also played its part - but fundamentally they give a very good impression of making the whole thing up as they go along.
Don't let great be the enemy of good. Even the most basic of face coverings have benefits.
Then why don't the bloody morons just tell everyone to wear some kind of face covering in confined spaces like buses, and leave the finite supply of proper masks to medical and care settings? Such advice would be unambiguous, achievable and promote the correct distribution of finite resources.
Although FWIW if we're going to start treating the WHO as God then perhaps we could also junk the 2m rule and adopt the 1m rule whilst we're at it?
In California, it's the law. Face coverings in shops, and on public transport.
Well that's nice for them I'm sure.
Personally I've lost faith in all this conflicting advice. Masks are useless, except now they're not, only they might be worse than useless because you might infect yourself when you're fiddling with them. The R number is 0.5 to 0.9, or 0.7 to 0.9, or perhaps 0.7 to 1.0, or 0.9 to 1.0, except that it's probably wildly different in the community to what it is in care homes but we're not really sure and we don't know what it is in either setting and it might be bleeding back out of the care homes fast enough to make a difference or it might not. The lockdown was essential except that the timing of the peak of the first wave suggests that new cases started dropping off before lockdown began. Immunity amongst the population might be very low or very high because we don't know whether innate resistance to the virus exists and whether or not antibodies to other coronaviruses offer some immunity. The only thing that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that you probably won't catch it if you're stood alone in the middle of an otherwise empty field.
Never mind the medical profession, the Delphic Oracle would give one about as much useful counsel on what to do next.
It wasn't just on the back of one report. It was a concerted effort to stop the drug becoming a gold standard treatment, because of Trump. Also because it's a cheap, widely available drug, with little profit for the wider drugs industry. But mostly because of Trump.
That's a pretty strange characterisation. Yes, this was a crap and quite possibly fraudulent paper - but that is it.
The reason most scientists were so riled with Trump is that he contributed to the ridiculous hype of a treatment, which led to a very large number of non randomised, unblinded and poorly designed trials. Which contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and actively hindered trials of other therapies.
And irrespective of the dodgy paper, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this is going to be a particularly useful therapy, let alone a "gold standard".
‘The trial has proceeded at unprecedented speed, enrolling over 11,000 patients from 175 NHS hospitals in the UK. Throughout this time, the independent Data Monitoring Committee has reviewed the emerging data about every two weeks to determine if there is evidence that would be strong enough to affect national and global treatment of COVID-19.
‘On Thursday 4 June, in response to a request from the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the independent Data Monitoring Committee conducted a further review of the data. Last night, the Committee recommended the chief investigators review the unblinded data on the hydroxychloroquine arm of the trial.
‘We have concluded that there is no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We have therefore decided to stop enrolling participants to the hydroxychloroquine arm of the RECOVERY Trial with immediate effect. We are now releasing the preliminary results as they have important implications for patient care and public health....
No it isn't a strange characterisation. Zinc and hydroxychloroquine is a combination treatment, with the zinc as the active partner - the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine is that it helps zinc to enter the cell and deal with the virus. Giving someone hydroxychloroquine alone is like giving someone a syringe without any antibiotics in it - of course it doesn't work. How many of the so-called 'studies' have looked at zinc and hydroxychloroquine in tandem? This is after doctors administering this combo have seen patients going from seriously ill to symptom free in 8 hours. Sorry but the Doctors who design these studies aren't stupid. For this to be totally missed and for the public to be told to 'move on nothing to see here' is morally reprehensible.
The abstract and the comment thread below it are well worth reading.
Results: The addition of zinc sulfate did not impact the length of hospitalization, duration of ventilation, or ICU duration. In univariate analyses, zinc sulfate increased the frequency of patients being discharged home, and decreased the need for ventilation, admission to the ICU, and mortality or transfer to hospice for patients who were never admitted to the ICU. After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744). Conclusion: This study provides the first in vivo evidence that zinc sulfate in combination with hydroxychloroquine may play a role in therapeutic management for COVID-19.
I'm glad it's showing a benefit, but those OR numbers are not that exciting.
My understanding of the process is that hydroxychloroquine (other drugs could be used) acts as an 'ionophore' allowing zinc to enter the cell, where the zinc inhibits virus replication. This has apparently been shown to work in cell cultures. Therefore, looking at hydroxychloroquine's efficacy without zinc is clearly a mischievous nonsense.
It is notable that the one study that actually uses zinc shows solid benefits over a protocol without zinc.
My wife is taking Zinc. £8 for 100 tablets which is not too bad.
There's a risk of spending a lot on this type of thing, though, if you're not careful.
I started taking moderate amounts of zinc and then after getting symptoms took some more, after a few days I worried that it was making things worse and stopped taking it.
Now I don't know if zinc helped, made things worse or had no effect at all.
Check the amounts you were taking against RDA - you might not even have been getting up to your recommended dose. Not all mineral supplements are created equal either - some are a lot more absorbable.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
You’ve changed your view on Boris. From fan, to wanting him locked up.
It is "Bad Eadric" month. "Good Eadric" is next month
Sean holding an opinion for a month would be a new record.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
There should be a German compound noun for this feeling: “the dismay upon discovering that you are governed by people much less intelligent than yourself, and you already consider yourself to be an idiot”
Being intelligent is no guarantee of being a good PM.
Of our post-war PMs with 1st class degrees, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Brown and Cameron it is a mixed bag in terms of record.
None of our best PMs in the last 100 years, Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher had a first class degree and Churchill did not even go to university
Having a degree of any kind is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being intelligent. Churchill was o9f course hugely, ferociously intelligent. Mags wasn't, dunno about Attlee.
I got a 2:2 in my undergraduate engineering degree because I was too busy sinking treble vodkas and chasing after women. I’m not sure if it is any reflection on my intelligence as a whole.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not wearing one while walking around outside in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s fair enough, I’m the same
But in any potentially crowded indoor space - shops, buses, trains, taxis - yes you should be wearing a face covering. To limit the potential transmission (personal protection is a lesser issue, but still a factor).
I fear this is a very basic national IQ test which several western nations have failed, and the British have been amongst the worst. This is a national DERRRRR
If >50% wear one I will wear one.
If <50% wear I will not wear one.
Its as simple as that and no I can't explain why my level of intelligence and education reduces my thought process to that either.
That is, let me point out, for shops - I would be far more likely to wear a mask on public transport.</p>
Just wear one in shops. Don't be antisocial.
And that isn't enough. The handles of supermarket trolleys are probably an important vector of infection. In the supermarkets I go to, about half the shoppers take a quick squirt of the crappy "anti-bacterial" spray that's provided and cursorily clean their hands with it, usually not bothering with their thumbs, the other half don't even do that, and I'm the only person who bothers wiping the trolley handle with ANYTHING (namely the 80% isopropanol solution I made at home, using isopropanol and aloe vera gel). This isn't difficult. Trolley handles are touched by many people. Practically all of us touch our faces a lot. Someone who's got this virus who uses a trolley will spread the virus to the handle. It's not over the top or consuming of hours of time to take the precaution of wiping the handle with a proper virus killer.
If Tesco's etc. provided proper cleaner and put up signs saying "Clean your hands or we won't let you in", with a cartoon board showing how to clean your hands properly, that would be much more useful than the strictness with which gauleiter-like staff enforce rules such as how to position your trolley at the checkout.
That's given me an idea to use my own hand made sanitiser at the supermarket.
But I fear I'm slipping into a fatalistic mindset - I did the social distancing and handwashing but still got infected by something. Now I continue to do the social distancing and handwashing but when you're out and about you can never be 100% safe.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
Not only is it a total volte face but, if the reports I've just been catching up on are anything like accurate, the revised advice is impossible to comply with. Medical grade masks for everybody over 60 (in the UK that's around 15 million people) and some three layered thing that can allegedly be made at home (if you just happen to have cotton sheeting, polypropylene and something fluid repellent lying around the house and the means to stitch it all together effectively) for most of the rest of us, infants and some ill and disabled people excepted.
What universe do these people inhabit? They might just as well have recommended that we each wear a necklace fashioned from Hydra's teeth to ward off the evil. We'd have about as much chance of obtaining those as an inexhaustible supply of N95 masks for every pensioner in the land.
Hopefully we won't see mask shortages in clinical settings as a result of the general public trying to get hold of the things in a panic. But if we get another couple of weeks down the line and NHS staff start screaming about a lack of PPE again, then this time we shall definitely know who is responsible.
The WHO and just about every epidemiologist and every nation on Earth has a completely different set of ideas about exactly what works and what direction this thing is moving in. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say they are all as clueless as each other - there have been some better guesses and clearly some better leadership in some places than others, and luck or lack thereof has probably also played its part - but fundamentally they give a very good impression of making the whole thing up as they go along.
Don't let great be the enemy of good. Even the most basic of face coverings have benefits.
Then why don't the bloody morons just tell everyone to wear some kind of face covering in confined spaces like buses, and leave the finite supply of proper masks to medical and care settings? Such advice would be unambiguous, achievable and promote the correct distribution of finite resources.
Although FWIW if we're going to start treating the WHO as God then perhaps we could also junk the 2m rule and adopt the 1m rule whilst we're at it?
In California, it's the law. Face coverings in shops, and on public transport.
Well that's nice for them I'm sure.
Personally I've lost faith in all this conflicting advice. Masks are useless, except now they're not, only they might be worse than useless because you might infect yourself when you're fiddling with them. The R number is 0.5 to 0.9, or 0.7 to 0.9, or perhaps 0.7 to 1.0, or 0.9 to 1.0, except that it's probably wildly different in the community to what it is in care homes but we're not really sure and we don't know what it is in either setting and it might be bleeding back out of the care homes fast enough to make a difference or it might not. The lockdown was essential except that the timing of the peak of the first wave suggests that new cases started dropping off before lockdown began. Immunity amongst the population might be very low or very high because we don't know whether innate resistance to the virus exists and whether or not antibodies to other coronaviruses offer some immunity. The only thing that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that you probably won't catch it if you're stood alone in the middle of an otherwise empty field.
Never mind the medical profession, the Delphic Oracle would give one about as much useful counsel on what to do next.
It's natural to throw your hands up and say "it's all too complicated".
But you shouldn't.
It's really terribly simple: places where mask wearing is common have had far smaller problems with CV-19 than places where it is not.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
I hate to agree with you, as a matter of general principle, but on this you are absolutely correct.
I've always thought the mask thing was a no brainer, even if it achieves very little there is no downside.
Seriously what is it with the British? Are we really thicker than the rest of the world? Even the majority of Americans seem to be wearing them these days. I think a couple of weeks ago Casino even commented that no normal person would wear a mask. Perhaps we just deserve to be the last out of lockdown and have about the worst record in Europe.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
I hate to agree with you, as a matter of general principle, but on this you are absolutely correct.
I've always thought the mask thing was a no brainer, even if it achieves very little there is no downside.
Seriously what is it with the British? Are we really thicker than the rest of the world? Even the majority of Americans seem to be wearing them these days. I think a couple of weeks ago Casino even commented that no normal person would wear a mask. Perhaps we just deserve to be the last out of lockdown and have about the worst record in Europe.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
There should be a German compound noun for this feeling: “the dismay upon discovering that you are governed by people much less intelligent than yourself, and you already consider yourself to be an idiot”
Being intelligent is no guarantee of being a good PM.
Of our post-war PMs with 1st class degrees, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Brown and Cameron it is a mixed bag in terms of record.
None of our best PMs in the last 100 years, Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher had a first class degree and Churchill did not even go to university
Having a degree of any kind is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being intelligent. Churchill was o9f course hugely, ferociously intelligent. Mags wasn't, dunno about Attlee.
Thatcher was superbly intelligent. A grammar school girl who became an esteemed biochemist who became the best peacetime prime minister in 100 years, and fighting misogyny all the way?
Peace be upon her
As the years pass her achievement looks all the greater, not lesser, and all her successors seem similarly diminished
She was fandabidozy, don't get me wrong, but I would put courage, tenacity, conviction and political instinct above intelligence in the list of her virtues. And was she that much of a chemist? I thought she worked for Persil or similar.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
The most likely reason is a lack of supply.
Wearing masks in public might be useful to some extent, but not a fraction as useful as making sure hospitals and care homes have enough to go around.
You can get masks everywhere now. M&S were flogging disposable ones at the entrance for 3 for a quid last week.
FPT HYUFD said 'Heath won in 1970 in the TV age against the more charismatic Wilson as the economy was in an awful state, the pound devalued etc and Major won in 1992 over Kinnock as he was seen as more centrist and Kinnock not trusted on the economy, also in the TV age.'
In what way was the economy in an awful state in 1970? Wilson bequeathed a Balance of Payments surplus to Heath - and a Budget Surplus. When was the last time a Tory Government managed to do either - never mind both - tpoa Labour Government? The economy was in pretty good shape in 1970 - far better than in March 1974 when Wilson returned to office in the aftermath of the 3 Day Week.Far better than the economy left by Thatcher in November 1990 when inflation was circa 10%.
I thought Wilson lost in 1970 because England got beaten by West Germany in the world Cup.
I started taking moderate amounts of zinc and then after getting symptoms took some more, after a few days I worried that it was making things worse and stopped taking it.
Now I don't know if zinc helped, made things worse or had no effect at all.
Zinc is alright up to a point, but too much is bad for you. @Foxy may be able to opine on safe levels. I do take a supplement that gives 100% of my RDA for Zinc and also for Vit.s D & K
Using Zinc as an antioxidant the dose should be higher 30mg or so, which has been used in long term studies at that dose. It can cause anaemia and kidney stones.
There is an anti inflammatory effect as well as an antiviral one. If HCQ works (I am unconvinced) it is probably due to modulating inflammation.
It is the vascular inflammation that is the killer part.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
I hate to agree with you, as a matter of general principle, but on this you are absolutely correct.
I've always thought the mask thing was a no brainer, even if it achieves very little there is no downside.
Seriously what is it with the British? Are we really thicker than the rest of the world? Even the majority of Americans seem to be wearing them these days. I think a couple of weeks ago Casino even commented that no normal person would wear a mask. Perhaps we just deserve to be the last out of lockdown and have about the worst record in Europe.
Because if you wear a mask you look like a divvy.
"But I was thinking of a plan to dye my whiskers green And always use so large a fan that they could not be seen."
If it's a mask nobody knows it's you looking like a divvy.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not wearing one while walking around outside in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s fair enough, I’m the same
But in any potentially crowded indoor space - shops, buses, trains, taxis - yes you should be wearing a face covering. To limit the potential transmission (personal protection is a lesser issue, but still a factor).
I fear this is a very basic national IQ test which several western nations have failed, and the British have been amongst the worst. This is a national DERRRRR
If >50% wear one I will wear one.
If <50% wear I will not wear one.
Its as simple as that and no I can't explain why my level of intelligence and education reduces my thought process to that either.
That is, let me point out, for shops - I would be far more likely to wear a mask on public transport.</p>
Why not be a sheep dog rather than a sheep?
I’m sorry, but your attitude is pathetic. If the overwhelming evidence convinces you, wear one, for the sake of your fellow citizens. If it does not, tell us why, when there are now no significant bodies on planet earth which are not advising the wearing of face coverings.
Because I don't want to look like a prat - either one way or another - and yes it is pathetic.
Now if the government wants people to wear masks in the shops then give them 10p off their bill and they will - the reverse of the plastic bag charge.
You admit is is pathetic but you continue to do it. Ye Gods.
If it helps, think of it this way. Not wearing a face covering is like blatant littering. You are casually spreading your potentially fatal aerosols around, and fuck everyone else “because putting it in a bin makes me look like a prat”
That is the level of your thinking.
I do not for one moment believe you are the kind of person who would casually scatter litter everywhere, for others to collect. Let alone if that litter was poisonous.
That’s an exact analogy.
Dude, do the right thing. Forget your vanity, wear a mask. Just for now
A good argument.
But for two provisos.
Firstly I'm very unlikely to be infected now having probably been infected in April.
Secondly I'm not sure that some passing of the virus through the low risk, ie the people I might come into contact with, is a bad thing when the threat of a second wave this winter remains.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
There should be a German compound noun for this feeling: “the dismay upon discovering that you are governed by people much less intelligent than yourself, and you already consider yourself to be an idiot”
Being intelligent is no guarantee of being a good PM.
Of our post-war PMs with 1st class degrees, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Brown and Cameron it is a mixed bag in terms of record.
None of our best PMs in the last 100 years, Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher had a first class degree and Churchill did not even go to university
Having a degree of any kind is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being intelligent. Churchill was o9f course hugely, ferociously intelligent. Mags wasn't, dunno about Attlee.
Thatcher was superbly intelligent. A grammar school girl who became an esteemed biochemist who became the best peacetime prime minister in 100 years, and fighting misogyny all the way?
Peace be upon her
As the years pass her achievement looks all the greater, not lesser, and all her successors seem similarly diminished
She was a chemist not a biochemist and not for long as changed career firstly to law and then politics.
Though it has been claimed she had a hand in Mr Whippy.
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
Seems like masks reduce the spread of the disease although they are not a silver bullet.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
Or just our particularly stupid political and scientific establishment advising us wrongly for months?
Imagine if Boris had started wearing a mask in early March. The optics would have been startling, and people would have taken notice. It would have been leadership, even if it embarrassed him. He did not do that. He preferred to joke about “handshaking corona patients” - then he got it and nearly died.
But the politicians - left and right - are not solely to blame. They were guided by the science and total fucking idiots like Van Tam and Harries were saying Don’t Wear Masks! until very recently
They should be sacked and their pensions should be taken away, and they should count themselves lucky they are not in jail. That is all there is to it.
God, I remember when some PBers said face coverings were unBritish and anyone who wore a face covering should be deported to Saudi Arabia.
There should be a German compound noun for this feeling: “the dismay upon discovering that you are governed by people much less intelligent than yourself, and you already consider yourself to be an idiot”
And so, finally, WHO say we should all wear masks or face coverings. The last to yield, have yielded
What a total fucking shitshow, and yes I am looking at you, Boris “handshake” Johnson
I bought my first masks in mid Feb and was much mocked on here for doing so, and for wearing them.
If we had all behaved like me, then, we wouldn’t be staring at the economic abyss and medical disaster, now.
I'm not sure how masks would be prevented any 'economic abyss', unless you think the rejuvenated mask industry was enough to pick up the slack.
I hate to swear so long before the lagershed, but JESUS H TWATTING CHRIST
if we’d had (nshallah) Czech style death rates (they wore masks, minimal deaths) or (Deus vult!) Korea style death rates (mandatory masks, basically no dead) we would now be able to confidently open our economy, with some careful restrictions.
As it happens, we have a moron political class advised by a cretinous scientific elite, and they told us not to wear masks for three months before completely changing their advice, so we are one of the most fucked countries in the world, still not taking minimal mask precautions, and our economy will now suffer thereby
I hate to agree with you, as a matter of general principle, but on this you are absolutely correct.
I've always thought the mask thing was a no brainer, even if it achieves very little there is no downside.
Seriously what is it with the British? Are we really thicker than the rest of the world? Even the majority of Americans seem to be wearing them these days. I think a couple of weeks ago Casino even commented that no normal person would wear a mask. Perhaps we just deserve to be the last out of lockdown and have about the worst record in Europe.
Because if you wear a mask you look like a divvy.
Gonna have to get used to it.
We are maybe 15% of the way through this, if the antibody data is correct.
Comments
It would of course be better than George HW Bush in 1992 and Carter in 1980, the last two Presidents who failed to win re-election.
I'm glad it's showing a benefit, but those OR numbers are not that exciting.
If the consumers don't return what will that mean and as I said earlier behind the froth of the headline numbers, 295.000 jobs were permanently lost among those who were not temporarily laid off.
It will be 9 days from identifying issue to when he goes in
4 - 6 hour op - in and out same day (but plenty of bed rest afterwards)
What universe do these people inhabit? They might just as well have recommended that we each wear a necklace fashioned from Hydra's teeth to ward off the evil. We'd have about as much chance of obtaining those as an inexhaustible supply of N95 masks for every pensioner in the land.
Hopefully we won't see mask shortages in clinical settings as a result of the general public trying to get hold of the things in a panic. But if we get another couple of weeks down the line and NHS staff start screaming about a lack of PPE again, then this time we shall definitely know who is responsible.
The WHO and just about every epidemiologist and every nation on Earth has a completely different set of ideas about exactly what works and what direction this thing is moving in. I wouldn't go quite so far as to say they are all as clueless as each other - there have been some better guesses and clearly some better leadership in some places than others, and luck or lack thereof has probably also played its part - but fundamentally they give a very good impression of making the whole thing up as they go along.
But you should stay gloomy - that way it will feel even better when the day comes. ☺
I avoided retail, travel and housing, so missed some dramatic recoveries, but I can't see those being sustained.
Mind you, have lost an equivalent sum through lost income and having to support Fox Jr, so swings and roundabouts.
Otherwise, your choice is a short hard lockdown or a long soft lockdown. Or an apparent miracle.
But there's a reason we use randomised trials. Simply, if you give people a sugar pill and tell them it's an experimental treatment, then more of them will get better than if you give them nothing at all.
Fingers crossed for hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc as a combination treatment. I really hope it works.
But I am always reminded of this xkcd, especially given the modesty of the benefits in the one academic study. If you test enough things with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, one of them will appear to work, just by the laws of probability.
Until now I really hasn't thought about pubs needing to open, now I remember what we are missing.
It's interesting to speculate why we have been reluctant to go down this route.
UnBritish?
It is notable that the one study that actually uses zinc shows solid benefits over a protocol without zinc.
Wearing masks in public might be useful to some extent, but not a fraction as useful as making sure hospitals and care homes have enough to go around.
However, After adjusting for the time at which zinc sulfate was added to our protocol, an increased frequency of being discharged home (OR 1.53, 95% CI 1.12-2.09) reduction in mortality or transfer to hospice remained significant (OR 0.449, 95% CI 0.271-0.744).
Those benefits are mild enough that it might simply be chance, and are significantly less than Remedsivir - albeit with a much cheaper drug.
At the moment I'm starting to see people who thought they were essential being shocked as they discover they are surplus to requirements as others have stepped up to the plate. For a fair number of people the furlough may result in accidentally redundancy as companies discovery they need fewer staff at the moment.
I'm thinking of a sell.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/senate/az/arizona_senate_mcsally_vs_kelly-6801.html
Mark Kelly, the former astronaut, is up 13 points in a Fox News poll from this week.
Why the Republicans put up Martha McSally (beaten by Kyrsten Sinema in 2018) again is beyond me. She ran an appalling campaign last time around, and appears to be performing even worse this time around.
People in a double blind trial who are assigned to the current treatment group will have better results than patients recieving the same treatment but not in any study. In other words just being in a clinical trial brings a benefit.
Although FWIW if we're going to start treating the WHO as God then perhaps we could also junk the 2m rule and adopt the 1m rule whilst we're at it?
BTB head scarfs are useful when you want to continue chatting on the phone while also dispensing pharmaceutical goods as the demonstrated by my local asian pharmacist.
There's a risk of spending a lot on this type of thing, though, if you're not careful.
However in the hand of government (any government) good intentions result in bad outcomes.
It became a idiom of superoraty, 'I'm important so I get a mask' and you would not know how to use one anyway!!!
And now its politicised,
My opinion:
1) In the early days government could and should have been honest, and sead:
a) the sicance on this is not clear
b) please don't try to get hold of medical masks stolen from hospitals
c) but better safe than sorry, if you can make you own or buy a non medical go ahead.
2) Assuming that the WHO and others are correct, in that it does make things slightly better its probably a small to negotiable, if it allows us to open up the economy again - great. but if it just makes people think 'we are in the end of days' it may slow down the return to normality.
If <50% wear I will not wear one.
Its as simple as that and no I can't explain why my level of intelligence and education reduces my thought process to that either.
That is, let me point out, for shops - I would be far more likely to wear a mask on public transport.
Don't get me started on Johnson's clean bill of health over the Arcuri business, I can still smell it from here!
And as for the impartial Cruella Fernandes-Braverman's proclamations on Dominic Cummings. Pah!
I'm keeping track of items proposed by Cotton that have subsequently been taken up by Trump: withdrawing from the Iran agreement, blaming China for Covid, using the military to quell riots. If we count Cotton saying "US jets" should be withdrawn from Europe because of Huawei and G5, followed by Trump's announcement of a reduction in the number of US service personnel in Germany by more than a quarter, we're now up to four. The betting market says Cotton is 13 times less likely than Hillary Clinton to win the presidency as a result of the 2020 election. The betting market is an ass!
Heer essentially views Cotton as a sane and therefore much more dangerous version of Trump.
HYUFD said
'Heath won in 1970 in the TV age against the more charismatic Wilson as the economy was in an awful state, the pound devalued etc and Major won in 1992 over Kinnock as he was seen as more centrist and Kinnock not trusted on the economy, also in the TV age.'
In what way was the economy in an awful state in 1970? Wilson bequeathed a Balance of Payments surplus to Heath - and a Budget Surplus. When was the last time a Tory Government managed to do either - never mind both - tpoa Labour Government?
The economy was in pretty good shape in 1970 - far better than in March 1974 when Wilson returned to office in the aftermath of the 3 Day Week.Far better than the economy left by Thatcher in November 1990 when inflation was circa 10%.
I think I saw it on a lectern somewhere....
I call it being a Libertarian, and it hold no matter what the government is.
But GOP voters, mianly the white evangelicals are fanatical in their judge focus. In many ways they see judge positions as mor eimportant that their congressianal representatives.
That's why the GOP losing the Wisconsin Supreme Court election recently was seen as such a shock.
** Though surprisingly the Treasury and HMRC have done pretty good.
Now I don't know if zinc helped, made things worse or had no effect at all.
The Thatcher Major governments cut inflation and Thatcher also cut the number of strikes and increased GDP per capita
"Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected.[2] Although usually small in comparison to the fundamental benefits of safety interventions, it may result in a lower net benefit than expected."
Now if the government wants people to wear masks in the shops then give them 10p off their bill and they will - the reverse of the plastic bag charge.
I mean LG cannot be who I think it is.
https://twitter.com/SpiroAgnewGhost/status/1268991084442476544
And that isn't enough. The handles of supermarket trolleys are probably an important vector of infection. In the supermarkets I go to, about half the shoppers take a quick squirt of the crappy "anti-bacterial" spray that's provided and cursorily clean their hands with it, usually not bothering with their thumbs, the other half don't even do that, and I'm the only person who bothers wiping the trolley handle with ANYTHING (namely the 80% isopropanol solution I made at home, using isopropanol and aloe vera gel). This isn't difficult. Trolley handles are touched by many people. Practically all of us touch our faces a lot. Someone who's got this virus who uses a trolley will spread the virus to the handle. It's not over the top or consuming of hours of time to take the precaution of wiping the handle with a proper virus killer.
If Tesco's etc. provided proper cleaner and put up signs saying "Clean your hands or we won't let you in", with a cartoon board showing how to clean your hands properly, that would be much more useful than the strictness with which gauleiter-like staff enforce rules such as how to position your trolley at the checkout.
The state of the nation's health would be considerably worse if lockdown had happened two months earlier.
Of our post-war PMs with 1st class degrees, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Brown and Cameron it is a mixed bag in terms of record.
None of our best PMs in the last 100 years, Churchill, Attlee and Thatcher had a first class degree and Churchill did not even go to university
https://twitter.com/JoshuaYJackson/status/1268938629172334594
Personally I've lost faith in all this conflicting advice. Masks are useless, except now they're not, only they might be worse than useless because you might infect yourself when you're fiddling with them. The R number is 0.5 to 0.9, or 0.7 to 0.9, or perhaps 0.7 to 1.0, or 0.9 to 1.0, except that it's probably wildly different in the community to what it is in care homes but we're not really sure and we don't know what it is in either setting and it might be bleeding back out of the care homes fast enough to make a difference or it might not. The lockdown was essential except that the timing of the peak of the first wave suggests that new cases started dropping off before lockdown began. Immunity amongst the population might be very low or very high because we don't know whether innate resistance to the virus exists and whether or not antibodies to other coronaviruses offer some immunity. The only thing that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that you probably won't catch it if you're stood alone in the middle of an otherwise empty field.
Never mind the medical profession, the Delphic Oracle would give one about as much useful counsel on what to do next.
It makes their man custard very white which is great for the money shots.
Don't ask me how I know that.
But I fear I'm slipping into a fatalistic mindset - I did the social distancing and handwashing but still got infected by something. Now I continue to do the social distancing and handwashing but when you're out and about you can never be 100% safe.
But you shouldn't.
It's really terribly simple: places where mask wearing is common have had far smaller problems with CV-19 than places where it is not.
Wearing a mask when you suffer from hayfever isn't pleasant - sneezing with a mask on doesn't end well.
Seriously what is it with the British? Are we really thicker than the rest of the world? Even the majority of Americans seem to be wearing them these days. I think a couple of weeks ago Casino even commented that no normal person would wear a mask. Perhaps we just deserve to be the last out of lockdown and have about the worst record in Europe.
Serena Williams' husband says he wants to be able to tell their daughter what he did to support the black community."
https://news.sky.com/story/alexis-ohanian-reddit-co-founder-resigns-and-calls-for-his-job-to-be-given-to-black-candidate-12001346
There is an anti inflammatory effect as well as an antiviral one. If HCQ works (I am unconvinced) it is probably due to modulating inflammation.
It is the vascular inflammation that is the killer part.
And always use so large a fan that they could not be seen."
If it's a mask nobody knows it's you looking like a divvy.
But for two provisos.
Firstly I'm very unlikely to be infected now having probably been infected in April.
Secondly I'm not sure that some passing of the virus through the low risk, ie the people I might come into contact with, is a bad thing when the threat of a second wave this winter remains.
You used to be witty, sharp even acerbic once.
Shame...
Though it has been claimed she had a hand in Mr Whippy.
We are maybe 15% of the way through this, if the antibody data is correct.