Do you remember the statos on here who produced graphs that proved everyone in the world would have covid in a few months.. i believe nothing and noone.. especially anyone pinning blame.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
Foreign hospital figures prove you cannot trust foreign figures.
Right, got it.
Thats exactly right, the French Hospital figures are far higher than their stated level of infections suggest they should be. They have had far less stated infections than the UK over the past 6 weeks, yet they have double the number of people in hospital.
That's not a problem with the hospital figures, it's a problem with the infection figures. No-one really knows how many people have had it, or have got it at the moment, and it can really only be inferred through sampling the population
'Guided by the science' hardly excuses mistaken decisions. Are they suggesting that all the countries which acted more proactively weren't 'guided by the science' ?
What is most contemptible is not the mistakes they have made, but their refusal to admit to them.
I don't know if it's a peculiarly British phenomenon, but we do seem to have a problem with this. I think most people are reasonable and understand that mistakes are made, especially in unusual circumstances. Even if you say "with the benefit of hindsight", it would be better to say something like that than to point blank say that you got everything right. See also the fire brigade and Grenfell Tower.
An inability to admit mistakes is a sign of a lack of confidence. I do think that our leadership class lacks confidence, both in themselves and in us as a country. I blame the version of history they have been reared on, which glorifies in our imperial past and leaves modern Britain looking impotent and rudderless by comparison. Once you accept that our best years were spent raping and pillaging the world, led by a bunch of incompetent chancers while the majority of the population was mired in poverty and ignorance, I think it becomes a lot easier to believe in our modern incarnation. This is a great country, one buffoons like Boris Johnson get out of the way and let it be run competently and fairly.
As a lawyer, I think about this mistake problem a lot. If I take a difficult case, where the law is unclear, to Court, and we lose, was it a mistake?
Can it simultaneous be the right decision but also a mistake?
FPT - if Starmer's polling that well in Scotland then a Labour majority might be possible.
Scottish unionists might flip Tory to Labour to protect it, so he could get 20-25 seats in Scotland (Tories down to 2-3 again).
He’d still have to do a Cameron and swipe 100+ in England though. Seems insurmountable but the electorate is so volatile these days I could see it happening if he stays moderate and Boris totally botches the economic recovery.
Those Boris Johnson figures are fairly standard for Tory leaders among Scottish voters, and are actually slightly better than the worst May and Cameron depths.
However, that Starmer +34 is truly outstanding! I cannot remember the last time a Unionist leader had such good Scottish ratings. Certainly not the over-hyped Ruth Davidson. You’d probably have to go back to Gordon Brown, Henry McLeish or Charlie Kennedy. And unlike Starmer, they were all Scots!
Is Starmer the most popular Englishman in Scotland since... who?
Yes, Starmer's polling well in Scotland, but Sturgeon’s polling even better.
Yes, some Scottish unionists will flip Tory to Labour to protect it, but nowhere near enough to get 20-25 seats in Scotland. And the Union might not make it to 2024 anyway.
Yes, he could still do a Cameron and swipe 100+ in England because the electorate is so volatile these days.
Yes, I too could see it happening if he stays moderate and Boris totally botches the economic recovery.
So, you agree with me except for the Scottish bit?
There are over 25 Scottish seats in Labour's top 150 targets. In an environment where there' a change in sentiment UK-wide and the chance of a change of UK Government I'd expect a level of split-ticket voting by some SNP supporters who want to kick the Tories out, and some Unionist tactical voting.
“So, you agree with me except for the Scottish bit?”
Yes, and I even kind of agree with your Scottish analysis too.
Split-ticket voting *will* happen (it always does). And Unionist tactical voting (it always does). But it’s a matter of how much.
Even if Starmer soars like an eagle for the next four years (tricky), I would say that the SLab ceiling is about 5-10 seats. So nowhere near your 20-25 seats.
The 25th seat is Paisley and Renfrewshire North with an SNP MAJ of 11,902. Are you honestly telling us that Starmer is going to single-handedly win that for SLab? Remember, SLab themselves are a total deadweight.
By the way are the people who claimed that the 'Stay Alert' slogan would be disastrous now willing to admit they were wrong ?
No, it was a shit slogan that didn't work.
You really are bitter that it did work aren't you Scott.
New positive cases down by 75% since it was used.
Apart from parts of the world still in denial, cases are hugely down almost everywhere. Where's the evidence this had anything to do with our particular slogan, launched during a muddled and confused speech by our PM?
That seems a bit unfair. It was the Imperial model that pushed UK into lock down by showing that things were going to be much more severe than the previous modelling indicated. So what if the Imperial model was based on an over-optimistic assumption? (5-6 day doubling) The model output was still shocking enough to change course.
If the Imperial model, with the wrong doubling time, had suggested the soft restrictions approach was fine, then there would be an issue. It may well have been wise not to come back to the government with a revised estimate when the original was dire enough to make the point and they probably weren't certain of the doubling time at that point - it's a bit hard to pick out as you're not sure what's community transmission (which you need to work out the doubling time and what's incoming cases).
On my understanding the Imperial model got the characteristics of the disease basically right. Ferguson and SAGE, it appears, underestimated the effectiveness of lockdown as a containment measure, and that you could really get through the epidemic, at least in the first wave with thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of fatalities.
The Ferguson/Imperial model predicted a few tens of thousands of deaths (up to about 50k, most scenarios lower) under full lock down, so if anything they overestimated what a lockdown could do - although if lock down applied at the point the report was published, rather than a little later, the estimates were probably pretty good.
I saw an interview with Prof Ferguson early on in the epidemic (maybe end Feb?) where he was quite dismissive of the effectiveness of social distancing in reducing the death toll. The SAGE minutes also don't seem to be particularly confident. My guess is that the thinking changed and they started suggesting a possible 20 000 figure. I am not sure if the model changed or full lockdown became politically acceptable and so they considered it seriously for the first time.
'Guided by the science' hardly excuses mistaken decisions. Are they suggesting that all the countries which acted more proactively weren't 'guided by the science' ?
What is most contemptible is not the mistakes they have made, but their refusal to admit to them.
I don't know if it's a peculiarly British phenomenon, but we do seem to have a problem with this. I think most people are reasonable and understand that mistakes are made, especially in unusual circumstances. Even if you say "with the benefit of hindsight", it would be better to say something like that than to point blank say that you got everything right. See also the fire brigade and Grenfell Tower.
An inability to admit mistakes is a sign of a lack of confidence. I do think that our leadership class lacks confidence, both in themselves and in us as a country. I blame the version of history they have been reared on, which glorifies in our imperial past and leaves modern Britain looking impotent and rudderless by comparison. Once you accept that our best years were spent raping and pillaging the world, led by a bunch of incompetent chancers while the majority of the population was mired in poverty and ignorance, I think it becomes a lot easier to believe in our modern incarnation. This is a great country, one buffoons like Boris Johnson get out of the way and let it be run competently and fairly.
As a lawyer, I think about this mistake problem a lot. If I take a difficult case, where the law is unclear, to Court, and we lose, was it a mistake?
Can it simultaneous be the right decision but also a mistake?
As any poker player knows, right decisions correlate with better outcomes only in the long run.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
Foreign hospital figures prove you cannot trust foreign figures.
Right, got it.
Thats exactly right, the French Hospital figures are far higher than their stated level of infections suggest they should be. They have had far less stated infections than the UK over the past 6 weeks, yet they have double the number of people in hospital.
That's not a problem with the hospital figures, it's a problem with the infection figures. No-one really knows how many people have had it, or have got it at the moment, and it can really only be inferred through sampling the population
It is a problem when the consensus is that France has done so much better than than the UK in dealing with Covid-19. Can you imagine if the situation was reversed with the UK claiming far less deaths and infections than France but having double the number of people in hospital. Beth Rigby and co would have great fun at the evening briefings with that one and it would send Scott into retweet overdrive about how the UK was fiddling the figures.
Probably a silly question but how do top scientists, medics etc get to be appointed Govt advisors? I realise they are very bright people and Ferguson in particular has worked on a lot of very nasty epidemics, but who picks the members of, for example, SAGE.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
By the way are the people who claimed that the 'Stay Alert' slogan would be disastrous now willing to admit they were wrong ?
No, it was a shit slogan that didn't work.
You really are bitter that it did work aren't you Scott.
New positive cases down by 75% since it was used.
Apart from parts of the world still in denial, cases are hugely down almost everywhere. Where's the evidence this had anything to do with our particular slogan, launched during a muddled and confused speech by our PM?
As new cases have fallen by 75% whilst we've been continually told that a second wave was about to happen its clear that the doom-mongers have been proved wrong.
That the doom-mongers seem disinclined to admit things have gone better than they predicted does suggest they might be more bitter than relieved at how things have progressed during the last month.
By the way are the people who claimed that the 'Stay Alert' slogan would be disastrous now willing to admit they were wrong ?
No, it was a shit slogan that didn't work.
You really are bitter that it did work aren't you Scott.
New positive cases down by 75% since it was used.
Haha! That's got nothing to do with "Stay Alert", thats the trailing effect from the far more effective "Stay at home" messaging.
Every person I've met has mocked the utter inanity of "Stay Alert" and has long since disregarded the government as a source of advice to be followed.
Only an utter sycophant who had switched off all critical functions to optimise his arse licking effectiveness would ascribe the fall in cases to the insert slogan here blandness of "Stay Alert".
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
Foreign hospital figures prove you cannot trust foreign figures.
Right, got it.
Thats exactly right, the French Hospital figures are far higher than their stated level of infections suggest they should be. They have had far less stated infections than the UK over the past 6 weeks, yet they have double the number of people in hospital.
France hospitalized more because they took in a lot of patients with less severe symptoms . As opposed to the UK where the advice if your symptoms worsened was to ring 111. In France you were told to ring for an ambulance . As for less stated infections the testing was not great in France but when it comes to deaths which is surely the most critical feature the UK had loads of advanced warning , of all the large European countries it should have done much better , over 40,000 confirmed deaths is an utter failure .
Did you see the pictures of the hospital trains sending patients all over the country in France. Are you saying that despite their health system being completely overloaded they were still admitting people into non-existent hospital beds with minor symptoms?
What are the obligations for companies under modern anti-slavery legislation? Do they not have to have some kind of routines or policies in place? I’d be grateful if anyone could outline the key requirements, or point me in the right direction.
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
The fury from Conservatives when Rory Stewart made this intervention was tangible. Jeremy Hunt fared no better. There are many on this site who could usefully examine their consciences.
Of course, we now know Boris Johnson bunked off for half of February so that he could relax with his fiancée, just as the storm clouds were gathering. Normally when a captain deserts his post, he is relieved of command. The Conservatives, however, would rather ignore tens of thousands of avoidable deaths than admit any failure on their part.
By the way are the people who claimed that the 'Stay Alert' slogan would be disastrous now willing to admit they were wrong ?
No, it was a shit slogan that didn't work.
You really are bitter that it did work aren't you Scott.
New positive cases down by 75% since it was used.
Haha! That's got nothing to do with "Stay Alert", thats the trailing effect from the far more effective "Stay at home" messaging.
Every person I've met has mocked the utter inanity of "Stay Alert" and has long since disregarded the government as a source of advice to be followed.
Only an utter sycophant who had switched off all critical functions to optimise his arse licking effectiveness would ascribe the fall in cases to the insert slogan here blandness of "Stay Alert".
Or perhaps someone who goes out to work and for whom 'stay alert' is a useful reminder.
And btw you come over as a little deranged in that comment - rather worrying at this time in the morning.
That Rory Stewart thing looks more prescient than I remembered.
His explanation on scientists vs politicians and their relative responsibilities is excellent.
I remember his being roundly mocked at the time.
I criticised him, though based on headlines/tweets - I hadn't seen that more detailed interview and would have been more sympathetic if I had, I thought from what I saw that he was saying ignore the science but what he said was actually a lot more nuanced than that. He was right in what he said in that interview and I was wrong to criticise him without finding out exactly what he had said.
'Guided by the science' hardly excuses mistaken decisions. Are they suggesting that all the countries which acted more proactively weren't 'guided by the science' ?
What is most contemptible is not the mistakes they have made, but their refusal to admit to them.
I don't know if it's a peculiarly British phenomenon, but we do seem to have a problem with this. I think most people are reasonable and understand that mistakes are made, especially in unusual circumstances. Even if you say "with the benefit of hindsight", it would be better to say something like that than to point blank say that you got everything right. See also the fire brigade and Grenfell Tower.
An inability to admit mistakes is a sign of a lack of confidence. I do think that our leadership class lacks confidence, both in themselves and in us as a country. I blame the version of history they have been reared on, which glorifies in our imperial past and leaves modern Britain looking impotent and rudderless by comparison. Once you accept that our best years were spent raping and pillaging the world, led by a bunch of incompetent chancers while the majority of the population was mired in poverty and ignorance, I think it becomes a lot easier to believe in our modern incarnation. This is a great country, one buffoons like Boris Johnson get out of the way and let it be run competently and fairly.
As a lawyer, I think about this mistake problem a lot. If I take a difficult case, where the law is unclear, to Court, and we lose, was it a mistake?
Can it simultaneous be the right decision but also a mistake?
The irony is that those at the top of this government have a self-image of “move fast and break things”. Instead, they move slow and lose things.
'Guided by the science' hardly excuses mistaken decisions. Are they suggesting that all the countries which acted more proactively weren't 'guided by the science' ?
What is most contemptible is not the mistakes they have made, but their refusal to admit to them.
I don't know if it's a peculiarly British phenomenon, but we do seem to have a problem with this. I think most people are reasonable and understand that mistakes are made, especially in unusual circumstances. Even if you say "with the benefit of hindsight", it would be better to say something like that than to point blank say that you got everything right. See also the fire brigade and Grenfell Tower.
I think a fair assessment may be that given the widely-recognised range of uncertainty in the early days and the suggestions from some analyses that the pandemic was worse thanexpected, the Government should have locked down early for precautionary reasons - and potentially saved 20,000 lives,
Boris's bias to cheery optimism plus the fear of economic consequences made them opt for delay and hoping the more optimistic models were right. In this sort of situation we need realism and caution rather than the mixture of optimism and can-do spirit that are appropriate for good times. And that's not just a judgment in hindsight. We need precisely the same now, and I'm not sure we're getting it.
I think this is right. Another contributing factor is the way in which we have run down our public health capacity over the last decade or so (along with decoupling it from the Health Service). Public Health England is a pale shadow of what existed previously.
Probably a silly question but how do top scientists, medics etc get to be appointed Govt advisors? I realise they are very bright people and Ferguson in particular has worked on a lot of very nasty epidemics, but who picks the members of, for example, SAGE.
You get on committees by being on other committees. It's a self-reinforcing process, as well as a full time occupation for those committee members. Not sure they get a lot of time to do any actual research.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
By the way are the people who claimed that the 'Stay Alert' slogan would be disastrous now willing to admit they were wrong ?
No, it was a shit slogan that didn't work.
You really are bitter that it did work aren't you Scott.
New positive cases down by 75% since it was used.
Haha! That's got nothing to do with "Stay Alert", thats the trailing effect from the far more effective "Stay at home" messaging.
Every person I've met has mocked the utter inanity of "Stay Alert" and has long since disregarded the government as a source of advice to be followed.
Only an utter sycophant who had switched off all critical functions to optimise his arse licking effectiveness would ascribe the fall in cases to the insert slogan here blandness of "Stay Alert".
Or perhaps someone who goes out to work and for whom 'stay alert' is a useful reminder.
And btw you come over as a little deranged in that comment - rather worrying at this time in the morning.
Reminder... a reminder... about Covid 19: that's a great idea! Just in case people forget right?
I guess people forget all the time don't they, its barely been in the press and its not like its affected the life of every single person in the country.
I can see it now, the government just wanted to make sure we didn't forget about the global pandemic.
I take it all back: its a marketing masterstroke! Don Draper would be proud of it and I predict a glittering career in marketing for the geniuses involved in coming up with it.
I for one will definitely be staying alert from now on.
'Guided by the science' hardly excuses mistaken decisions. Are they suggesting that all the countries which acted more proactively weren't 'guided by the science' ?
What is most contemptible is not the mistakes they have made, but their refusal to admit to them.
I don't know if it's a peculiarly British phenomenon, but we do seem to have a problem with this. I think most people are reasonable and understand that mistakes are made, especially in unusual circumstances. Even if you say "with the benefit of hindsight", it would be better to say something like that than to point blank say that you got everything right. See also the fire brigade and Grenfell Tower.
I think a fair assessment may be that given the widely-recognised range of uncertainty in the early days and the suggestions from some analyses that the pandemic was worse thanexpected, the Government should have locked down early for precautionary reasons - and potentially saved 20,000 lives,
Boris's bias to cheery optimism plus the fear of economic consequences made them opt for delay and hoping the more optimistic models were right. In this sort of situation we need realism and caution rather than the mixture of optimism and can-do spirit that are appropriate for good times. And that's not just a judgment in hindsight. We need precisely the same now, and I'm not sure we're getting it.
I think this is right. Another contributing factor is the way in which we have run down our public health capacity over the last decade or so (along with decoupling it from the Health Service). Public Health England is a pale shadow of what existed previously.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
That Rory Stewart thing looks more prescient than I remembered.
His explanation on scientists vs politicians and their relative responsibilities is excellent.
I remember his being roundly mocked at the time.
I criticised him, though based on headlines/tweets - I hadn't seen that more detailed interview and would have been more sympathetic if I had, I thought from what I saw that he was saying ignore the science but what he said was actually a lot more nuanced than that. He was right in what he said in that interview and I was wrong to criticise him without finding out exactly what he had said.
Probably a silly question but how do top scientists, medics etc get to be appointed Govt advisors? I realise they are very bright people and Ferguson in particular has worked on a lot of very nasty epidemics, but who picks the members of, for example, SAGE.
You get on committees by being on other committees. It's a self-reinforcing process, as well as a full time occupation for those committee members. Not sure they get a lot of time to do any actual research.
It's the Chapocracy, the defining organisational form of Britain. If you're a good chap then other good chaps will ask you to join them in a committee of good chaps. Being a good chap means being good to the other chaps. If you stop being a good chap then funny things will start to happen to you, like your private life starts appearing in the newspapers. So be a good chap, there's a good chap.
I suggest he was found out well before he achieved office, but both Conservatives and voters chose to overlook this for reasons that are familiar to us all.
I think there's more to it than that. There was some cognitive dissonance going on as people thought he'd be an election winner, and was sound on Brexit and protecting Tory seats, but he was also OK as London Mayor, and people thought he'd build a strong team around him and step-up.
Turns out London Mayor is about his level.
(I'm not sure Khan even matches that, by the way)
I am pretty sure I made the point that the qualities needed for the mayoralty aren't the same as those for PM, before his selection - and that he managed to run the mayoralty such that he avoided all meaningful scrutiny and left the hard work and difficult thinking to others.
In No. 10 he appears mostly to be relying on Cummings, which isn't going so well, and is struggling with his first real exposure to scrutiny and accountability.
He's very shallow, isn't he? Little to offer other than "ra ra ra ... great country ... we'll do it ... ra ra ... gonna beat this thing ... ra ra ... world class ... come on blighty ... burble burble ... ra ra ... bluster bluster ... ra ra ra."
Probably a silly question but how do top scientists, medics etc get to be appointed Govt advisors? I realise they are very bright people and Ferguson in particular has worked on a lot of very nasty epidemics, but who picks the members of, for example, SAGE.
You get on committees by being on other committees. It's a self-reinforcing process, as well as a full time occupation for those committee members. Not sure they get a lot of time to do any actual research.
It's a 'quis custodiet ipsos custodes' problem, and pretty much universal. Non scientist politicians are saying things like 'we are following the best science' when they couldn't speak coherently for two seconds about what science is or how it works, let alone adjudicate what counts as 'best science'.
A sub point is that 'following the science' is meaningless anyway, when all political decisions, unlike pure science has to take both economics and morality into account. Science doesn't do either of those.
What are the obligations for companies under modern anti-slavery legislation? Do they not have to have some kind of routines or policies in place? I’d be grateful if anyone could outline the key requirements, or point me in the right direction.
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
Very few.
In the UK - which is still the leader in legislation on this - the focus of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act isn't on "modern anti-slavery", but obligations relating to modern slavery (a completely different matter) All companies with an annual turnover of £36 mn or more must publish, to quote Wiki, a statement to "confirm the steps taken to ensure that slavery and human trafficking are not taking place in the business (or in any supply chain) or declare that no steps to confirm the existence of slavery or trafficking have been taken"
That's it.
It's not illegal to source goods from a supplier known to use slave labour. The assumption is that by requiring publication of the issue, public opinion will drive what happens next
By the way are the people who claimed that the 'Stay Alert' slogan would be disastrous now willing to admit they were wrong ?
No, it was a shit slogan that didn't work.
You really are bitter that it did work aren't you Scott.
New positive cases down by 75% since it was used.
Haha! That's got nothing to do with "Stay Alert", thats the trailing effect from the far more effective "Stay at home" messaging.
Every person I've met has mocked the utter inanity of "Stay Alert" and has long since disregarded the government as a source of advice to be followed.
Only an utter sycophant who had switched off all critical functions to optimise his arse licking effectiveness would ascribe the fall in cases to the insert slogan here blandness of "Stay Alert".
Or perhaps someone who goes out to work and for whom 'stay alert' is a useful reminder.
And btw you come over as a little deranged in that comment - rather worrying at this time in the morning.
Reminder... a reminder... about Covid 19: that's a great idea! Just in case people forget right?
I guess people forget all the time don't they, its barely been in the press and its not like its affected the life of every single person in the country.
I can see it now, the government just wanted to make sure we didn't forget about the global pandemic.
I take it all back: its a marketing masterstroke! Don Draper would be proud of it and I predict a glittering career in marketing for the geniuses involved in coming up with it.
I for one will definitely be staying alert from now on.
Probably a silly question but how do top scientists, medics etc get to be appointed Govt advisors? I realise they are very bright people and Ferguson in particular has worked on a lot of very nasty epidemics, but who picks the members of, for example, SAGE.
You get on committees by being on other committees. It's a self-reinforcing process, as well as a full time occupation for those committee members. Not sure they get a lot of time to do any actual research.
No professors get a lot of time to do any actual research (no more than senior management in any company get a lot of time to do the jobs of those they are managing)
FPT - if Starmer's polling that well in Scotland then a Labour majority might be possible.
Scottish unionists might flip Tory to Labour to protect it, so he could get 20-25 seats in Scotland (Tories down to 2-3 again).
He’d still have to do a Cameron and swipe 100+ in England though. Seems insurmountable but the electorate is so volatile these days I could see it happening if he stays moderate and Boris totally botches the economic recovery.
Those Boris Johnson figures are fairly standard for Tory leaders among Scottish voters, and are actually slightly better than the worst May and Cameron depths.
However, that Starmer +34 is truly outstanding! I cannot remember the last time a Unionist leader had such good Scottish ratings. Certainly not the over-hyped Ruth Davidson. You’d probably have to go back to Gordon Brown, Henry McLeish or Charlie Kennedy. And unlike Starmer, they were all Scots!
Is Starmer the most popular Englishman in Scotland since... who?
Yes, Starmer's polling well in Scotland, but Sturgeon’s polling even better.
Yes, some Scottish unionists will flip Tory to Labour to protect it, but nowhere near enough to get 20-25 seats in Scotland. And the Union might not make it to 2024 anyway.
Yes, he could still do a Cameron and swipe 100+ in England because the electorate is so volatile these days.
Yes, I too could see it happening if he stays moderate and Boris totally botches the economic recovery.
Given there will be no indyref2 allowed for a generation under the Tories but Starmer would allow indyref2 of there is a Nationalist majority again next year those figures are not good for Yes.
The SNP need Boris and hard Brexit to have the best chance of winning indyref2 but Starmer is more popular than Boris in Scotland and would pursue a softer Brexit so if he granted indyref2 Yes would likely lose it again
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
Does it? Thats what France are saying, but whose death figures can you trust when they are such a political football? The hospital figures simply do not tie up with their infection and death figures.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
The stories we have heard about hospital admissions in the UK is that people are so ill when they are admitted that many of them are too late for treatment. British patients are dying quickly, rather than surviving for weeks in ICU and recovering.
I expect that when we have good estimates of the total number of people infected in different countries that we will see a higher IFR in the UK for this reason.
It will take many months if not years for a full inquiry to determine what did or did not go wrong in the UK's Covid response, including the accuracy of the scientific advice.
Assuming things are back to relative normality by the end of the year Brexit will again be back to the fore and the polling shows the public now split on whether Boris should pursue a transition period extension but Tory and Leave voters strongly opposed
What are the obligations for companies under modern anti-slavery legislation? Do they not have to have some kind of routines or policies in place? I’d be grateful if anyone could outline the key requirements, or point me in the right direction.
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
To give credit where credit's due, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was probably Theresa May's biggest success while in Government, and it is a model piece of legislation that has been followed in many other jurisdictions. As you say it requires businesses to publish an annual statement if they have an annual turnover above £36 million. However, while it's strong on self-reporting, it's very weak on victim protection.
There's a useful summary of articles setting out it's pros and cons here -
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
Does it? Thats what France are saying, but whose death figures can you trust when they are such a political football? The hospital figures simply do not tie up with their infection and death figures.
The simplest explanation looks likely to be correct: the French took a more aggressive view of who to admit to hospital and who to put in ICU, and quite possibly as a result saved many more lives. That requires no chauvinistic assumption that Britain is the only country honestly gathering statistics and seems entirely consistent with what we know.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
Foreign hospital figures prove you cannot trust foreign figures.
Right, got it.
Thats exactly right, the French Hospital figures are far higher than their stated level of infections suggest they should be. They have had far less stated infections than the UK over the past 6 weeks, yet they have double the number of people in hospital.
France hospitalized more because they took in a lot of patients with less severe symptoms . As opposed to the UK where the advice if your symptoms worsened was to ring 111. In France you were told to ring for an ambulance . As for less stated infections the testing was not great in France but when it comes to deaths which is surely the most critical feature the UK had loads of advanced warning , of all the large European countries it should have done much better , over 40,000 confirmed deaths is an utter failure .
Did you see the pictures of the hospital trains sending patients all over the country in France. Are you saying that despite their health system being completely overloaded they were still admitting people into non-existent hospital beds with minor symptoms?
France had clusters in the ne, Paris and the suburbs , many other parts had very few cases . That put a strain on the systems there but in terms of patients being transferred it wasn’t that many . The system was never completely overloaded .
You seem to be ignoring the advice in France , ring an ambulance if your symptoms worsen , so people got to hospital earlier , also France has a lower obesity rate which also could have impacted clinical outcomes .
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
Does it? Thats what France are saying, but whose death figures can you trust when they are such a political football? The hospital figures simply do not tie up with their infection and death figures.
Even if there are questions about what gets counted as a Covid death or a non-Covid death, the total number of deaths is pretty reliable. Unless you really think that countries are hiding large numbers of corpses somewhere.
That seems a bit unfair. It was the Imperial model that pushed UK into lock down by showing that things were going to be much more severe than the previous modelling indicated. So what if the Imperial model was based on an over-optimistic assumption? (5-6 day doubling) The model output was still shocking enough to change course.
If the Imperial model, with the wrong doubling time, had suggested the soft restrictions approach was fine, then there would be an issue. It may well have been wise not to come back to the government with a revised estimate when the original was dire enough to make the point and they probably weren't certain of the doubling time at that point - it's a bit hard to pick out as you're not sure what's community transmission (which you need to work out the doubling time and what's incoming cases).
On my understanding the Imperial model got the characteristics of the disease basically right. Ferguson and SAGE, it appears, underestimated the effectiveness of lockdown as a containment measure, and that you could really get through the epidemic, at least in the first wave with thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of fatalities.
The Ferguson/Imperial model predicted a few tens of thousands of deaths (up to about 50k, most scenarios lower) under full lock down, so if anything they overestimated what a lockdown could do - although if lock down applied at the point the report was published, rather than a little later, the estimates were probably pretty good.
I saw an interview with Prof Ferguson early on in the epidemic (maybe end Feb?) where he was quite dismissive of the effectiveness of social distancing in reducing the death toll. The SAGE minutes also don't seem to be particularly confident. My guess is that the thinking changed and they started suggesting a possible 20 000 figure. I am not sure if the model changed or full lockdown became politically acceptable and so they considered it seriously for the first time.
I didn't see that. Figures I quoted are from the March 16 report (the one that led to lock down). As I recall, the earlier modelling that suggested this could be handled without lock down was not from Imperial. If Ferguson was criticising effectiveness of social distancing (i.e. short of a lock down) then he's probably been consistent (although possibly not right as social distancing, early enough, may have been enough). Anyway, I haven't seen the interview, so my interpretation might all be wrong.
What are the obligations for companies under modern anti-slavery legislation? Do they not have to have some kind of routines or policies in place? I’d be grateful if anyone could outline the key requirements, or point me in the right direction.
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
Very few.
In the UK - which is still the leader in legislation on this - the focus of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act isn't on "modern anti-slavery", but obligations relating to modern slavery (a completely different matter) All companies with an annual turnover of £36 mn or more must publish, to quote Wiki, a statement to "confirm the steps taken to ensure that slavery and human trafficking are not taking place in the business (or in any supply chain) or declare that no steps to confirm the existence of slavery or trafficking have been taken"
That's it.
It's not illegal to source goods from a supplier known to use slave labour. The assumption is that by requiring publication of the issue, public opinion will drive what happens next
But why do so few of the relevant companies actually bother publishing this statement, or bother updating every year? (And what is your source for “very few”?)
As far as I can make out, the failure to publish a statement, or the failure to update annually, has pretty much zero consequences. That seems very unwise to me. We are just building up massive problems in the future.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
Does it? Thats what France are saying, but whose death figures can you trust when they are such a political football? The hospital figures simply do not tie up with their infection and death figures.
The simplest explanation looks likely to be correct: the French took a more aggressive view of who to admit to hospital and who to put in ICU, and quite possibly as a result saved many more lives. That requires no chauvinistic assumption that Britain is the only country honestly gathering statistics and seems entirely consistent with what we know.
What are the obligations for companies under modern anti-slavery legislation? Do they not have to have some kind of routines or policies in place? I’d be grateful if anyone could outline the key requirements, or point me in the right direction.
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
Very few.
In the UK - which is still the leader in legislation on this - the focus of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act isn't on "modern anti-slavery", but obligations relating to modern slavery (a completely different matter) All companies with an annual turnover of £36 mn or more must publish, to quote Wiki, a statement to "confirm the steps taken to ensure that slavery and human trafficking are not taking place in the business (or in any supply chain) or declare that no steps to confirm the existence of slavery or trafficking have been taken"
That's it.
It's not illegal to source goods from a supplier known to use slave labour. The assumption is that by requiring publication of the issue, public opinion will drive what happens next
But why do so few of the relevant companies actually bother publishing this statement, or bother updating every year? (And what is your source for “very few”?)
As far as I can make out, the failure to publish a statement, or the failure to update annually, has pretty much zero consequences. That seems very unwise to me. We are just building up massive problems in the future.
If a business fails to produce a slavery and human trafficking statement for a particular financial year the Secretary of State can seek an injunction requiring the organisation to comply. If the organisation fails to comply with the injunction, they will be in contempt of court. However, so far as I am aware, this has never been done.
There is a register of statements here, according to which 17349 UK companies have submitted 16228 statements -
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
Does it? Thats what France are saying, but whose death figures can you trust when they are such a political football? The hospital figures simply do not tie up with their infection and death figures.
The simplest explanation looks likely to be correct: the French took a more aggressive view of who to admit to hospital and who to put in ICU, and quite possibly as a result saved many more lives. That requires no chauvinistic assumption that Britain is the only country honestly gathering statistics and seems entirely consistent with what we know.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
Foreign hospital figures prove you cannot trust foreign figures.
Right, got it.
Thats exactly right, the French Hospital figures are far higher than their stated level of infections suggest they should be. They have had far less stated infections than the UK over the past 6 weeks, yet they have double the number of people in hospital.
France hospitalized more because they took in a lot of patients with less severe symptoms . As opposed to the UK where the advice if your symptoms worsened was to ring 111. In France you were told to ring for an ambulance . As for less stated infections the testing was not great in France but when it comes to deaths which is surely the most critical feature the UK had loads of advanced warning , of all the large European countries it should have done much better , over 40,000 confirmed deaths is an utter failure .
Did you see the pictures of the hospital trains sending patients all over the country in France. Are you saying that despite their health system being completely overloaded they were still admitting people into non-existent hospital beds with minor symptoms?
France had clusters in the ne, Paris and the suburbs , many other parts had very few cases . That put a strain on the systems there but in terms of patients being transferred it wasn’t that many . The system was never completely overloaded .
You seem to be ignoring the advice in France , ring an ambulance if your symptoms worsen , so people got to hospital earlier , also France has a lower obesity rate which also could have impacted clinical outcomes .
The desire to stick up for the French Government on this site is so sweet. The dismissal of the fact that they have double the number of patients in hospital and double the number in ICU as they are kinder to their citizens is bizarre.
Apparently now the French treat Covid 19 better than the UK and have much more succesful outcomes, even though it is a disease with no medical cure.
Would we be having a different discussion if the question to Ferguson had been different?
Q: Was Johnson right to rush in the lock down on 23 March? A: Well, if he'd waited another week, 50k more would have died.
Did Johnson save 50k lives?
I can't believe I'm (half) defending Johnson and the government - I'm not fan of either, I did not and will not vote for Johnson and they've made plenty of mistakes*. However, until the Ferguson/Imperial model of 16 March, the advice to the government seemed to be that action to that point, short of a lock down, was enough. They may well have seen the Ferguson model before it was published, but how quickly could they have acted? Lock down a week before it happened is perhaps possible, but you have to allow some time to not only appreciate the new advice on lock down but also to work through the (dire) consequences of a full lock down for the economy. It was not a decision to be taken lightly.
* Care homes, obviously. Also not pushing the soft lock down option such as working at home as much as possible at an earlier point.
What are the obligations for companies under modern anti-slavery legislation? Do they not have to have some kind of routines or policies in place? I’d be grateful if anyone could outline the key requirements, or point me in the right direction.
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
To give credit where credit's due, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was probably Theresa May's biggest success while in Government, and it is a model piece of legislation that has been followed in many other jurisdictions. As you say it requires businesses to publish an annual statement if they have an annual turnover above £36 million. However, while it's strong on self-reporting, it's very weak on victim protection.
There's a useful summary of articles setting out it's pros and cons here -
That seems a bit unfair. It was the Imperial model that pushed UK into lock down by showing that things were going to be much more severe than the previous modelling indicated. So what if the Imperial model was based on an over-optimistic assumption? (5-6 day doubling) The model output was still shocking enough to change course.
If the Imperial model, with the wrong doubling time, had suggested the soft restrictions approach was fine, then there would be an issue. It may well have been wise not to come back to the government with a revised estimate when the original was dire enough to make the point and they probably weren't certain of the doubling time at that point - it's a bit hard to pick out as you're not sure what's community transmission (which you need to work out the doubling time and what's incoming cases).
On my understanding the Imperial model got the characteristics of the disease basically right. Ferguson and SAGE, it appears, underestimated the effectiveness of lockdown as a containment measure, and that you could really get through the epidemic, at least in the first wave with thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of fatalities.
The Ferguson/Imperial model predicted a few tens of thousands of deaths (up to about 50k, most scenarios lower) under full lock down, so if anything they overestimated what a lockdown could do - although if lock down applied at the point the report was published, rather than a little later, the estimates were probably pretty good.
I saw an interview with Prof Ferguson early on in the epidemic (maybe end Feb?) where he was quite dismissive of the effectiveness of social distancing in reducing the death toll. The SAGE minutes also don't seem to be particularly confident. My guess is that the thinking changed and they started suggesting a possible 20 000 figure. I am not sure if the model changed or full lockdown became politically acceptable and so they considered it seriously for the first time.
I didn't see that. Figures I quoted are from the March 16 report (the one that led to lock down). As I recall, the earlier modelling that suggested this could be handled without lock down was not from Imperial. If Ferguson was criticising effectiveness of social distancing (i.e. short of a lock down) then he's probably been consistent (although possibly not right as social distancing, early enough, may have been enough). Anyway, I haven't seen the interview, so my interpretation might all be wrong.
I seem to recall a discussion on this in the dim & distant pst, where lockdown was ruled out 'because the British would never stand for it'. To be fair I think that was in a 'scientific' rather than a 'political' discussion.
In an novel pandemic that causes anywhere up to a 1% fatality rate (more if health services are overwhelmed), 20,000 excess deaths out of a population of 66 million is sadly well within the envelope of possible outcomes, and far lower than many of the projections that circulated at the time. I seem to recall that 500,000 was the reasonable worst case calculated by Ferguson and independently by Chris Whitty.
As is now obvious, lockdown is sending whole nations insane and crippling their economies at the same time, so it's hardly unreasonable that the government was reticent to take such an unprecedented step.
Most people don't demand perfect levels of foresight from their leaders in unprecedented circumstances. I have no doubt that whenever we locked down, the same political opponents of Boris Johnson would be saying 'Well, if we'd locked down a few days earlier, we'd have saved X more lives...'
In other despite Brexit news, Unilever abandons the Netherlands HQ and relocates to be fully run from the UK. No material change in job locations but it does spell long term doom for the food products business being run our of the Netherlands.
Interestingly 18 months ago the CEO got sacked for trying to do the opposite.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
Does it? Thats what France are saying, but whose death figures can you trust when they are such a political football? The hospital figures simply do not tie up with their infection and death figures.
The simplest explanation looks likely to be correct: the French took a more aggressive view of who to admit to hospital and who to put in ICU, and quite possibly as a result saved many more lives. That requires no chauvinistic assumption that Britain is the only country honestly gathering statistics and seems entirely consistent with what we know.
Don't disagree, but the better stats thing (not for nefarious purposes, just due to the way things are organised) is somewhat true. I'm in epidemiology and our health data are some of the most complete in the world, partly due to the centralised organisation of the NHS with all hospitals submitting records centrally (for GP practices they use several different systems, don't submit centrally and you can't get a complete dataset).
Other countries with good data: Denmark and some other Scandinavian countries (Norway very good, I think) Canada (partly split by territories, but linked to admin data too) Australia (parts of, think it's NSW is very good, but haven't used personally)
Within UK, Scotland has by far the best data as it also fully links primary care.
I think other countries will get good data on COVID-19, but the way things are set up here probably does mean we have some of the best up to date data.
In an novel pandemic that causes anywhere up to a 1% fatality rate (more if health services are overwhelmed), 20,000 excess deaths out of a population of 66 million is sadly well within the envelope of possible outcomes, and far lower than many of the projections that circulated at the time. I seem to recall that 500,000 was the reasonable worst case calculated by Ferguson and independently by Chris Whitty.
As is now obvious, lockdown is sending whole nations insane and crippling their economies at the same time, so it's hardly unreasonable that the government was reticent to take such an unprecedented step.
Most people don't demand perfect levels of foresight from their leaders in unprecedented circumstances. I have no doubt that whenever we locked down, the same political opponents of Boris Johnson would be saying 'Well, if we'd locked down a few days earlier, we'd have saved X more lives...'
In a counter-factual universe Corbyn won (or at least was PM as a result of) the 2019 election and had to cope with coronavirus. Lockdown was suggested and Johnson, plus the Telegraph and Mail, went bat-shit crazy about the liberty of the subject.
What are the obligations for companies under modern anti-slavery legislation? Do they not have to have some kind of routines or policies in place? I’d be grateful if anyone could outline the key requirements, or point me in the right direction.
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
To give credit where credit's due, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was probably Theresa May's biggest success while in Government, and it is a model piece of legislation that has been followed in many other jurisdictions. As you say it requires businesses to publish an annual statement if they have an annual turnover above £36 million. However, while it's strong on self-reporting, it's very weak on victim protection.
There's a useful summary of articles setting out it's pros and cons here -
She regards it as her best legacy from her time in office. And David Cameron considers Gay Marriage to be his. Kind of interesting that what the last 2 Tory PMs are most proud of is progressive social legislation that few Tory voters and even fewer Tory members and activists would regard as priorities even where not actively opposed.
Re the thread I have lost faith in Boris since Cummings and he will not recover from that self inflicted wound and his full recovery from covid is by no means certain
However, last nights news conference by Whitty and Vallance explained in full and honest detail how they dealt with the science and said that the important element is for the lessons to be taken on board and applied to any future outbreaks
That conference should be 'mandated' for everyone to carefully listen to before passing judgment on Boris who by the way is alongside Sturgeon, Drakesford and Foster in acting exactly the same way in implementing 'stay at home'
Indeed the evidence from Whitty and Vallance expressed in a public enquiry would provide cover for the leaders, as not one of them would have had any choice but to do as they did
It is no doubt true, and Sturgeon has admitted as much on several occassions, that lockdown was 2 weeks late but large amounts of the criticism today is with the benefit of hindsight
Would we be having a different discussion if the question to Ferguson had been different?
Q: Was Johnson right to rush in the lock down on 23 March? A: Well, if he'd waited another week, 50k more would have died.
Did Johnson save 50k lives?
I can't believe I'm (half) defending Johnson and the government - I'm not fan of either, I did not and will not vote for Johnson and they've made plenty of mistakes*. However, until the Ferguson/Imperial model of 16 March, the advice to the government seemed to be that action to that point, short of a lock down, was enough. They may well have seen the Ferguson model before it was published, but how quickly could they have acted? Lock down a week before it happened is perhaps possible, but you have to allow some time to not only appreciate the new advice on lock down but also to work through the (dire) consequences of a full lock down for the economy. It was not a decision to be taken lightly.
* Care homes, obviously. Also not pushing the soft lock down option such as working at home as much as possible at an earlier point.
I'd agree, which is why I criticise both government and advisors. (And more open process for obtaining scientific advice might have helped, possibly ?)
My strongest criticism, though, is not that they made mistakes (though some, like the care homes debacle, were obvious and egregious at the time), but that they will not acknowledge that they did so.
In an novel pandemic that causes anywhere up to a 1% fatality rate (more if health services are overwhelmed), 20,000 excess deaths out of a population of 66 million is sadly well within the envelope of possible outcomes, and far lower than many of the projections that circulated at the time. I seem to recall that 500,000 was the reasonable worst case calculated by Ferguson and independently by Chris Whitty.
As is now obvious, lockdown is sending whole nations insane and crippling their economies at the same time, so it's hardly unreasonable that the government was reticent to take such an unprecedented step.
Most people don't demand perfect levels of foresight from their leaders in unprecedented circumstances. I have no doubt that whenever we locked down, the same political opponents of Boris Johnson would be saying 'Well, if we'd locked down a few days earlier, we'd have saved X more lives...'
UnbelievabIy, many still haven`t grasped the seriousness of the situation. I`m still talking to people who think that businesses are going to be up and running like before as if by magic.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
Does it? Thats what France are saying, but whose death figures can you trust when they are such a political football? The hospital figures simply do not tie up with their infection and death figures.
Your determination to press your conclusion in the face of both contrary evidence and well argued rebuttal is, err, remarkable.
The scientific advice was that this virus would have to run its course and that there was little that we could do that would have any effect. This proved to be wrong. Lockdown worked far more effectively than expected. The hindsight is that by going into lockdown earlier we could have reduced the death toll. That looks provisionally right. The scientific advice (and possibly the economic advice) was that we would only tolerate lockdown for a certain period of time and it was therefore important that that time was used to reduce what was expected to be peak pressure on the NHS. I think this has been proven broadly correct. The lockdown has frayed at the edges increasingly in the last few weeks and not just because of Cummings. The scientific advice was that as soon as the lockdown ended the virus would come back and that it was very important that this did not happen in the winter when there would be other pressures on the NHS. This seems to have underestimated the efficacy of changes in behaviour, notably social distancing. It was key to decision 1 above but the jury is still out. The failure to develop adequate testing capacity and a working contact and trace capacity have had very negative effects both in failing to control the spread of the virus and in making the emergence from lockdown more problematic. The government really got this in mid to late April. It was arguably 2 months late. Rory is right to say that following scientific advice that has not been challenged, tested and put in a bigger picture is not good enough. The lack of scientific literacy in our political class has undoubtedly cost us dear. The quality of that advice has been disappointing but that does not excuse the government, at least not completely.
"a 6.5-day mean generation time. Based on fits to the early growth-rate of the epidemic in Wuhan, we make a baseline assumption that R0=2.4 but examine values between 2.0 and 2.6."
This means Ferguson assumed the number of cases were doubling by a factor of 2.4 every 6.5 days. This is equivalent to doubling every 5 days.
In fact, the data from Italy and the UK showed that at the time, cases were doubling every two days. Ferguson was guided by data from Wuhan (which was either misleading or did not apply to European countries).
Ferguson's mistake led the Government to plan for a peak in the Summer. Vallance said on 12th March.
"For the UK, the peak is expected to fall in three months' time, likely in the summer months, and tail off throughout the autumn."
That is why lockdown started late -- the Government had been informed by Ferguson's modelling that the growth was much, much slower than it really was.
Mike Smithson is correct that there is a reckoning coming, but it is coming for the scientists.
The French hospital figures demonstrate that you cannot trust figures from other countries on infections and deaths
In what way are they wrong?
France currently has double the number of people in hospital than the UK with Covid-19. They were ahead of us on the virus curve, so if they truly have had less infections and less deaths than the UK then the number of people in their hospitals should be much less than the uk currently, but it is double the number.
That contains several logical leaps and assumptions. Being "ahead on the curve" should mean the situation is worse, until something comes along that forces the rate back down. After that has happened, the key consideration is the nature of whatever is improving. Further, admissions to hospital will depend very heavily on the criteria for admission.
In other news, Rory is now speaking on R4
You don't think that France and the UK have similar admission criteria to hospital for Covid-19? As most hospitals in the UK are currently empty I doubt that UK hospitals are playing particularly hardball on who they admit for Covid-19.
A friend of mine has been sick with the virus this past week and a half and it's clear from her experience that the advice in England hasn't changed. People are told to stay at home and not come to hospital.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
So you think French hospitals are full with people with very minor sysmptoms?
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
So why does the UK have many thousands more who have died, than France?
Does it? Thats what France are saying, but whose death figures can you trust when they are such a political football? The hospital figures simply do not tie up with their infection and death figures.
The simplest explanation looks likely to be correct: the French took a more aggressive view of who to admit to hospital and who to put in ICU, and quite possibly as a result saved many more lives. That requires no chauvinistic assumption that Britain is the only country honestly gathering statistics and seems entirely consistent with what we know.
Don't disagree, but the better stats thing (not for nefarious purposes, just due to the way things are organised) is somewhat true. I'm in epidemiology and our health data are some of the most complete in the world, partly due to the centralised organisation of the NHS with all hospitals submitting records centrally (for GP practices they use several different systems, don't submit centrally and you can't get a complete dataset).
Other countries with good data: Denmark and some other Scandinavian countries (Norway very good, I think) Canada (partly split by territories, but linked to admin data too) Australia (parts of, think it's NSW is very good, but haven't used personally)
Within UK, Scotland has by far the best data as it also fully links primary care.
I think other countries will get good data on COVID-19, but the way things are set up here probably does mean we have some of the best up to date data.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn't have said this before but it would be a good idea to practice with Webex, Teams and zoom. They are going to be a significant part of a lawyers tool kit going forward.
The scientific advice was that this virus would have to run its course and that there was little that we could do that would have any effect. This proved to be wrong. Lockdown worked far more effectively than expected. The hindsight is that by going into lockdown earlier we could have reduced the death toll. That looks provisionally right. The scientific advice (and possibly the economic advice) was that we would only tolerate lockdown for a certain period of time and it was therefore important that that time was used to reduce what was expected to be peak pressure on the NHS. I think this has been proven broadly correct. The lockdown has frayed at the edges increasingly in the last few weeks and not just because of Cummings. The scientific advice was that as soon as the lockdown ended the virus would come back and that it was very important that this did not happen in the winter when there would be other pressures on the NHS. This seems to have underestimated the efficacy of changes in behaviour, notably social distancing. It was key to decision 1 above but the jury is still out. The failure to develop adequate testing capacity and a working contact and trace capacity have had very negative effects both in failing to control the spread of the virus and in making the emergence from lockdown more problematic. The government really got this in mid to late April. It was arguably 2 months late. Rory is right to say that following scientific advice that has not been challenged, tested and put in a bigger picture is not good enough. The lack of scientific literacy in our political class has undoubtedly cost us dear. The quality of that advice has been disappointing but that does not excuse the government, at least not completely.
Very good post. I`d add that, listening to the news this morning and over the last few days, it seems to me that much more energy is being put into criticising past actions, with hindsight and with a vested interest in government-bashing, rather than concentrating efforts on doing the right things going forward, for example getting children back to school.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
As new cases have fallen by 75% whilst we've been continually told that a second wave was about to happen its clear that the doom-mongers have been proved wrong.
That the doom-mongers seem disinclined to admit things have gone better than they predicted does suggest they might be more bitter than relieved at how things have progressed during the last month.
Doom-mongers: "This could kill 500k people unless we do something!" Naysayers: "Bah humbug." Government (belatedly): "Oh shit, the doom-mongers are right! We’d better do something about it." ... later ... Naysayers: "See, we only ended up with 40k deaths, I don’t see what all the fuss was about!"
Nobody wants a second wave & nor do we have a second wave right now. That doesn’t mean that concern about a second wave is misguided. The second wave of the 1918 flu killed more people than the first one did after all.
Nobody is "bitter" about there not being a second wave right now. Relieved, if anything.
That Rory Stewart thing looks more prescient than I remembered.
His explanation on scientists vs politicians and their relative responsibilities is excellent.
I remember his being roundly mocked at the time.
Yes, I certainly was very sceptical at the time. Don't think I descended to mocking but might be wrong.
Rory may have been a little off on some of the detail, but his broad thesis, we should challenge the scientific assumptions and go into lockdown early because we are going to have to do it anyway... that seems absolutely right.
Lack of opposition also a big factor. Corbyn on the way out, but Starmer not yet in meant no challenge from Labour at all.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
The scientific advice was that this virus would have to run its course and that there was little that we could do that would have any effect. This proved to be wrong. Lockdown worked far more effectively than expected. The hindsight is that by going into lockdown earlier we could have reduced the death toll. That looks provisionally right. The scientific advice (and possibly the economic advice) was that we would only tolerate lockdown for a certain period of time and it was therefore important that that time was used to reduce what was expected to be peak pressure on the NHS. I think this has been proven broadly correct. The lockdown has frayed at the edges increasingly in the last few weeks and not just because of Cummings. The scientific advice was that as soon as the lockdown ended the virus would come back and that it was very important that this did not happen in the winter when there would be other pressures on the NHS. This seems to have underestimated the efficacy of changes in behaviour, notably social distancing. It was key to decision 1 above but the jury is still out. The failure to develop adequate testing capacity and a working contact and trace capacity have had very negative effects both in failing to control the spread of the virus and in making the emergence from lockdown more problematic. The government really got this in mid to late April. It was arguably 2 months late. Rory is right to say that following scientific advice that has not been challenged, tested and put in a bigger picture is not good enough. The lack of scientific literacy in our political class has undoubtedly cost us dear. The quality of that advice has been disappointing but that does not excuse the government, at least not completely.
Very good post. I`d add that, listening to the news this morning and over the last few days, it seems to me that much more energy is being put into criticising past actions, with hindsight and with a vested interest in government-bashing, rather than concentrating efforts on doing the right things going forward, for example getting children back to school.
I agree that criticisms of actions past are largely unproductive at the moment. That said the transition out of lockdown is looking little less than utterly chaotic and carries significant risks. The criticism of lack of scientific literacy in our government applies to the media in spades. They have been truly awful focusing on trivia, dodgy statistics barely understood and meaningless gotchas while there are stories of substance and ineptitude all around them going unreported.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
"a 6.5-day mean generation time. Based on fits to the early growth-rate of the epidemic in Wuhan, we make a baseline assumption that R0=2.4 but examine values between 2.0 and 2.6."
This means Ferguson assumed the number of cases were doubling by a factor of 2.4 every 6.5 days. This is equivalent to doubling every 5 days.
In fact, the data from Italy and the UK showed that at the time, cases were doubling every two days. Ferguson was guided by data from Wuhan (which was either misleading or did not apply to European countries).
Ferguson's mistake led the Government to plan for a peak in the Summer. Vallance said on 12th March.
"For the UK, the peak is expected to fall in three months' time, likely in the summer months, and tail off throughout the autumn."
That is why lockdown started late -- the Government had been informed by Ferguson's modelling that the growth was much, much slower than it really was.
Mike Smithson is correct that there is a reckoning coming, but it is coming for the scientists.
Yes, currently it does seem that the advice given by SAGE / PHE was woeful. Part of the blame for that falls on the scientists themselves.
Some blame must surely attach to the government however, for the state that Public Health England was in. They took a department with responsibility for planning the response to major risk to the UK, lifted it out of the NHS & then gutted it. It seems entirely unsurprising that the remnants were not up to the job when a pandemic finally came calling.
What are the obligations for companies under modern anti-slavery legislation? Do they not have to have some kind of routines or policies in place? I’d be grateful if anyone could outline the key requirements, or point me in the right direction.
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
To give credit where credit's due, the Modern Slavery Act 2015 was probably Theresa May's biggest success while in Government, and it is a model piece of legislation that has been followed in many other jurisdictions. As you say it requires businesses to publish an annual statement if they have an annual turnover above £36 million. However, while it's strong on self-reporting, it's very weak on victim protection.
There's a useful summary of articles setting out it's pros and cons here -
She regards it as her best legacy from her time in office. And David Cameron considers Gay Marriage to be his. Kind of interesting that what the last 2 Tory PMs are most proud of is progressive social legislation that few Tory voters and even fewer Tory members and activists would regard as priorities even where not actively opposed.
While Tony Blair was most ashamed of FOI and the Hunting Act, his government's few real 'progressive' acts
The scientific advice was that this virus would have to run its course and that there was little that we could do that would have any effect. This proved to be wrong. Lockdown worked far more effectively than expected. The hindsight is that by going into lockdown earlier we could have reduced the death toll. That looks provisionally right. The scientific advice (and possibly the economic advice) was that we would only tolerate lockdown for a certain period of time and it was therefore important that that time was used to reduce what was expected to be peak pressure on the NHS. I think this has been proven broadly correct. The lockdown has frayed at the edges increasingly in the last few weeks and not just because of Cummings. The scientific advice was that as soon as the lockdown ended the virus would come back and that it was very important that this did not happen in the winter when there would be other pressures on the NHS. This seems to have underestimated the efficacy of changes in behaviour, notably social distancing. It was key to decision 1 above but the jury is still out. The failure to develop adequate testing capacity and a working contact and trace capacity have had very negative effects both in failing to control the spread of the virus and in making the emergence from lockdown more problematic. The government really got this in mid to late April. It was arguably 2 months late. Rory is right to say that following scientific advice that has not been challenged, tested and put in a bigger picture is not good enough. The lack of scientific literacy in our political class has undoubtedly cost us dear. The quality of that advice has been disappointing but that does not excuse the government, at least not completely.
I think that is broadly right. I would add that there is also the question of why other countries were seemingly able to come to a better decision, and why that didn't lead either our scientists to wonder if they'd got it right, or our politicians to treat the UK scientists' advice with more scepticism. I suspect a degree of British exceptionalism was likely at work in both cases. Also, fairly or not politicians get the blame when things go wrong on their watch, and it's fairly clear that Johnson had his eye off the ball in late February and early March, so I think the opprobrium coming his way is only to be expected.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
Indeed, software packages are just tools. What actually matters is that the user understands the data they are working with and knows what they want the software to do.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn't have said this before but it would be a good idea to practice with Webex, Teams and zoom. They are going to be a significant part of a lawyers tool kit going forward.
Luckily I already have very advanced Excel skills and used web conferencing tons in my previous career so I guess all of that is covered.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
Excel. Wizard.
What.
You would be amazed at the number of emails I get from agents every day that they have dictated and had their secretaries type and then send for them. I am not talking magnum opi, I am talking a few lines.
I wonder why everything resulting from covid is a problem not an opportunity? If the government grasped the education issue and took the opportunity to reduce class sizes to fifteen on a permanent basis it would revolutionize the state sector. Instead it will compromise on the science and deliver a half baked solution which will harm the state sector even more. Not a problem for the Tory cabinet they don’t use state schools.
"a 6.5-day mean generation time. Based on fits to the early growth-rate of the epidemic in Wuhan, we make a baseline assumption that R0=2.4 but examine values between 2.0 and 2.6."
This means Ferguson assumed the number of cases were doubling by a factor of 2.4 every 6.5 days. This is equivalent to doubling every 5 days.
In fact, the data from Italy and the UK showed that at the time, cases were doubling every two days. Ferguson was guided by data from Wuhan (which was either misleading or did not apply to European countries).
Ferguson's mistake led the Government to plan for a peak in the Summer. Vallance said on 12th March.
"For the UK, the peak is expected to fall in three months' time, likely in the summer months, and tail off throughout the autumn."
That is why lockdown started late -- the Government had been informed by Ferguson's modelling that the growth was much, much slower than it really was.
Mike Smithson is correct that there is a reckoning coming, but it is coming for the scientists.
Exactly this. Why an admission from Ferguson that he got it wrong puts pressure on the government (who were taking his advice), I'm not sure.
"The government were wrong, they should have ignored me"?
He has been wrong before though. I'm not sure why he was regarded as the foremost authority.
The scientific advice was that this virus would have to run its course and that there was little that we could do that would have any effect. This proved to be wrong. Lockdown worked far more effectively than expected. The hindsight is that by going into lockdown earlier we could have reduced the death toll. That looks provisionally right. The scientific advice (and possibly the economic advice) was that we would only tolerate lockdown for a certain period of time and it was therefore important that that time was used to reduce what was expected to be peak pressure on the NHS. I think this has been proven broadly correct. The lockdown has frayed at the edges increasingly in the last few weeks and not just because of Cummings. The scientific advice was that as soon as the lockdown ended the virus would come back and that it was very important that this did not happen in the winter when there would be other pressures on the NHS. This seems to have underestimated the efficacy of changes in behaviour, notably social distancing. It was key to decision 1 above but the jury is still out. The failure to develop adequate testing capacity and a working contact and trace capacity have had very negative effects both in failing to control the spread of the virus and in making the emergence from lockdown more problematic. The government really got this in mid to late April. It was arguably 2 months late. Rory is right to say that following scientific advice that has not been challenged, tested and put in a bigger picture is not good enough. The lack of scientific literacy in our political class has undoubtedly cost us dear. The quality of that advice has been disappointing but that does not excuse the government, at least not completely.
Very good post. I`d add that, listening to the news this morning and over the last few days, it seems to me that much more energy is being put into criticising past actions, with hindsight and with a vested interest in government-bashing, rather than concentrating efforts on doing the right things going forward, for example getting children back to school.
I agree that criticisms of actions past are largely unproductive at the moment. That said the transition out of lockdown is looking little less than utterly chaotic and carries significant risks. The criticism of lack of scientific literacy in our government applies to the media in spades. They have been truly awful focusing on trivia, dodgy statistics barely understood and meaningless gotchas while there are stories of substance and ineptitude all around them going unreported.
Agreed. Proper journalism died a long time ago on these islands.
If we’re apportioning blame, I’d say:
1. Greedy businesses (Heathrow, airlines, ferry companies, Cheltenham Festival, Nike etc etc etc) 2. Useless journalists and media owners: wouldn’t know their arses from their elbows 3. China 4. Whining, incompetent scientists 5. Politicians
Yes, most politicians are less use than a wet paper bag, but in the scheme of things they are angels compared to the total shits that kept Heathrow going.
"a 6.5-day mean generation time. Based on fits to the early growth-rate of the epidemic in Wuhan, we make a baseline assumption that R0=2.4 but examine values between 2.0 and 2.6."
This means Ferguson assumed the number of cases were doubling by a factor of 2.4 every 6.5 days. This is equivalent to doubling every 5 days.
In fact, the data from Italy and the UK showed that at the time, cases were doubling every two days. Ferguson was guided by data from Wuhan (which was either misleading or did not apply to European countries).
Ferguson's mistake led the Government to plan for a peak in the Summer. Vallance said on 12th March.
"For the UK, the peak is expected to fall in three months' time, likely in the summer months, and tail off throughout the autumn."
That is why lockdown started late -- the Government had been informed by Ferguson's modelling that the growth was much, much slower than it really was.
Mike Smithson is correct that there is a reckoning coming, but it is coming for the scientists.
Excellent post and very clearly explained thank you.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
Excel. Wizard.
What.
You would be amazed at the number of emails I get from agents every day that they have dictated and had their secretaries type and then send for them. I am not talking magnum opi, I am talking a few lines.
Lawyers of PB: since I finished my exams I’ve got “advanced certification” in both Lexis and Westlaw. Is there any other systems or software, in your view, it would be useful to familiarize myself with for CV purposes?
I wouldn’t worry too much about them, you’ll be shown how to use anything you need on the job.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
In summary: Boris is actually great; it's that Dom bloke who's mucking everything up. The question is, on whose behest did Monty put this out? It has to be someone who's pretty sure of being the next Tory leader.
Comments
Can it simultaneous be the right decision but also a mistake?
Yes, and I even kind of agree with your Scottish analysis too.
Split-ticket voting *will* happen (it always does). And Unionist tactical voting (it always does). But it’s a matter of how much.
Even if Starmer soars like an eagle for the next four years (tricky), I would say that the SLab ceiling is about 5-10 seats. So nowhere near your 20-25 seats.
The 25th seat is Paisley and Renfrewshire North with an SNP MAJ of 11,902. Are you honestly telling us that Starmer is going to single-handedly win that for SLab? Remember, SLab themselves are a total deadweight.
That seems like a very obvious and sufficient explanation for the difference, whereas your explanation requires the French government to be hiding deaths numbering several times those they admit to. Which is the more likely explanation?
That the doom-mongers seem disinclined to admit things have gone better than they predicted does suggest they might be more bitter than relieved at how things have progressed during the last month.
Every person I've met has mocked the utter inanity of "Stay Alert" and has long since disregarded the government as a source of advice to be followed.
Only an utter sycophant who had switched off all critical functions to optimise his arse licking effectiveness would ascribe the fall in cases to the insert slogan here blandness of "Stay Alert".
And do all companies in practice actively apply the routines?
we had hundreds of them on Osborne.
Of course, we now know Boris Johnson bunked off for half of February so that he could relax with his fiancée, just as the storm clouds were gathering. Normally when a captain deserts his post, he is relieved of command. The Conservatives, however, would rather ignore tens of thousands of avoidable deaths than admit any failure on their part.
And btw you come over as a little deranged in that comment - rather worrying at this time in the morning.
Such as the loudly and frequently predicted second wave which hasn't appeared.
Another contributing factor is the way in which we have run down our public health capacity over the last decade or so (along with decoupling it from the Health Service).
Public Health England is a pale shadow of what existed previously.
So why does France alse have double the number of people in ICU than the UK?
I guess people forget all the time don't they, its barely been in the press and its not like its affected the life of every single person in the country.
I can see it now, the government just wanted to make sure we didn't forget about the global pandemic.
I take it all back: its a marketing masterstroke! Don Draper would be proud of it and I predict a glittering career in marketing for the geniuses involved in coming up with it.
I for one will definitely be staying alert from now on.
Meanwhile, back at the farm.
A sub point is that 'following the science' is meaningless anyway, when all political decisions, unlike pure science has to take both economics and morality into account. Science doesn't do either of those.
In the UK - which is still the leader in legislation on this - the focus of the 2015 Modern Slavery Act isn't on "modern anti-slavery", but obligations relating to modern slavery (a completely different matter) All companies with an annual turnover of £36 mn or more must publish, to quote Wiki, a statement to "confirm the steps taken to ensure that slavery and human trafficking are not taking place in the business (or in any supply chain) or declare that no steps to confirm the existence of slavery or trafficking have been taken"
That's it.
It's not illegal to source goods from a supplier known to use slave labour. The assumption is that by requiring publication of the issue, public opinion will drive what happens next
Wiki's good as a source on this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Slavery_Act_2015
The SNP need Boris and hard Brexit to have the best chance of winning indyref2 but Starmer is more popular than Boris in Scotland and would pursue a softer Brexit so if he granted indyref2 Yes would likely lose it again
I expect that when we have good estimates of the total number of people infected in different countries that we will see a higher IFR in the UK for this reason.
Assuming things are back to relative normality by the end of the year Brexit will again be back to the fore and the polling shows the public now split on whether Boris should pursue a transition period extension but Tory and Leave voters strongly opposed
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1270659501927141378?s=20
There's a useful summary of articles setting out it's pros and cons here -
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/uk-modern-slavery-act
And here's a reasonably summary of the Act itself from a law firm (not mine!)
https://coffinmew.co.uk/the-modern-slavery-act-2015-a-quick-guide-to-what-it-is-and-how-to-stay-compliant/
You seem to be ignoring the advice in France , ring an ambulance if your symptoms worsen , so people got to hospital earlier , also France has a lower obesity rate which also could have impacted clinical outcomes .
https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
UK: 64200 excess deaths
France: 24700 excess deaths
Those numbers may not be exactly right, but they're not going to be massively wrong.
But why do so few of the relevant companies actually bother publishing this statement, or bother updating every year? (And what is your source for “very few”?)
As far as I can make out, the failure to publish a statement, or the failure to update annually, has pretty much zero consequences. That seems very unwise to me. We are just building up massive problems in the future.
https://twitter.com/tommy_blomqvist/status/1270957980675125257
There is a register of statements here, according to which 17349 UK companies have submitted 16228 statements -
http://www.modernslaveryregistry.org/
Apparently now the French treat Covid 19 better than the UK and have much more succesful outcomes, even though it is a disease with no medical cure.
We will see I think poll parity very soon.
Wasn't hindsight then.
Q: Was Johnson right to rush in the lock down on 23 March?
A: Well, if he'd waited another week, 50k more would have died.
Did Johnson save 50k lives?
I can't believe I'm (half) defending Johnson and the government - I'm not fan of either, I did not and will not vote for Johnson and they've made plenty of mistakes*. However, until the Ferguson/Imperial model of 16 March, the advice to the government seemed to be that action to that point, short of a lock down, was enough. They may well have seen the Ferguson model before it was published, but how quickly could they have acted? Lock down a week before it happened is perhaps possible, but you have to allow some time to not only appreciate the new advice on lock down but also to work through the (dire) consequences of a full lock down for the economy. It was not a decision to be taken lightly.
* Care homes, obviously. Also not pushing the soft lock down option such as working at home as much as possible at an earlier point.
Well done Mrs May! But we can do better.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-53004748
https://twitter.com/ottocrat/status/1270983948370403328
In an novel pandemic that causes anywhere up to a 1% fatality rate (more if health services are overwhelmed), 20,000 excess deaths out of a population of 66 million is sadly well within the envelope of possible outcomes, and far lower than many of the projections that circulated at the time. I seem to recall that 500,000 was the reasonable worst case calculated by Ferguson and independently by Chris Whitty.
As is now obvious, lockdown is sending whole nations insane and crippling their economies at the same time, so it's hardly unreasonable that the government was reticent to take such an unprecedented step.
Most people don't demand perfect levels of foresight from their leaders in unprecedented circumstances. I have no doubt that whenever we locked down, the same political opponents of Boris Johnson would be saying 'Well, if we'd locked down a few days earlier, we'd have saved X more lives...'
Interestingly 18 months ago the CEO got sacked for trying to do the opposite.
Other countries with good data:
Denmark and some other Scandinavian countries (Norway very good, I think)
Canada (partly split by territories, but linked to admin data too)
Australia (parts of, think it's NSW is very good, but haven't used personally)
Within UK, Scotland has by far the best data as it also fully links primary care.
I think other countries will get good data on COVID-19, but the way things are set up here probably does mean we have some of the best up to date data.
Re the thread I have lost faith in Boris since Cummings and he will not recover from that self inflicted wound and his full recovery from covid is by no means certain
However, last nights news conference by Whitty and Vallance explained in full and honest detail how they dealt with the science and said that the important element is for the lessons to be taken on board and applied to any future outbreaks
That conference should be 'mandated' for everyone to carefully listen to before passing judgment on Boris who by the way is alongside Sturgeon, Drakesford and Foster in acting exactly the same way in implementing 'stay at home'
Indeed the evidence from Whitty and Vallance expressed in a public enquiry would provide cover for the leaders, as not one of them would have had any choice but to do as they did
It is no doubt true, and Sturgeon has admitted as much on several occassions, that lockdown was 2 weeks late but large amounts of the criticism today is with the benefit of hindsight
(And more open process for obtaining scientific advice might have helped, possibly ?)
My strongest criticism, though, is not that they made mistakes (though some, like the care homes debacle, were obvious and egregious at the time), but that they will not acknowledge that they did so.
That is toxic in so many ways.
The scientific advice was that this virus would have to run its course and that there was little that we could do that would have any effect. This proved to be wrong. Lockdown worked far more effectively than expected. The hindsight is that by going into lockdown earlier we could have reduced the death toll. That looks provisionally right.
The scientific advice (and possibly the economic advice) was that we would only tolerate lockdown for a certain period of time and it was therefore important that that time was used to reduce what was expected to be peak pressure on the NHS. I think this has been proven broadly correct. The lockdown has frayed at the edges increasingly in the last few weeks and not just because of Cummings.
The scientific advice was that as soon as the lockdown ended the virus would come back and that it was very important that this did not happen in the winter when there would be other pressures on the NHS. This seems to have underestimated the efficacy of changes in behaviour, notably social distancing. It was key to decision 1 above but the jury is still out.
The failure to develop adequate testing capacity and a working contact and trace capacity have had very negative effects both in failing to control the spread of the virus and in making the emergence from lockdown more problematic. The government really got this in mid to late April. It was arguably 2 months late.
Rory is right to say that following scientific advice that has not been challenged, tested and put in a bigger picture is not good enough. The lack of scientific literacy in our political class has undoubtedly cost us dear. The quality of that advice has been disappointing but that does not excuse the government, at least not completely.
Ferguson was wrong and bears a lot of blame for what happened. It is very depressing for UK science, which should have done much, much better.
Here is Ferguson's paper of 16th March.
https://tinyurl.com/txf7zru
Here is the mistake -- it is not hard to find:
"a 6.5-day mean generation time. Based on fits to the early growth-rate of the epidemic in Wuhan, we make a baseline assumption that R0=2.4 but examine values between 2.0 and 2.6."
This means Ferguson assumed the number of cases were doubling by a factor of 2.4 every 6.5 days. This is equivalent to doubling every 5 days.
In fact, the data from Italy and the UK showed that at the time, cases were doubling every two days. Ferguson was guided by data from Wuhan (which was either misleading or did not apply to European countries).
Ferguson's mistake led the Government to plan for a peak in the Summer. Vallance said on 12th March.
"For the UK, the peak is expected to fall in three months' time, likely in the summer months, and tail off throughout the autumn."
That is why lockdown started late -- the Government had been informed by Ferguson's modelling that the growth was much, much slower than it really was.
Mike Smithson is correct that there is a reckoning coming, but it is coming for the scientists.
Don’t tell HY.
If you have good Excel skills, you will be regarded by most lawyers as some kind of wizard. So advertise that if that applies to you.
Can’t wait til AI replaces the lot of you.
Naysayers: "Bah humbug."
Government (belatedly): "Oh shit, the doom-mongers are right! We’d better do something about it."
... later ...
Naysayers: "See, we only ended up with 40k deaths, I don’t see what all the fuss was about!"
Nobody wants a second wave & nor do we have a second wave right now. That doesn’t mean that concern about a second wave is misguided. The second wave of the 1918 flu killed more people than the first one did after all.
Nobody is "bitter" about there not being a second wave right now. Relieved, if anything.
Rory may have been a little off on some of the detail, but his broad thesis, we should challenge the scientific assumptions and go into lockdown early because we are going to have to do it anyway... that seems absolutely right.
Lack of opposition also a big factor.
Corbyn on the way out, but Starmer not yet in meant no challenge from Labour at all.
What.
Some blame must surely attach to the government however, for the state that Public Health England was in. They took a department with responsibility for planning the response to major risk to the UK, lifted it out of the NHS & then gutted it. It seems entirely unsurprising that the remnants were not up to the job when a pandemic finally came calling.
Also, fairly or not politicians get the blame when things go wrong on their watch, and it's fairly clear that Johnson had his eye off the ball in late February and early March, so I think the opprobrium coming his way is only to be expected.
Cheers guys!
"The government were wrong, they should have ignored me"?
He has been wrong before though. I'm not sure why he was regarded as the foremost authority.
If we’re apportioning blame, I’d say:
1. Greedy businesses (Heathrow, airlines, ferry companies, Cheltenham Festival, Nike etc etc etc)
2. Useless journalists and media owners: wouldn’t know their arses from their elbows
3. China
4. Whining, incompetent scientists
5. Politicians
Yes, most politicians are less use than a wet paper bag, but in the scheme of things they are angels compared to the total shits that kept Heathrow going.
/PB pedantry off
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/10/the-obligatory-gpt-3-post/
And don't be fooled by QCs. John Mortimer correctly observed that success in the law only requires common sense, and reasonably clean fingernails.