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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Johnson’s big gamble – setting a time table for the lockdown regulations to be eased
Lockdown bandit Cummings and his team have certainly been hard at work briefing the media on the changes in the lockdown regulations that are due to be announced by the Prime Minister in House of Commons today
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He is no more to be trusted than Trump is.
Perhaps the British government should also consider some kind of app.
It was unreasonable to hold out a provisional unlocking and expect millions of businesses large and small to be spending time, effort and money preparing for something that politicians were keeping hypothetical.
A repeat over the fiasco over two metres is the last thing we need. I am sure like me you have seen the trouble small businesses have already gone to, to communicate the “two metre rule” - homemade laminated notices, painted stones, painted shop windows, marked out floor surfaces, etc - and yet we can all see that soon the government is going to pull the rug out from under this and move the goalposts once again (as it says in the Times).
It simply wasn’t possible for Johnson to cling to his fence any longer on this one - the ‘decisiveness’ is belated and mostly government spin.
CNN: As coverage of the event focused on its shortcomings on Sunday, Trump only grew more upset. He was seething and spent the day lashing out at staff, several sources said. Trump's campaign manager Brad Parscale, who was well aware Trump would be upset by the turnout, hasn't been the only target of Trump's ire. Instead, sources predicted anyone -- White House officials included -- could be fired over what happened.
Trump spent the weekend seething about the disappointing crowd for his comeback event in Oklahoma on Saturday night, according to CNN reporting. His hopes of a full-time return to the campaign trail then took another blow with news that eight staffers and two Secret Service agents at the event are now positive for the coronavirus.
The test results cast Trump's risky decision to go ahead with an indoor rally that doctors fear turned into a super-spreader infectious event in an even worse light. They also show how the virus -- now marching through southern and western states despite Trump's insistence that the US has already "prevailed" in the fight -- is having a disastrous impact on the "Great American Comeback" narrative at the heart of his reelection bid.
A second wave is inevitable.
When the second wave hits, which it will, he's going to take a hammering.
Out in the High Streets there is already no social distancing, no hand sanitisers, no temperature checkers, no contact tracing and very few face masks.
A second wave is coming, probably around mid-July.
But yes, a second wave looks probable; perhaps not quite as soon as that.
Welcome to PB, Mr. Irish.
Crude calculation: Imagine you've got a pub with 100 people in it, and about 1 person in 1000 is infected. So there's a about a 10% chance of someone in the pub being infected, and that person has 99 people they can infect. Now say half of those people stay at home. You now only have a 5% chance of someone being infected, and if there is someone then they only have 49 people to infect, so you only have one-quarter of the contagion.
This is obviously a bit wrong because people tend to talk to each other rather than randomly interacting with everyone in the pub, and the virus partly seems to spread through interaction rather than being broadcast to everyone in the room, but there's also a countervailing effect where it's easier for each person or group to keep their distance if there's more space.
https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1275300927835176961
Pretty much the opposite right now in the UK. We are crackers. And of course it makes my life more at risk and means I can't get out as much because I know there are too many cavaliers at large.
It comes from educating people and there's none of that.
We will be hit badly. Again.
Yes, there is the inexorable rise in case numbers, but nothing like the exponential take off even sensible forecasters were predicting at the outset (leaving aside the PB his & hers Nostradamuses who had ten million cases worldwide down for 9 April - when the reality looks like 30 June or 1 July)
I am Sean and I claim my £5.
The world went into lockdown, which is why the virus was more subdued. Countries which didn't, like Brazil, have come a cropper.
The UK is now less virus-scared than when the first two cases popped up in Newcastle back in March.
I haven't bothered replying to Edmund's numbers pub game because it was just a series of successively false premises. Like shooting for the moon and reaching Antarctica instead.
Firstly because the ‘predictions’ that were being posted multiple times daily in March were based on case numbers from relatively few early exposed countries that themselves had locked down.
Second, because true exponential take off hasn’t yet happened anywhere, lockdown or not.
It is a routine, it is a very simple routine. You are given a clipboard with a list. You add your name to the list. Then you get served. I did exactly that on Sunday here in Berlin.
Surely neither Athelstan nor Drake would have considered 'their' England as part of what we now call the UK, would they. Ireland and Wales hadn't been conquered and annexed in Athelstan's time, Scotland was still independent in Drake's. And Ireland didn't formally join the Union until 1801, although its was effectively conquered and annexed several hundred years earlier.
I reckon some of the least disruptive interventions - things like opening windows - are probably doing a lot the work, so although the very drastic things in the European lockdowns are helpful, you don't necessarily go into very fast exponential growth if you stop doing them.
A more modest reduction also gets you to a speed of growth at which you're better able to respond, so to annoy you with more numbers games, if you're doubling every 5 days and it takes 2 weeks to detect the results of your actions then you have 8x growth and things are way out of control, but if your failed policy is only producing a doubling every 10 days you can do a course correction after maybe 3x growth, which is a lot less catastrophic. (Apologies to all the dead people in the 3x.)
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/boris-johnson-new-prime-minister-sir-nicholas-soames-winston-churchill-grandson-317701
BTW it is not simple bluetooth contact that is measured. Distance and time is also measured, so that low risk bluetooth contacts, such as passing someone on the other side of the road is not counted as an infection risk.
The other point is that a Corona test result comes with a QR code, so that it's not possible for a numpty to cause chaos by claiming to be infected.
What amazes me is back when SLab were riding high at 40%+, about 40% of their voters were pro-independence. One would logically assume that as folk drifted from SLab to SNP the proportion of SLab voters backing independence would drop, leaving SLab as a strongly British nationalist party, but this has not happened. As their vote shrunk, the proportion supporting independence has stayed pretty steady in the 30-40% band, and now seems to be showing an uptick, to 43%. This is extremely heartening.
The significant number of Scottish Liberal Democrats, 16%, supporting independence is also an uptick, and most welcome. Call it the Judy Steel tradition.
The question is, does it really matter what the SLab and SLD leaderships do? Thus far they have been ineffective at persuading significant chunks of their support on the merits of the Union. What more can they do to stop the drift to Yes?
This would especially be a problem if someone tests positive on admission to hospital and might not be in a condition to go through all their recent movements.
This is where an app has a big advantage - as well as covering other spaces where filling in forms isn't going to happen, like public transport and shops.
Climate change suffers under a similar problem: One group publishes a study overestimating the speed of global warming with confidence intervals. The extreme of that interval is then reported as the headline figure. Then no one takes notice of the good but still worrying estimates, because they are nothing compared to the sensationalist headlines.
For example I know people who do not have the Corona-Warn app, because they do not have a smart phone (or a very old one). Such people still go to bars now and then.
British people are fine with masks, provided others are wearing them too. Ours is a embarrassed nation, and it is embarrassing to be inappropriately dressed. Britons will wear them if others do, and not if others do not. Peer pressure is needed.
Not because I need to be, of course, but on principle!
But the PB predictions that were being made in March were ludicrous; now we can relax and see that it was all nonsense, but they were being advanced as serious forecasts at the time.
By now we were supposed to have passed one billion confirmed cases - a hundred times the current level - a level to be reached not now, but much earlier, way back in early May.
"Lord Nelson, Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Henry Cooper, Lady Diana, vi har slått dem alle sammen, vi har slått dem alle sammen! (we have beaten them all, we have beaten them all!). Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? Maggie Thatcher ... your boys took a hell of a beating! Your boys took a hell of a beating!"
On a serious point, I would have thought it’s more intelligent to start looking at local authority lockdowns for any potential second wave. It’s silly to keep Golspie under tight control because of cases in Kilmarnock.
The survey of 1,070 Scottish residents over the age of 16 found support for independence was 54% to 46%, once Don’t Knows were removed.
When you include undecided voters, support for independence is leading by 50% to 43%, with 7% of Don’t Knows. This relates to a stunning 338,000 additional Yes voters compared to 2014, assuming similar turnout levels.
Breakdown
The poll found that male respondents would support independence by 58% to 42% and females were still marginally in favour of the union by 51% to 49%.
The unionist lead in female voters is dependent on age, with females aged between 15 and 34 supporting independence by a massive 73% to 27%. That was higher than the equivalent age group for men, where independence led by 68% to 32%.
Indeed the unionist vote relies on three key groups; firstly males and females over the age of 55 where the union still leads 57% to 43%, females over the age of 55 where the union leads 61% to 39% and Conservative voters.
The list is odd. And perhaps more revealing of Norwegians’ understanding than you might initially see.
It's sad to see them find ways to win.
It is of course highly regrettable that after 3 months of this we have still not got much of a trace and test system in place. I am not sure that there is anything inevitable about a second wave but such a system would have reduced the risk. In my experience people take social distancing at least as seriously as they should, arguably much more so given the relatively modest number of cases in the community right now but the lockdown has collapsed around the edges with families and friends once again visiting each other relatively freely and kids meeting up with their pals as a matter of routine.
Scotland is in serious danger of being left behind in all this with an overly cautious and maternalistic government being much more equivocal about normal life starting again. This will cost hundreds of Scottish businesses and thousands of Scottish jobs. Ironically, the additional weakening of the Scottish economy and the inevitably greater reliance upon English subsidy just might save the Union.
I understand what you mean about apps 'knowing' where I am etc. If I ever wanted to disappear the first thing I'd dump is my smartphone.
Then my credit card.
A few years ago I read a book about a chap who did exactly that. Dumped his phone, dumped his credit card, lived rough in London and after a while was able to create a completely new identity.
Can't remember the name of the book, though! Or the author.
Must have been successful!
Things won't get back to normal now but with the ability to maybe trade in July and August they've got at least a chance. If those months were written off too you could increase the number of businesses never to reopen by an order of magnitude.
But when most people don’t wear masks - definitely the case when I shopped last - peer pressure works in the other direction.
I think you might be confusing him with Lord Rothermere, who as a very strongly anti-Communist figure was associated with several Fascist movements, including Mosley of course, but also Mussolini and Horthy.
In my own line of work the Scottish Courts system is already at least 8 weeks behind England in terms of opening up again and announcement after announcement by Scottish Courts is followed by really pitiful amounts of action on the ground and the odd token hearing with no jury trials until next month at the earliest and then only 2 set down.
I'm afraid that you are the one that is dreaming Malcolm if you think such caution and hesitancy comes without a price.
But unless Scotland goes independent they're never going to get that.
It's a Catch 22 dilemma.