Comparing USA numbers each day for same day a week ago is not encouraging. Monday is 30% up on cases, 20% up on deaths. Big increases on previous day's. Tues - Fri are peak days so I assume some new records will be set this week. Surely Trump can't keep ignoring?
They are just numbers not people to Trump.
A single day being prevented from playing golf is a tragedy, 130,000 deaths is a statistic.
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we had the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Almost as if Johnson wants the Scottish Tories to get shafted at the Holyrood election in May.
Aren't all those standards currently set at national and EU level? The only power grab I see here is Sturgeon looking for more points to score and insert her independence wedge that bit further.
Your arse, the powers are currently held by Scotland and are the European standards, plans are England will set any standard they want and Scotland will have no say in the matter. It is a big big deal to Scotland, England can eat chlorinated chicken and hormone filled beef as much as it wants.
So the current standards were set at an EU level and with Brexit that transfers down to the UK level as at no point have they been delegated to regional governments.
Another day, another batshit announcement from the government. Lets talk about masks. I haven't work one in anger yet, and I was going into shops (sometimes several in an afternoon to check stock availability / how people are shopping etc to help us keep food on the shelves) for both shopping and work reasons without a mask. When supermarkets were strictly limiting the number of punters in circulation and enforcing one way systems it felt OK. Yesterday lunchtime in Aldi was the first time it really didn't feel OK and I decided I'd need a mask on next time.
So do I support masks? Yes. But straight away. A lot of people have bought masks. Every supermarket now sells masks. You can make one out of a sock in a minute for temporary use. Mask up. Not a week on Friday. Where as I and others have pointed out we have the absurdity of it being safe to not wear a mask to go into the pub and get hammered but not safe to not wear a mask when you buy a bag of crisps at the shop on the way home.
You can't make distinctions between "essential" and "non-essential" either. This is either being done for public health reasons or it is not. We're trying to crush the virus or we're not. Half-arsed wear one here here and here but not there there or there is stupid. I suspect the call now is that unless we wear a mask we're going to carry on with infection levels well above our neighbours including Scotland and therefore we either squash it or we will be on no-travel lists quickly.
Boris has said you should wear a covering in shops now, but it is not mandatory until next Friday. So please - wear your masks now folks!
But it is "safe" not to have to wear them until the 24th!!!!!
Joined up government it is not.
No it's legal not to have to wear them.
If you have one and are capable of doing so then you should even before the 24th. The right thing to do is still the right thing to do even if it's not legally required!
I'd prefer if this never had to be legally required and people chose to do it off their own initiative.
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Logically you would expect a peak of infection a few weeks after lockdown as the currently infected people infect the family they are locked in with. The only way you would get a peak before a lockdown is if you have cocked-up so much that the virus is already self-limited by prior infections, but if you have done that the number of infections and deaths would be far, far greater.
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Even a dead cat bounces. Hardly something to celebrate when its so small.
The big contraction was in hospitality which was still completely shut in May, other sectors grew at between 6 and 8 points in May. June will tell the same story.
The industry figures I am seeing shows covers in restaurants still only back to 30% of before the fall
The mask wearing thing is already going totally off the rails as the police federation says it can't been enforced.
Of course it can't. You could see scuffles and fights breaking out as mask wearers try to enforce the rules at the few remaining shops that have customers. Who would want to shop in places like that?
Its manifestly completely counter productive.
Another Johnson disaster.
The police also told us that lockdown itself couldn't be enforced. It turned out that compliance was very high, because the average citizen isn't stupid and has a sense both of self-preservation and of responsibility to others. The same will be true here - if Belgium can do it, then why can't we?
Wearing masks is also likely to suppress a second wave and make people feel safer in public, the lack of such confidence in safety now being the biggest obstacle to the resumption of normal economy activity.
How's the 'do nothing, it'll be fine strategy' working out in the US?
US deaths yesterday less than a tenth of the level they were at in May.
So what's your point?
Weekend reporting.
I think the reason is rather different - a lot of deaths are being recorded as pneumonia
Alternatively it could be that the virus is simply subsiding, as the great Dr Gupta and her Oxford team predicted, and at the same time we are getting much better at treating it, as we were always bound to, being resourceful creatures.
Honestly the delusion on here is staggering. Its a mile thick.
Don't think it showed much evidence of subsiding in that Hereford farm... Still looks like its pretty infectious!
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Not forgetting unofficial lockdown began a few days prior to it being legally required.
There are no excess deaths at the moment . Why on earth is something so depressing ,going to cause aggression and disgusting litter (with little upside as people -especially people who don't want to - wear masks wrongly and keep fiddling with them?) being imposed now? It will cause economic damage as well . There must be lots of people like me who have been deliberately going out (not using public transport due to needing to wear a mask) walking to shops some distance away to buy stuff (clothes ,books , electrics) who wont be doing that after this rule comes in.
My expectation is you'll keep going out and just get used to wearing a mask.
Wearing a mask during a pandemic is more libertarian than having a lockdown or other solutions. That so many people are blithely saying 'why don't we shut the pubs again instead of having masks' really bothers me. So people should be driven into penury because some people can't be arsed to wear a mask?
Except most people and especially those forced to wear a mask do not wear them correctly and keep fiddling with them and taking them off . If its not even effective it is stupid to impose.
Not half as stupid as you I bet.
No more cask strength turnip juice, for you, this morning. Back to the regular....
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Logically you would expect a peak of infection a few weeks after lockdown as the currently infected people infect the family they are locked in with. The only way you would get a peak before a lockdown is if you have cocked-up so much that the virus is already self-limited by prior infections, but if you have done that the number of infections and deaths would be far, far greater.
So when would you say the peak of infections in the UK was?
My most reliable economic indicator is half finished project cars for sale on forums and FB groups. They are the ultimate discretionary expense and the first thing to go as confidence evaporates. By this metric we are fucked harder than a Sub Lt left alone with Lord Mountbatten. I could have had a 996 vert for about 40% of its parted out value last night. Petrolheads are running for the exits.
I don't understand the comment about Lord Mountbatten.
Even a dead cat bounces. Hardly something to celebrate when its so small.
The big contraction was in hospitality which was still completely shut in May, other sectors grew at between 6 and 8 points in May. June will tell the same story.
The industry figures I am seeing shows covers in restaurants still only back to 30% of before the fall
Not surprising as I said, I'd be surprised if the sector gets back to 60% of where it was pre virus without a vaccine. Even with a vaccine it is going to be permanently diminished to some level.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
Mr. 43, aye, I'm aware that Cao Cao was a greyer figure than the villain he's portrayed as.
And you're entirely right about the strategy being forced upon Zhuge Liang (as an aside, I reference that incident in one of my Sir Edric books, I forget which). It still worked.
Seems to me the Govt has missed a trick here by not introducing masks in a few well-known hotspots like Leicester and Bradford. This would answer the burning questions (a) will they stem the infection? (b) will they further depress retail trade? and (c) will enforcement be difficult? Armed with information from this modest demographic experiment the Govt can then decide whether to impose it more generally.
My most reliable economic indicator is half finished project cars for sale on forums and FB groups. They are the ultimate discretionary expense and the first thing to go as confidence evaporates. By this metric we are fucked harder than a Sub Lt left alone with Lord Mountbatten. I could have had a 996 vert for about 40% of its parted out value last night. Petrolheads are running for the exits.
I don't understand the comment about Lord Mountbatten.
Lord Mountbatten was a degenerate and all round deviant.
Lord Mountbatten’s ‘lust for young men’ revealed.
Newly released FBI files give grim detail on the private life of Prince Charles’s mentor and his wife — ‘persons of extremely low morals’
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Not forgetting unofficial lockdown began a few days prior to it being legally required.
It is actually a few days before lockdown which demonstrates that we were able to get the R figure below 1 without lockdown. Lockdown may have sustained R below 1 but to argue that lockdown saved 450,000 lives when the R figure was below 1 before lockdown is pushing reality a bit.
Even a dead cat bounces. Hardly something to celebrate when its so small.
The big contraction was in hospitality which was still completely shut in May, other sectors grew at between 6 and 8 points in May. June will tell the same story.
The industry figures I am seeing shows covers in restaurants still only back to 30% of before the fall
Not surprising as I said, I'd be surprised if the sector gets back to 60% of where it was pre virus without a vaccine. Even with a vaccine it is going to be permanently diminished to some level.
Locally I can't think of any restaurant where I would be happy to sit in.
In fact the only exception I can think of is a recently built pub near my parents which has so much space you would need a 5m distance rule for them to have a problem - to meet the 2m rule they just had to move a single table.
F1: not my bag (time scale plus low return) but Mercedes to win the Constructors are 1.05 on Betfair exchange (only a little available but even at 1.02 it's probably value).
I'm not saying it's inevitable. But I stand a better chance of opening my bedroom door and finding Olivia Wilde and Jennifer Morrison pillow fighting in their underwear to decide which one of them gets to sleep with me.
Almost as if Johnson wants the Scottish Tories to get shafted at the Holyrood election in May.
Aren't all those standards currently set at national and EU level? The only power grab I see here is Sturgeon looking for more points to score and insert her independence wedge that bit further.
Your arse, the powers are currently held by Scotland and are the European standards, plans are England will set any standard they want and Scotland will have no say in the matter. It is a big big deal to Scotland, England can eat chlorinated chicken and hormone filled beef as much as it wants.
So the current standards were set at an EU level and with Brexit that transfers down to the UK level as at no point have they been delegated to regional governments.
Malc, Brexit is about getting free of EU diktats. Scots Indy is about walking straight back into their welcoming arms, and handing over the haddock.
Seems to me the Govt has missed a trick here by not introducing masks in a few well-known hotspots like Leicester and Bradford. This would answer the burning questions (a) will they stem the infection? (b) will they further depress retail trade? and (c) will enforcement be difficult? Armed with information from this modest demographic experiment the Govt can then decide whether to impose it more generally.
Given that both Leicester and Bradford have hotspots for the same reason (3rd world standards and wages in the textile industry) I doubt masks would be the issue.
My most reliable economic indicator is half finished project cars for sale on forums and FB groups. They are the ultimate discretionary expense and the first thing to go as confidence evaporates. By this metric we are fucked harder than a Sub Lt left alone with Lord Mountbatten. I could have had a 996 vert for about 40% of its parted out value last night. Petrolheads are running for the exits.
I don't understand the comment about Lord Mountbatten.
Lord Mountbatten was a degenerate and all round deviant.
Lord Mountbatten’s ‘lust for young men’ revealed.
Newly released FBI files give grim detail on the private life of Prince Charles’s mentor and his wife — ‘persons of extremely low morals’
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Logically you would expect a peak of infection a few weeks after lockdown as the currently infected people infect the family they are locked in with. The only way you would get a peak before a lockdown is if you have cocked-up so much that the virus is already self-limited by prior infections, but if you have done that the number of infections and deaths would be far, far greater.
Logically you should expect a peak of infection at lockdown because prior to lockdown people could naturally infect more than just those they live with, plus there's a reasonable chance many of those lived with would already have caught the virus pre-lockdown.
The data we have shows that is what happened. The virus peaked when we went into lockdown.
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Not forgetting unofficial lockdown began a few days prior to it being legally required.
It is actually a few days before lockdown which demonstrates that we were able to get the R figure below 1 without lockdown. Lockdown may have sustained R below 1 but to argue that lockdown saved 450,000 lives when the R figure was below 1 before lockdown is pushing reality a bit.
No it wasn't. Only if you mess around with the figures in a way to try and stretch it out to deceive do you get that.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Logically you would expect a peak of infection a few weeks after lockdown as the currently infected people infect the family they are locked in with. The only way you would get a peak before a lockdown is if you have cocked-up so much that the virus is already self-limited by prior infections, but if you have done that the number of infections and deaths would be far, far greater.
So when would you say the peak of infections in the UK was?
My hunch is within a week of lockdown, but that's from the viewpoint of lockdown being a policy to have as much of the population as possible shelter, the assumption that the virus inevitably infects most people* in a home (the peak if you like), and then burns out as there's nobody left to infect in the home.
In reality it's somewhat muddled by a lot of people already entering a de facto lockdown before it became official; by withdrawing children from school, working from home, and not going out. i.e. The start of lockdown is not a single date, but a period.
I think the hospital admissions is also a little misleading as in the early stages there were a lot of probable infections dismissed as not COVID-19, then a switch to assuming COVID-19 and getting people into hospital, followed by a degree of triage to limit admissions to severe cases as capacity was reached.
I think it will take some serious number-crunching to determine the peak, as best we can, after this is all over.
* The assumption here is that in the home infection is almost unavoidable even with mitigations that would have some effect in the community.
Seems to me the Govt has missed a trick here by not introducing masks in a few well-known hotspots like Leicester and Bradford. This would answer the burning questions (a) will they stem the infection? (b) will they further depress retail trade? and (c) will enforcement be difficult? Armed with information from this modest demographic experiment the Govt can then decide whether to impose it more generally.
There's already some kind of secret international randomized trial going on where scientists at the One World Government flip a coin to assign each country something to do or not do then measure the results. At least that's the best way to explain the UK response.
I wonder if, technically, we won’t actually have a recession this year. It requires two quarters of negative growth, and it looks like all that will be concentrated in a very small time span.
Or is it going to e split between Q1 an Q2?
Probably correct, but not an easy sell for the government with 3m unemployed.
I think that’s a classic case of ‘you can prove anything with statistics.’
Remember, if your feet are in a furnace and your head’s in a bucket of liquid nitrogen, on average you’re perfectly comfortable.
Well I doubt you feel very much after a fairly short time...
Actually liquid nitrogen is just under 78 K while a furnace is above 1273K, so the average would be 675K which is still a bit on the warm side for most people’s tastes.
Can you tell that I am waiting for someone to get out of a meeting so I can have the information I need to get on with my job?
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Not forgetting unofficial lockdown began a few days prior to it being legally required.
It is actually a few days before lockdown which demonstrates that we were able to get the R figure below 1 without lockdown. Lockdown may have sustained R below 1 but to argue that lockdown saved 450,000 lives when the R figure was below 1 before lockdown is pushing reality a bit.
No it wasn't. Only if you mess around with the figures in a way to try and stretch it out to deceive do you get that.
So when was the peak of infections if peak hospital admissions was the 2nd April?
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Not forgetting unofficial lockdown began a few days prior to it being legally required.
It is actually a few days before lockdown which demonstrates that we were able to get the R figure below 1 without lockdown. Lockdown may have sustained R below 1 but to argue that lockdown saved 450,000 lives when the R figure was below 1 before lockdown is pushing reality a bit.
No it wasn't. Only if you mess around with the figures in a way to try and stretch it out to deceive do you get that.
Since we are dealing in average times (from infection to symptom, to admission and to death) then its impossible to pin down exactly when infections peaked, However to argue that the peak was a few days before lockdown is just not something that can be proven with the data we have, Occam's razor suggests the big falls were due to lockdown for the greater part. Actions in the weeks prior to lockdown, such as increased hand washing etc may have slowed the increase, but we just don't have the evidence.
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Logically you would expect a peak of infection a few weeks after lockdown as the currently infected people infect the family they are locked in with. The only way you would get a peak before a lockdown is if you have cocked-up so much that the virus is already self-limited by prior infections, but if you have done that the number of infections and deaths would be far, far greater.
So when would you say the peak of infections in the UK was?
My hunch is within a week of lockdown, but that's from the viewpoint of lockdown being a policy to have as much of the population as possible shelter, the assumption that the virus inevitably infects most people* in a home (the peak if you like), and then burns out as there's nobody left to infect in the home.
In reality it's somewhat muddled by a lot of people already entering a de facto lockdown before it became official; by withdrawing children from school, working from home, and not going out. i.e. The start of lockdown is not a single date, but a period.
I think the hospital admissions is also a little misleading as in the early stages there were a lot of probable infections dismissed as not COVID-19, then a switch to assuming COVID-19 and getting people into hospital, followed by a degree of triage to limit admissions to severe cases as capacity was reached.
I think it will take some serious number-crunching to determine the peak, as best we can, after this is all over.
* The assumption here is that in the home infection is almost unavoidable even with mitigations that would have some effect in the community.
I don't see any way homes could be the peak given the pre lockdown estimate is that R was 3. It's only possible to have an R of 3 if most transmission is occuring outside the home.
On average it's unlikely R could even hit 1 within a home - eg for a couple one may pass it to their partner but who do they then pass it on to within the home this an average of 0.5
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
F1: not my bag (time scale plus low return) but Mercedes to win the Constructors are 1.05 on Betfair exchange (only a little available but even at 1.02 it's probably value).
I'm not saying it's inevitable. But I stand a better chance of opening my bedroom door and finding Olivia Wilde and Jennifer Morrison pillow fighting in their underwear to decide which one of them gets to sleep with me.
On the spreads you can buy Merc at 47. Makes up 50 if they win and 30 if they're 2nd. That's 1.18. I've done that and laid the 1.05 to be flat if they're 2nd and decent profit if they win. Spread bet requires no cash since it's on credit. The risk I'm left with is that somehow Merc don't even manage 2nd. That would stick me with a big loss. But I'm happy to run that risk since I think it's as close to a zero chance as you can get in sport.
You can do a similar - but more risky and thus more upside - strategy for Lewis to win the WDC. Buy on the spreads and lay on Betfair. Again flat if 2nd, good profit if he wins, nasty loss if he fails to manage 2nd.
I have done the above type trade pairings for each of the last 3 seasons and they have always paid off or been flat. Just generally, specifically for F1, it is always worth assessing the spreads against the exchange - because of how the sport is dominated by Merc and Hamilton in the sense that you can conceive of them not winning but they are almost bound to go close. This plays differently into binary win/loss markets c.f. spreads that make up on relative positions.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you worked more than 35 hours a week, 35 hours a week applying for jobs to get benefits is not that punitive.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Says someone who has a job - I currently know a fair few who haven't but don't have enough cash or get up and go to go self employed.
My most reliable economic indicator is half finished project cars for sale on forums and FB groups. They are the ultimate discretionary expense and the first thing to go as confidence evaporates. By this metric we are fucked harder than a Sub Lt left alone with Lord Mountbatten. I could have had a 996 vert for about 40% of its parted out value last night. Petrolheads are running for the exits.
I don't understand the comment about Lord Mountbatten.
Lord Mountbatten was a degenerate and all round deviant.
Lord Mountbatten’s ‘lust for young men’ revealed.
Newly released FBI files give grim detail on the private life of Prince Charles’s mentor and his wife — ‘persons of extremely low morals’
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Not forgetting unofficial lockdown began a few days prior to it being legally required.
It is actually a few days before lockdown which demonstrates that we were able to get the R figure below 1 without lockdown. Lockdown may have sustained R below 1 but to argue that lockdown saved 450,000 lives when the R figure was below 1 before lockdown is pushing reality a bit.
No it wasn't. Only if you mess around with the figures in a way to try and stretch it out to deceive do you get that.
So when was the peak of infections if peak hospital admissions was the 2nd April?
About ten days or so prior so about the 23rd
Lockdown was announced 18 March before the lockdown was made more severe days later culminating in the 23rd.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
I don't think there are 500k vacancies - I suspect it's a lot less than that.
Jobserve (albeit IT biased) currently only has 3600 jobs which is less than 20% of what it usually has.
Worse of those 3600 jobs a lot are duplicates from different agencies - I suspect there is just over 1200 real jobs on there at most..
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you worked more than 35 hours a week, 35 hours a week applying for jobs to get benefits is not that punitive.
35 hours applying for jobs that you aren't qualified for simply means as an employer you end up wasting time removing the completely non-qualified from the process - which means that valid applications can and do get lost...
Yet Job centres insist on you applying for anything you can find no matter how unqualified you are for it.
On Today programme and I have no idea who this was or whether he knew what he was talking about but statement was made that Covid deaths fall into 2 batches. There are those that die in the early stages and then those who die much later from the damage done eg heart failure. They are all recorded as Covid deaths. He claims that many of those dying now are the latter who are March/April victims. If true that is encouraging and must be easy to identify the numbers in each group. Not heard this before.
Once again, I am surprised at what I thought was common knowledge, not being commonly known.
COVID19 kills in a number of ways. One outcome is that the patient is left on life support, their body massively damaged.
I have a suspicion that a couple of the small spikes in deaths we have seen recently, were down shutting off life support for small groups of patients on the same day.
I think that the 2 batches of deaths is common knowledge what I don't think is commonly known (well not by me anyway) is that much of the current deaths are (if true) the 2nd batch from March/April. I would be interested in confirmation of that.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
My most reliable economic indicator is half finished project cars for sale on forums and FB groups. They are the ultimate discretionary expense and the first thing to go as confidence evaporates. By this metric we are fucked harder than a Sub Lt left alone with Lord Mountbatten. I could have had a 996 vert for about 40% of its parted out value last night. Petrolheads are running for the exits.
I don't understand the comment about Lord Mountbatten.
Lord Mountbatten was a degenerate and all round deviant.
Lord Mountbatten’s ‘lust for young men’ revealed.
Newly released FBI files give grim detail on the private life of Prince Charles’s mentor and his wife — ‘persons of extremely low morals’
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
The mask wearing thing is already going totally off the rails as the police federation says it can't been enforced.
Of course it can't. You could see scuffles and fights breaking out as mask wearers try to enforce the rules at the few remaining shops that have customers. Who would want to shop in places like that?
Its manifestly completely counter productive.
Another Johnson disaster.
If everybody wears masks more people will go shopping, why can’t you just accept that you have to wear one and get on with it? It’s no big deal doesn’t get in the way of shopping or talking to people, may reduce the possibility of a second wave and shows solidarity with fellow citizens doing their bit to limit risk whilst boosting the economy.
I don;t see why I should accept the advice of people whose actions to date, far from 'boosting' the economy, have actually destroyed it. You and the other lockdown loons lost the right to lecture others weeks ago.
You need to stop dictating and start listening. OF course you won't because that would mean admitting your gargantuan errors. Errors which are becoming more apparent with each day.
Are you talking about our beloved Conservative government?
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Not forgetting unofficial lockdown began a few days prior to it being legally required.
It is actually a few days before lockdown which demonstrates that we were able to get the R figure below 1 without lockdown. Lockdown may have sustained R below 1 but to argue that lockdown saved 450,000 lives when the R figure was below 1 before lockdown is pushing reality a bit.
No it wasn't. Only if you mess around with the figures in a way to try and stretch it out to deceive do you get that.
So when was the peak of infections if peak hospital admissions was the 2nd April?
About ten days or so prior so about the 23rd
Lockdown was announced 18 March before the lockdown was made more severe days later culminating in the 23rd.
So therefore the R rate was below 1 either before or on the day of the formal lockdown.
Therefore washing hands and social distancing must have had a huge effect on reducing infections.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
There's something in that but I think there are two different perspectives here. As an individual you don't want to get or spread the virus, but if there's hardly any virus, it's not worth the cost of doing anything non-trivial. In Britain it fortunately now only seems to be in your rational self-interest to inconvenience yourself to avoid the virus if you're in a hot-spot.
From the government's perspective they want to prevent *growth*: If you're the person who turns 1 case into 2 cases, and those 2 cases will then turn into 4 cases, then those 4 cases into 8, it's worth a lot to stop you getting the virus.
The virus does seem to grow quite remorselessly when there's no response, and there's quite a substantial lag between cases being detected and people finding out, so it probably makes sense to do the interventions that are both easily enforceable and low-cost everywhere. More disruptive things probably only *can* be done in the hot-spots, because people will only go so far to inconvenience themselves to avoid catching a virus that hardly anybody has.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you worked more than 35 hours a week, 35 hours a week applying for jobs to get benefits is not that punitive.
It is entirely pointless - and, therefore, punitive. It is based on the assumption that those claiming are not interested in finding work.
Last time we had mass unemployment we had a much less onerous benefits system, despite its many faults, and one that was much more focused on getting people back into work rather than punishing them for not having work.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
I was going to start looking at spread betting but then they axed the points markets I was interested in and only head the places. That's much less to my liking.
On masks: an approach to take, from Government, might be that when the national level of R falls below a certain threshold (substantially under 1) they're no longer nationally required, but that if local R figures rise then they can be reimposed on a local basis.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
No the whole point is that you keep the virus from being a problem again by preemptively wearing masks. Reactively taking these measures will mean harsher lockdowns in the future. Masks put us on the front foot against the virus and they allow us to reopen shops to near maximum capacity.
As @Andy_Cooke handily laid out, this is a war of attrition. Individual measures will raise or lower the R value and masks will bring a big reduction and allow us to ease up elsewhere and unlock more economic activity.
Seems to me the Govt has missed a trick here by not introducing masks in a few well-known hotspots like Leicester and Bradford. This would answer the burning questions (a) will they stem the infection? (b) will they further depress retail trade? and (c) will enforcement be difficult? Armed with information from this modest demographic experiment the Govt can then decide whether to impose it more generally.
There's already some kind of secret international randomized trial going on where scientists at the One World Government flip a coin to assign each country something to do or not do then measure the results. At least that's the best way to explain the UK response.
Our Lizard People Overlords were very relaxed about Covid - until human to Lizard transfer was proven.
It’s funny how much people here object to wearing a mask. It’s like they find it personally embarrassing.
It’s such a tiny thing to do that primary benefits others. I can’t see what the fuss is. Just get on with it and carry on.
In any case we’re already obliged to wear fabric coverings in shops, just somewhat lower down. Perhaps these too are controversial with the anti mask crowd. Maybe they like other things to breathe freely in Tesco.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
All that graphic about growth shows is that an extended lockdown was, after all, the worst policy decision by any British government ever, in history.
The economy been destroyed permanently, the measures to alleviate it riddled with abuses, the ongoing nanny stating is a massive impediment to recovery, and the medical profession is wreaking havoc with its ''winter is coming'' fear project.
On top of all this we have through the compulsory wearing of masks in shops, a desperate attempt by a completely beleaguered government to prove to everybody its strategy is right.
The cowardice and incompetence know no bounds.
Soon is will be apparent that our 350bn deficit isn;t temporary but permanent, we can't afford to service our debt, and the inevitable result is a massive decline in public services and living standards.
How many more times. There is no new normal. We either go back to our lives and accept the risks, or live far poorer lives.
You choose, because your government is far too afraid to.
Without lockdown there would have been 500 000 Covid deaths on some estimates, instead we have less than a tenth of that and face masks are vital to reduce further spread of the virus as we reopen the economy
Peak of infections was prior to lockdown.
Shown your fucking working.
Peak hospital admissions, 2nd April, peak deaths 8th April, work back from there.
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we have the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
Working back from there gets... when lockdown started.
Not forgetting unofficial lockdown began a few days prior to it being legally required.
It is actually a few days before lockdown which demonstrates that we were able to get the R figure below 1 without lockdown. Lockdown may have sustained R below 1 but to argue that lockdown saved 450,000 lives when the R figure was below 1 before lockdown is pushing reality a bit.
No it wasn't. Only if you mess around with the figures in a way to try and stretch it out to deceive do you get that.
So when was the peak of infections if peak hospital admissions was the 2nd April?
About ten days or so prior so about the 23rd
Lockdown was announced 18 March before the lockdown was made more severe days later culminating in the 23rd.
So therefore the R rate was below 1 either before or on the day of the formal lockdown.
Therefore washing hands and social distancing must have had a huge effect on reducing infections.
What was the first day of lockdown in your eyes?
When schools closed on the 20th as had been announced on the 18th were we in lockdown yet in your eyes?
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
What the Government should be addressing is the nightmare of hospitals remaining empty and people who need treatment for non-covid illnesses not getting it. Om my wife's ward yesterday they had 8 staff and 2 patients. She has barely done any work for months. The hospital has not had a Covid patient for 5 weeks. Its madness whats going on in our hospitals.
The mask wearing thing is already going totally off the rails as the police federation says it can't been enforced.
Of course it can't. You could see scuffles and fights breaking out as mask wearers try to enforce the rules at the few remaining shops that have customers. Who would want to shop in places like that?
Its manifestly completely counter productive.
Another Johnson disaster.
The police also told us that lockdown itself couldn't be enforced. It turned out that compliance was very high, because the average citizen isn't stupid and has a sense both of self-preservation and of responsibility to others. The same will be true here - if Belgium can do it, then why can't we?
Wearing masks is also likely to suppress a second wave and make people feel safer in public, the lack of such confidence in safety now being the biggest obstacle to the resumption of normal economy activity.
How's the 'do nothing, it'll be fine strategy' working out in the US?
US deaths yesterday less than a tenth of the level they were at in May.
So what's your point?
First, that deaths are a lagging indicator, and likely to rise in the coming weeks since cases are exploding now. Second, that letting the disease run rampant is forcing measures for opening up the economy to stall or even reverse. Third, normal life can't return while citizens are afraid that going out in public will expose them to a dangerous illness that can result in death or permanent damage to their health.
Suppress the disease, save the economy. There's no way around the first step, terribly painful though it is.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
Then wear masks and unlock economic activity to maximum. That's the answer here.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
If masks help keep the threat non existent then we can get back to normal economically even if we are fashionably different. What will destroy the economy is a resurgence of the virus especially as we enter the winter flu season.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
Then wear masks and unlock economic activity to maximum. That's the answer here.
Max you're a numbers guy. What precautionary measures would you take for a 0.0001132% risk?
Edit: of catching a virus which you will almost certainly live through with very minor effects.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit. The last date is 23rd June as DWP are no longer publishing weekly figures probably because they are going to be so bad as furlough ends.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Being on universal credit doesn't mean you are looking for work.
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Being on universal credit doesn't mean you are looking for work.
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
Really? I seem to remember looking for work being a significant section within the specifications of the sanction management software I wrote for the universal credit appointment management system.
And yes there are exceptions but that requires a whole pile of currently suspended health checks which means everyone who has applied will be looking for work.
Now I know you have a habit of posting without thinking but that is a whole new level of being caught out...
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
Then wear masks and unlock economic activity to maximum. That's the answer here.
Max you're a numbers guy. What precautionary measures would you take for a 0.0001132% risk?
Edit: of catching a virus which you will almost certainly live through with very minor effects.
It depends what you're doing.
If you told me I'd have that percentage risk of catching HIV then I'd wear a condom. If you told me that percentage risk of catching COVID and passing it on to my loved ones I don't want to kill them I can wear a mask.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
Then wear masks and unlock economic activity to maximum. That's the answer here.
Max you're a numbers guy. What precautionary measures would you take for a 0.0001132% risk?
Edit: of catching a virus which you will almost certainly live through with very minor effects.
That's 5.3m x the risk rate given the size of the population, the individual risk is obviously very low but the national risk of a second lockdown is very high. Look at California, Serbia and countless other places which have had to reimpose lockdown measures. Masks are a basically pain free method of preventing that worst case scenario. I really, really don't understand the resistance among some people.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
What the Government should be addressing is the nightmare of hospitals remaining empty and people who need treatment for non-covid illnesses not getting it. Om my wife's ward yesterday they had 8 staff and 2 patients. She has barely done any work for months. The hospital has not had a Covid patient for 5 weeks. Its madness whats going on in our hospitals.
Then you will be pleased to hear that at least at my local hospital routine treatment seems to be back up and running: I am now in the middle of a set of treatment which should have happened in May. Ironically it is this treatment which affects my immune system and means I have to shelter...
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Being on universal credit doesn't mean you are looking for work.
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
Really? I seem to remember looking for work being a significant section within the specifications of the sanction management software I wrote
Well your memory has failed you.
Looking for work is a section if you are getting the benefit as you are unemployed. For those who are already working a minimum wage job and are getting what used to be called working tax credits or child tax credits and add now a part of universal credit it is a different matter.
Consistent with a 10%+ poll shift (or a 5% swing as traditionally thought of) and Trump down to approx 72 ECVs...
Consistent with Biden doing well in States he has no hope of winning.
Montana - Over 50% would win it no matter how you look at it ;-) 2016 Trump got 56% so surprising that Biden 9% ahead now - if he is.
Trump is still 9% ahead in Montana
If Biden were 9% or even 0.009% ahead in Montana, we would be looking at the worst Republican defeat since at least 1936.
Bill Clinton won Montana in 1992, as did LBJ in 1964 and Truman in 1948
McCain actually only won Montana by 2.4% in 2008 in the context of a national 7.2% Obama lead.
It has elected some conservative democrats to the Senate in recent times but rather like Missouri I would be shocked to see it actually go blue in a presidential election, even in a Biden blowout.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Being on universal credit doesn't mean you are looking for work.
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
Really? I seem to remember looking for work being a significant section within the specifications of the sanction management software I wrote for the universal credit appointment management system.
Now I know you have a habit of posting without thinking but that is a whole new level of being caught out...
UC now covers income-based ESA (for sick and disabled), in some regions.
One other point about mask wearing: might it have the side effect of reducing the transmission of flu and so reduce the pressure on the NHS this winter?
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Being on universal credit doesn't mean you are looking for work.
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
Really? I seem to remember looking for work being a significant section within the specifications of the sanction management software I wrote for the universal credit appointment management system.
Now I know you have a habit of posting without thinking but that is a whole new level of being caught out...
UC now covers income-based ESA (for sick and disabled), in some regions.
Not for new claims it won't which is what the 3.4 million claims we are talking about are any and all transfers have been postponed.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
Then wear masks and unlock economic activity to maximum. That's the answer here.
So are you suggesting that wearing masks means that we can forget social distancing and everyone can return to work normally?
I really don't get the argument that weaing masks will mean that economic activity can return to the maximum.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Being on universal credit doesn't mean you are looking for work.
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
Really? I seem to remember looking for work being a significant section within the specifications of the sanction management software I wrote for the universal credit appointment management system.
Now I know you have a habit of posting without thinking but that is a whole new level of being caught out...
UC now covers income-based ESA (for sick and disabled), in some regions.
Plus what used to be called tax credits etc ... Or housing benefit.
Universal credit is not simply jobseekers allowance.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
Then wear masks and unlock economic activity to maximum. That's the answer here.
So are you suggesting that wearing masks means that we can forget social distancing and everyone can return to work normally?
I really don't get the argument that weaing masks will mean that economic activity can return to the maximum.
Yes, that's the whole fucking point of them. If everyone wears masks then we can basically eliminate social distancing. Japan and other Asian countries have shown that this is possible.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
Tobes there, who unencumbered by qualifications pronounces on public health, Covid-19, economics, social policy, 'progressive eugenics' and education, accusing someone of being a journalist who thinks he's a scientist.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
Then wear masks and unlock economic activity to maximum. That's the answer here.
So are you suggesting that wearing masks means that we can forget social distancing and everyone can return to work normally?
I really don't get the argument that weaing masks will mean that economic activity can return to the maximum.
Yes that's the whole damn point!
Would you rather have social distancing and lockdown ... Or wear a damn mask and get back to normal?
I'd rather get back to normal! Which would you prefer?
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Being on universal credit doesn't mean you are looking for work.
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
Really? I seem to remember looking for work being a significant section within the specifications of the sanction management software I wrote for the universal credit appointment management system.
Now I know you have a habit of posting without thinking but that is a whole new level of being caught out...
UC now covers income-based ESA (for sick and disabled), in some regions.
Plus what used to be called tax credits etc ... Or housing benefit.
Universal credit is not simply jobseekers allowance.
Keep clutching at your straws - I would love to see why someone would be claiming for tax credits or housing benefit due to being furloughed.
90%+ of these new claims are because people no longer have money coming in after previously working...
Interesting to read the debate on masks in the UK. For some of us, it's been compulsory to wear them everywhere outside the home for months now. People adapt to them, it's really not that bad but one does notice that communication becomes slightly more difficult - we read faces and lips subconsciously in normal times.
The mask wearing thing is already going totally off the rails as the police federation says it can't been enforced.
Of course it can't. You could see scuffles and fights breaking out as mask wearers try to enforce the rules at the few remaining shops that have customers. Who would want to shop in places like that?
Its manifestly completely counter productive.
Another Johnson disaster.
The police also told us that lockdown itself couldn't be enforced. It turned out that compliance was very high, because the average citizen isn't stupid and has a sense both of self-preservation and of responsibility to others. The same will be true here - if Belgium can do it, then why can't we?
Wearing masks is also likely to suppress a second wave and make people feel safer in public, the lack of such confidence in safety now being the biggest obstacle to the resumption of normal economy activity.
How's the 'do nothing, it'll be fine strategy' working out in the US?
US deaths yesterday less than a tenth of the level they were at in May.
So what's your point?
What bollocks.
It is not a factor of 10 but more like 1.5 (you would have been better picking April where the factor is about 2.5). But more importantly the increase in deaths and more dramatically cases is rocketing. New cases are 3 times May's figures. This week they are likely to hit new records as they did last week and these records of cases are being broken by 5K to 10K each time.
Deaths have already jumped dramatically in the last week if you compare each day to the same day in the past week and of course deaths lag cases so expect those to start to climb significantly also.
One other point about mask wearing: might it have the side effect of reducing the transmission of flu and so reduce the pressure on the NHS this winter?
That will be the primary reason for it, it now neds to be matched with an aggressive flu vaccination campaign with free vaccines for all over 50 and if that capacity is there, anybody who wants it. They should also now re-enginee the hospitals with regional covid centers ready and waiting and other hospital returned to normal, aided by universal mask usage within them. An ounce of prevention now will pay massive dividends in the future.
Those charts are scary if you've been made redundant. Vacancies are running at 40% of what they were this time last year but the number of job hunters is far higher.
There is a ton of shit coming for this government over the benefits system and sanctions etc, once millions who never thought they would go near the DWP find out what it entails. E.g. 35 hours a week filling in hundreds of applications to tick a box.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
If you don't want to spend hours filling in applications then get a job.
Easier said than done with 4m jobseekers and 500k vacancies.
Well we aren't at 4m jobseekers yet and the ones who genuinely want a job and come across like they genuinely want one too will find it easier to get a job first.
Any evidence of that given that no one here has defined what a job seeker is.
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Any evidence those 9 million were actively looking for work and the overwhelming majority were not blissfully happy taking 80% of their wages and would only start looking for work if and when it becomes necessary?
Oh they are currently blissfully happy taking their wages - their shock is yet to come.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
Being on universal credit doesn't mean you are looking for work.
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
Really? I seem to remember looking for work being a significant section within the specifications of the sanction management software I wrote for the universal credit appointment management system.
Now I know you have a habit of posting without thinking but that is a whole new level of being caught out...
UC now covers income-based ESA (for sick and disabled), in some regions.
Plus what used to be called tax credits etc ... Or housing benefit.
Universal credit is not simply jobseekers allowance.
Keep clutching at your straws
It's not a straw it's a fact. Are you claiming that everyone who is working (even if furloughed) and getting tax credits or housing benefits via Universal Credit is obliged to look for work despite the fact they already are working?
If those who are working are obliged to look for work or they face sanctions then that is an insane system. Is that seriously what you're claiming? Or did you make a mistake?
Interesting to read the debate on masks in the UK. For some of us, it's been compulsory to wear them everywhere outside the home for months now. People adapt to them, it's really not that bad but one does notice that communication becomes slightly more difficult - we read faces and lips subconsciously in normal times.
Looking at the detail of the GDP figures - there was a continued drop in social activities which led to another big contraction in the hospitality sector. This is why it was 1.8% growth instead of the ~5% expected. Masks are the key to getting this sector back up and running and any whining from libertarians and other objectors should be ignored.
Construction was up 8%, production was up 6%, manufacturing was up 8% but services only grew by 0.9%, spot the difference. I actually think it's these numbers, not the fear of a second wave which has changed the government's decision on mask wearing.
June will bring big gains in the other two sectors again but lowish growth from a low base in services. Hopefully July will prove to have made a difference and the further easing as we go forwards will help too.
One final thing on masks, I have a lot of European friends and I'm married to a European. In all of these countries mask wearing has become normal for indoor activity. No one gives a shit and in Italy they've basically done away with social distancing indoors where masks are required. From what they all say their European family and friends won't come to this country to visit them or on holiday until we have mandatory masks. It is holding back a whole sector of the economy. The people who are allowed to come aren't doing so, the government needs to get our and advertise that masks are being made mandatory all across Europe and Asia so we rescue the August and September tourism season
Agreed. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the vehemently anti-mask proportion of the population is fairly low, and that there will be a significant net benefit to the economy.
But I'd be interested to know what the aim is. Clearly eradication is not the aim as we're resuming international travel. So why do we need to go even further to suppress cases when it appears to be pretty low at the moment and the NHS is coping well?
I don't speak for the government but the UK seems to be gradually rolling back the most disruptive measures, while making the less disruptive ones semi-permanent.
This seems like the right general approach to me: Containment is a game of averages, if your infection rate is stable or a little bit below 1 but you want to be able to do something that increases the average number of people an infected person infects - say reopening schools - you need to counter that with something else that decreases the average number of people an infected person infects.
Exactly.
Think of it as if you're playing a role-playing game. There are a bunch of factors that push R down and a bunch that push R up.
For the sake of argument, take the following effects as correct and accurate; in reality, all are fuzzy, but the directions are probably right.
We know that if you go to the suite of factors that we called "lockdown" (different in each country, of course), you can get R down to around 0.6.
Add people going around outside with social distancing. R+0.01 Reopen non-essential shops and schools with social distancing. R+0.15 Reopen pubs and restaurants with social distancing and maximal outside use. R+0.15 Get people back to work if they can't work from home. R+0.1 Reopen gyms, cinemas, beauticians with social distancing. R+0.15 Impose masks in shops. R-0.2 Impose masks in pubs and restaurants. R-0.2
What do you do? It's certainly true that going for the full suite of lockdown measures (sans masks) gets R down to an acceptable level. It's also true that if you were to impose masks in pubs and restaurants it'd get R down still further. But might make eating a meal a bit of a challenge (ie it's impractical).
I think people seem to have this love of either-or absolutist situations. Either it's safe or it's not. When in reality, it's all a fuzzy shifting of probabilities. You're x% less likely to be infected if mass are imposed in shops. You're not certainly safe, nor were you certain to be infected before. That's just how probability works (albeit, as Tetlock and Gardner have pointed out, the human brain isn't set up to deal with fuzzy shades of grey and probabilities).
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it assumes that the virus is sitting in wait, looking for further opportunities to spread beyond the slave factories of Leicester back into the broader community. In some parts of the country that is true, there is still enough ambient virus around to make these sort of measures an appropriate response. In most of the country, however, unless you go to an infected care home you are unlikely to find any virus to be exposed to. In most of Scotland you can't even find it in hospital because the last patients have long since been discharged.
Masks in March, April May, possibly even June made a lot of sense and would probably have allowed us to come out of lockdown faster. Now? In localised areas of risk yes. Across the entire country? Just daft.
It's not, David. The whole point is that masks will allow shops which are currently open at 30% of capacity to run at 70-80% of capacity. It removes the big motivation of not going out shopping (queues) and it also removes the health concern aspect of going outside in general.
Additionally if there is going to be a second wave having a population that is confident at mask wearing like Asian countries is better than asking people to learn to do it properly when getting it wrong really can make everything worse.
At least 75% of us are wearing masks against a risk that does not exist at the present time. Probably higher. Our government seems to lurch from painful and stupid inaction (eg quarantine) to gross over-reaction without any thought of the consequences. We need a lot more localised and evidence led responses. So people in Leicester should definitely be wearing masks right now and for at least another couple of months. People in Dundee really don't need to or to undertake social distancing either. There is no virus. Obviously if that changes the advice should change too.
That's like saying you should only wear a condom if you're having a one night stand if your partner knows they have HIV.
It really isn't. Yesterday there were 6 new cases of the virus in Scotland, a country of 5.3m people. I saw a suggestion it was another care home where residents tested positive. Like Keynes, if the facts change I will change my mind but right now our policies are having very negative economic effects to defend us from a non existent threat.
Then wear masks and unlock economic activity to maximum. That's the answer here.
So are you suggesting that wearing masks means that we can forget social distancing and everyone can return to work normally?
I really don't get the argument that weaing masks will mean that economic activity can return to the maximum.
Yes, that's the whole fucking point of them. If everyone wears masks then we can basically eliminate social distancing. Japan and other Asian countries have shown that this is possible.
It's already there, the distancing is 2 metres without mitigation and 1 metre with. It's baked in that the distancing can be reduced to 1 metre in shops once masks are mandatory .
Comments
What some people forget is that in April when we were getting 6000 postive tests we were only testing 8000 people. If we had the testing capacity in March that we have now we would have had at least 40-60,000 positive tests a day. Testing capacity in March was 2-3,000. If you had symptoms you were told to stay home. You were not allowed to get tested.
Therefore the only reliable way of working out the level of infections is hospital admissions and deaths.
If you have one and are capable of doing so then you should even before the 24th. The right thing to do is still the right thing to do even if it's not legally required!
I'd prefer if this never had to be legally required and people chose to do it off their own initiative.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1282958589955641344
https://youdontneedamask.com/
And you're entirely right about the strategy being forced upon Zhuge Liang (as an aside, I reference that incident in one of my Sir Edric books, I forget which). It still worked.
Lord Mountbatten’s ‘lust for young men’ revealed.
Newly released FBI files give grim detail on the private life of Prince Charles’s mentor and his wife — ‘persons of extremely low morals’
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lord-mountbattens-lust-for-young-men-revealed-90swzmgms
In fact the only exception I can think of is a recently built pub near my parents which has so much space you would need a 5m distance rule for them to have a problem - to meet the 2m rule they just had to move a single table.
I'm not saying it's inevitable. But I stand a better chance of opening my bedroom door and finding Olivia Wilde and Jennifer Morrison pillow fighting in their underwear to decide which one of them gets to sleep with me.
The data we have shows that is what happened. The virus peaked when we went into lockdown.
Edited extra bit: also an emphasis on curb-side pickup and deliveries.
I wonder how many of the newly unemployed enjoyed raging about benefits scroungers in the pub of a Friday night?
In reality it's somewhat muddled by a lot of people already entering a de facto lockdown before it became official; by withdrawing children from school, working from home, and not going out. i.e. The start of lockdown is not a single date, but a period.
I think the hospital admissions is also a little misleading as in the early stages there were a lot of probable infections dismissed as not COVID-19, then a switch to assuming COVID-19 and getting people into hospital, followed by a degree of triage to limit admissions to severe cases as capacity was reached.
I think it will take some serious number-crunching to determine the peak, as best we can, after this is all over.
* The assumption here is that in the home infection is almost unavoidable even with mitigations that would have some effect in the community.
Actually liquid nitrogen is just under 78 K while a furnace is above 1273K, so the average would be 675K which is still a bit on the warm side for most people’s tastes.
Can you tell that I am waiting for someone to get out of a meeting so I can have the information I need to get on with my job?
On average it's unlikely R could even hit 1 within a home - eg for a couple one may pass it to their partner but who do they then pass it on to within the home this an average of 0.5
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1282900258750701569?s=20
You can do a similar - but more risky and thus more upside - strategy for Lewis to win the WDC. Buy on the spreads and lay on Betfair. Again flat if 2nd, good profit if he wins, nasty loss if he fails to manage 2nd.
I have done the above type trade pairings for each of the last 3 seasons and they have always paid off or been flat. Just generally, specifically for F1, it is always worth assessing the spreads against the exchange - because of how the sport is dominated by Merc and Hamilton in the sense that you can conceive of them not winning but they are almost bound to go close. This plays differently into binary win/loss markets c.f. spreads that make up on relative positions.
(dyor)
Lockdown was announced 18 March before the lockdown was made more severe days later culminating in the 23rd.
Jobserve (albeit IT biased) currently only has 3600 jobs which is less than 20% of what it usually has.
Worse of those 3600 jobs a lot are duplicates from different agencies - I suspect there is just over 1200 real jobs on there at most..
My last day in the office was the 16th of March.
I use the fourth busiest train station outside of London, for the early parts of March it was eerily quiet.
The country was informally in lockdown/engaging in social distancing long before Boris Johnson mandated it.
That’s why Peter Hitchens et al make idiots of themselves over infections were falling before the formal lockdown.
Yet Job centres insist on you applying for anything you can find no matter how unqualified you are for it.
His deviancy is to do with his actions like visiting brothels and engaging in the services of people under the age of consent.
The idea people can only do the right thing if they're going to be fined if they don't is insane.
There are 3 million self employed people without any government support at the moment and 9.3million people where furloughed on the 28th June (last figures currently available see https://www.statista.com/statistics/1116638/uk-number-of-people-on-furlough/ )
I seriously suspect 4 million will be a vast underestimate.
Therefore washing hands and social distancing must have had a huge effect on reducing infections.
From the government's perspective they want to prevent *growth*: If you're the person who turns 1 case into 2 cases, and those 2 cases will then turn into 4 cases, then those 4 cases into 8, it's worth a lot to stop you getting the virus.
The virus does seem to grow quite remorselessly when there's no response, and there's quite a substantial lag between cases being detected and people finding out, so it probably makes sense to do the interventions that are both easily enforceable and low-cost everywhere. More disruptive things probably only *can* be done in the hot-spots, because people will only go so far to inconvenience themselves to avoid catching a virus that hardly anybody has.
Last time we had mass unemployment we had a much less onerous benefits system, despite its many faults, and one that was much more focused on getting people back into work rather than punishing them for not having work.
I was going to start looking at spread betting but then they axed the points markets I was interested in and only head the places. That's much less to my liking.
On masks: an approach to take, from Government, might be that when the national level of R falls below a certain threshold (substantially under 1) they're no longer nationally required, but that if local R figures rise then they can be reimposed on a local basis.
As @Andy_Cooke handily laid out, this is a war of attrition. Individual measures will raise or lower the R value and masks will bring a big reduction and allow us to ease up elsewhere and unlock more economic activity.
I honestly don't understand the objection.
Then they started panicking.
When schools closed on the 20th as had been announced on the 18th were we in lockdown yet in your eyes?
Edit: of catching a virus which you will almost certainly live through with very minor effects.
Actually I've just found the universal credit claim figures from 1st March to 23rd June 3,403,530 claimed universal credit. The last date is 23rd June as DWP are no longer publishing weekly figures probably because they are going to be so bad as furlough ends.
So yep that 4 million is an understatement as there was 1 million claiming before hand.
Being blunt something like 12-14 million people were not working on June 23rd....
There is a mountain of difference between people not working and people looking for work. Those are two very, very different propositions.
And yes there are exceptions but that requires a whole pile of currently suspended health checks which means everyone who has applied will be looking for work.
Now I know you have a habit of posting without thinking but that is a whole new level of being caught out...
If you told me I'd have that percentage risk of catching HIV then I'd wear a condom. If you told me that percentage risk of catching COVID and passing it on to my loved ones I don't want to kill them I can wear a mask.
Ironically it is this treatment which affects my immune system and means I have to shelter...
Looking for work is a section if you are getting the benefit as you are unemployed. For those who are already working a minimum wage job and are getting what used to be called working tax credits or child tax credits and add now a part of universal credit it is a different matter.
It has elected some conservative democrats to the Senate in recent times but rather like Missouri I would be shocked to see it actually go blue in a presidential election, even in a Biden blowout.
I really don't get the argument that weaing masks will mean that economic activity can return to the maximum.
Universal credit is not simply jobseekers allowance.
https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1282938849426124800?s=20
Would you rather have social distancing and lockdown ... Or wear a damn mask and get back to normal?
I'd rather get back to normal! Which would you prefer?
90%+ of these new claims are because people no longer have money coming in after previously working...
It is not a factor of 10 but more like 1.5 (you would have been better picking April where the factor is about 2.5). But more importantly the increase in deaths and more dramatically cases is rocketing. New cases are 3 times May's figures. This week they are likely to hit new records as they did last week and these records of cases are being broken by 5K to 10K each time.
Deaths have already jumped dramatically in the last week if you compare each day to the same day in the past week and of course deaths lag cases so expect those to start to climb significantly also.
If those who are working are obliged to look for work or they face sanctions then that is an insane system. Is that seriously what you're claiming? Or did you make a mistake?
I could be wrong, but I suspect that the vehemently anti-mask proportion of the population is fairly low, and that there will be a significant net benefit to the economy.