$2,933 for ‘Girl’s Night’: Medicaid chief’s consulting expenses revealed https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/10/seema-verma-medicaid-expenses-411539 When Seema Verma, the Trump administration's top Medicaid official, went to a reporter's home in November 2018 for a "Girl's Night" thrown in her honor, taxpayers footed the bill to organize the event: $2,933.
When Verma wrote an op-ed on Fox News' website that fall, touting President Donald Trump's changes to Obamacare, taxpayers got charged for one consultant's price to place it: $977...
...The efforts were steered by Pam Stevens, a Republican communications consultant and former Trump administration official working to raise the brand of Verma, who leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The prices were the amount a consulting company billed the government for her services, based on her invoices, which were obtained by congressional Democrats.
They are among the revelations included in a sweeping congressional investigation chronicling how Verma spent more than $3.5 million on a range of GOP-connected consultants, who polished her public profile, wrote her speeches and Twitter posts, brokered meetings with high-profile individuals — and even billed taxpayers for connecting Verma with fellow Republicans in Congress.
The 49-year-old Verma, who advised then-Gov. Mike Pence in Indiana on health policy before joining the Trump administration, has strongly rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing in her consulting practices. In October 2019, she told a House committee that “all the contracts we have at CMS are based on promoting the work of CMS” and the spending was “consistent with how the agency has used resources in the past.”
But the probe — conducted by Democrats across four congressional committees — found that Verma surrounded herself with a rotating cast of at least 15 highly paid communications consultants during her first two years in office, even as she publicly called for fiscal restraint and championed policies like work requirements for Americans on Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people...
Democrats seem to be doing reasonably well in managing the news cycle in the run up to the election.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
$2,933 for ‘Girl’s Night’: Medicaid chief’s consulting expenses revealed https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/10/seema-verma-medicaid-expenses-411539 When Seema Verma, the Trump administration's top Medicaid official, went to a reporter's home in November 2018 for a "Girl's Night" thrown in her honor, taxpayers footed the bill to organize the event: $2,933.
When Verma wrote an op-ed on Fox News' website that fall, touting President Donald Trump's changes to Obamacare, taxpayers got charged for one consultant's price to place it: $977...
...The efforts were steered by Pam Stevens, a Republican communications consultant and former Trump administration official working to raise the brand of Verma, who leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The prices were the amount a consulting company billed the government for her services, based on her invoices, which were obtained by congressional Democrats.
They are among the revelations included in a sweeping congressional investigation chronicling how Verma spent more than $3.5 million on a range of GOP-connected consultants, who polished her public profile, wrote her speeches and Twitter posts, brokered meetings with high-profile individuals — and even billed taxpayers for connecting Verma with fellow Republicans in Congress.
The 49-year-old Verma, who advised then-Gov. Mike Pence in Indiana on health policy before joining the Trump administration, has strongly rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing in her consulting practices. In October 2019, she told a House committee that “all the contracts we have at CMS are based on promoting the work of CMS” and the spending was “consistent with how the agency has used resources in the past.”
But the probe — conducted by Democrats across four congressional committees — found that Verma surrounded herself with a rotating cast of at least 15 highly paid communications consultants during her first two years in office, even as she publicly called for fiscal restraint and championed policies like work requirements for Americans on Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people...
Democrats seem to be doing reasonably well in managing the news cycle in the run up to the election.
An interesting piece from the CDC. I can only speculate as to why our own world beating Track and Trace system has not published something on the issue. I am tempted by an FoI request.
A key point here is that the survey didn’t differentiate between indoor and outdoor dining. Indoor dining - sitting down in an enclosed air conditioned space with lots of others for an extended period of time - has obvious similarities with other known super spreading hotspots like airplanes and cruise ships. Dining outdoors much less so.
Plenty of outdoor crowding causes the spread to spike: funerals, football matches, Cheltenham festival etc.
Just as dangerous and I won't go near either indoor or outdoor dining.
I think you will find most funerals are indoors, wholly or partly.
There is a massive difference between being packed into a sporting crowd of people all shouting at the top of their voice, and a quiet dinner at the edge of the square.
If you read the article you will see that the study didn't gather this key data
I don't think it could, within the methodology of the study.
Intuitively I would expect outdoor events to be safer, but it is perhaps of no matter to us in drizzly autumnL England. Dining al fresco won't be tenable for much longer.
So Biden has a less than 5.5% lead in Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Arizona and Trump leads in Ohio. And of course Silver wrongly had an 85% chance Hillary would win in 2016 too just over a week before polling day.
If Trump wins all those states and holds his 2016 states he wins the EC
How can you say he had that wrong a week before? A 15% chance is still a chance and quite a decent one at that.
Trump won, if he failed to predict Trump would win the EC he got it wrong, he may not have got it massively wrong but he was still wrong
They gave him a 30% chance of winning in the final prediction. If you don't understand that then you have zero understanding of odds and statistical analysis. If they'd given him a 1 percent chance of winning i'd agree with you but they didn't and never did. They consistently said Trump is the underdog but he has a path.
So what, whether they said he had a 1% chance or a 30% chance they still said it was more likely than not he would lose, he won, so on balance they were wrong
How on earth can you post on a betting site many times each day for years, and have not yet understood that a 30% probability comes in quite often?
That is really a very ignorant post for this forum.
I was scolded recently for suggesting plenty on here have little comprehension of odds and betting. Its not a betting site at all, much to my disappointment.
FFS, the different countries in the UK are still playing silly buggers. Scotland an under 12 doesn't count for the 6, so Wales goes under 11s...
Its to appease all the "I can't see my grandkids" whingers.
I’m not sure that’s the point of the post - which is to highlight that all U.K. administrations are basically following the same policy prescriptions whilst having nuanced differences that clearly have no scientific basis just to give the impression that they are taking their own decisions.
FFS, the different countries in the UK are still playing silly buggers. Scotland an under 12 doesn't count for the 6, so Wales goes under 11s...
Its to appease all the "I can't see my grandkids" whingers.
I’m not sure that’s the point of the post - which is to highlight that all U.K. administrations are basically following the same policy prescriptions whilst having nuanced differences that clearly have no scientific basis just to give the impression that they are taking their own decisions.
Bozo is doing his best to minimise the differences, by following Scotland
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
The one with the big tourism industry.
There are very few tourists in France. Just look throughout Europe where mask wearing is mandatory, cases are climbing hugely.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
We realise you have a hard on for masks.
But the reality is that throughout this process, the empirical evidence for mask wearing has grown and grown. As in peer reviewed, scientific papers.
Now. You can choose to believe that Spain's spike in CV-19 cases was due to mask wearing rather than (say) re-opening nightclubs. But all that demonstrates is that you don't really care about the academic research, or indeed the data.
Does the data data support 7 year olds compulsorily wearing masks to school? Or people scowling at each other if they don’t wear them walking outside on the street?
Whether you like to admit it or not, there’s a social trade off to wearing face coverings. There are approx 2.8m deaths per year in the US and your paper cites 33k lives saved between June and Oct if 95% of people wear masks in public. So that’s saving excess deaths worth perhaps a week or two over the year?
Is that worth it really? Given the vast bulk of the lives saved are lives that would likely be lost this year or next anyway?
Is there evidence yet on what living in such a clinical germ free fashion is doing to immune systems, particularly of the young?
What if the Disease X of the next decade is a rhinovirus. It’s not impossible, until SARS coronaviruses were widely seen as a mere nuisance. But we’ve deprived a generation from acquiring natural immunity against the killer rhinovirus, because they spent their childhood avoiding all germs at all cost.
Not everyone that hates lockdowns, masks and the like is ignorant and thinks covid is caused by 5G, that it’s harmless or invented by Bill Gates. We are just looking with a slightly wider perspective at what we’re giving up now, and what we might be risking both socially, economically and medically in the years ahead.
I hate masks and lockdowns. They are bad economically, socially, and for mental and physical health. Masks impair communication. They are uncomfortable. I would love not to wear them.
And I completely accept that this is a series of trade offs.
The reality is that we accept a small number of temporary inconveniences to avoid a lot of people dying, a long lasting de facto lockdown (which is what's happened in Arizona, Georgia and Sweden), and large numbers of people with serious lingering issues.
#LongCovid is the final refuge of corona disaster mongers. I’m yet to see the compelling evidence that shows it justifies the ongoing restrictions. In fact the most recent studies indicate that more than half of the worst cases of those with lingering symptoms fully recover within 90 days. And this number might improve further.
I don’t wish to downplay that some younger people are going to have a rough time after being infected. There are some that will. Maybe even me. But I question whether this outweighs the aggregate health impact of continued lockdowns (both direct, and indirect from weaker long term economic growth).
Here's the thing: this is something that needs a reasoned debate, but it also needs data.
And the "longcovid" story is not a new one invented by fearmongers. SeanT was reporting on long term side effects back in February. I know a number of people who have not fully recovered from it.
My view is that we should not seek "zero Covid", but that we should seek to manage it at a low level until a vaccine is available. This means we should ban the highest risk activities (nightclubs, karaoke clubs, concerts, indoor sporting events), and require people to wear masks on things like public transport.
Doing that, I believe, is enough to keep R at a relatively low level, while avoiding it running completely out of control.
The other thing that I think you missed is that places without formal lockdowns still have de facto ones. Sweden's economic performance is Q2 - if the PMIs are correct - will be the worst in Europe, and its unemployment continues to climb. If people are scared, they don't go out. It may not be a formal lockdown, but people aren't going about their normal life - instead working from home has become de facto.
My business is in Arizona. It was one of the the first to reopen in the US (which given I'm in the business of selling auto insurance, and I want people to get out and drive and buy new cars). But Arizona has been a bit of a disaster zone. Not i terms of deaths, but in terms of economic activity. Shopping malls are still deserted. Restaraunts are still closing. Driving activity and new auto purchases are down worse than in California.
So I think you've created a bit of a false dichotemy - between places that are thriving because there are no lockdowns, and places that are suffering because they have them.
I don’t disagree with too much of your recommended panacea. But that’s not what’s happening in the uk. My son’s school gave a vote to teachers on the use of masks by kids. Good way of keeping them onboard and into work. But they came up with a policy of enforced mask wearing by all kids older than 7, at all times unless in the classroom. There’s not much evidence kids that age can even spread it, much less that they should be wearing masks even outside as they wait for class.
It’s but one example of how the fear messaging from the govt is mixing with British health & safety / officialdom culture and coming up with quite perverse outcomes, where the cure is without doubt causing more damage over the long term than the ailment.
Sensible risk segmentation and freedom of choice is all I ask for.
So Biden has a less than 5.5% lead in Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Arizona and Trump leads in Ohio. And of course Silver wrongly had an 85% chance Hillary would win in 2016 too just over a week before polling day.
If Trump wins all those states and holds his 2016 states he wins the EC
How can you say he had that wrong a week before? A 15% chance is still a chance and quite a decent one at that.
Trump won, if he failed to predict Trump would win the EC he got it wrong, he may not have got it massively wrong but he was still wrong
They gave him a 30% chance of winning in the final prediction. If you don't understand that then you have zero understanding of odds and statistical analysis. If they'd given him a 1 percent chance of winning i'd agree with you but they didn't and never did. They consistently said Trump is the underdog but he has a path.
So what, whether they said he had a 1% chance or a 30% chance they still said it was more likely than not he would lose, he won, so on balance they were wrong
How on earth can you post on a betting site many times each day for years, and have not yet understood that a 30% probability comes in quite often?
That is really a very ignorant post for this forum.
I was scolded recently for suggesting plenty on here have little comprehension of odds and betting. Its not a betting site at all, much to my disappointment.
TBF deciding the outcome based on your own preference and then looking for polls to support it doesn't require any understanding of odds
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
I hope you're right.
However, I'd point out that in "enclosed" situations, like the choir or the fishing vessel, you saw over 80% of people infected. This does not suggest that 75% or so of the population has natural immunity.
So Biden has a less than 5.5% lead in Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Arizona and Trump leads in Ohio. And of course Silver wrongly had an 85% chance Hillary would win in 2016 too just over a week before polling day.
If Trump wins all those states and holds his 2016 states he wins the EC
How can you say he had that wrong a week before? A 15% chance is still a chance and quite a decent one at that.
Trump won, if he failed to predict Trump would win the EC he got it wrong, he may not have got it massively wrong but he was still wrong
They gave him a 30% chance of winning in the final prediction. If you don't understand that then you have zero understanding of odds and statistical analysis. If they'd given him a 1 percent chance of winning i'd agree with you but they didn't and never did. They consistently said Trump is the underdog but he has a path.
So what, whether they said he had a 1% chance or a 30% chance they still said it was more likely than not he would lose, he won, so on balance they were wrong
How on earth can you post on a betting site many times each day for years, and have not yet understood that a 30% probability comes in quite often?
That is really a very ignorant post for this forum.
I was scolded recently for suggesting plenty on here have little comprehension of odds and betting. Its not a betting site at all, much to my disappointment.
There are some here who never bet, and others who are serious gamblers, though often less frequent posters. Election nights it's the place to be.
MoM GDP up 6.6%, UK economy now 11.7% smaller than in Feb. Recovery looks extremely V shaped. We're on track to recover around 95% of GDP before the end of the year, even with this new lockdown.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I take your point though I disagree with it. "Pro EU" and "anti Boris aren't two sides of the same coin. There is a huge amount of reality creeping in to the endless rhetoric about Brexit and if that makes you think we're talking down the PM in favour of the EU then sobeit.
Johnson (and out of courtesy to you I have restrained from calling him "Shagger" as I normally do) didn't read the deal. His deal. The deal he signed as PM. The deal he then fought an election to secure. That deal. Didn't read it. Didn't understand it. The tweet from the FT earlier saying No10 grew hostile over the summer as it understood the implications of the deal speaks volumes.
That isn't being pro EU. It's just pointing out the epic fail of not reading something before you sign it. And whilst Philip is absolutely right as he endlessly restates the sovereignty of the UK parliament allows it to change the law I have never disagreed with him - it is the wisdom of doing so with the glaringly obvious ramifications. Well, glaringly obvious to former Tory PMs and leaders and diplomats and civil servants but apparently not obvious to people who don't read things before they sign them.
Brexit happened. We left. It is what we do now that matters. Pointing out that the EU has a long stated position on its external border is not being pro EU. Pointing to the unsquareable circle of leaving the EEA and CU (neither of which are the EU) and maintaining our Good Friday agreement obligations is not pro EU. It is just reality. A reality that the PM appears not have have read.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
I hope you're right.
However, I'd point out that in "enclosed" situations, like the choir or the fishing vessel, you saw over 80% of people infected. This does not suggest that 75% or so of the population has natural immunity.
You don't need 75%. Social distancing will have dramatically reduced the herd immunity threshold from the originally projected level. Assume the number of people actually infected in the spring was greater than reported (many being recorded as new cases now, since the virus hangs around in the system) and a modest level of resistance from recent exposure to other coronaviruses, and you have a credible hypothesis
p.s. neither the infamous ski chalet nor the diamond princess got anywhere near 80%
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
Traffic jams indicate that less people are taking public transport, which is good in most German cities. While the restrictions are consiiderably relaxed compaerd to the end of March, we are still a very long way from "back to normal".
Just as an example, the winter semester at Berlin Unis will again be online except for courses which cannot be taught using distance learning, such as chemistry practicals.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
I hope you're right.
However, I'd point out that in "enclosed" situations, like the choir or the fishing vessel, you saw over 80% of people infected. This does not suggest that 75% or so of the population has natural immunity.
You don't need 75%. Social distancing will have dramatically reduced the herd immunity threshold from the originally projected level. Assume the number of people actually infected in the spring was greater than reported (many being recorded as new cases now, since the virus hangs around in the system) and a modest level of resistance from recent exposure to other coronaviruses, and you have a credible hypothesis
p.s. neither the infamous ski chalet nor the diamond princess got anywhere near 80%
Both of those are Situations where 80+% of people were infected.
The reason we don't see that in the real world is because people self isolate as cases rise. If there's no possibility of self isolation, then you get much higher levels of infection.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
The one with the big tourism industry.
There are very few tourists in France. Just look throughout Europe where mask wearing is mandatory, cases are climbing hugely.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
We realise you have a hard on for masks.
But the reality is that throughout this process, the empirical evidence for mask wearing has grown and grown. As in peer reviewed, scientific papers.
Now. You can choose to believe that Spain's spike in CV-19 cases was due to mask wearing rather than (say) re-opening nightclubs. But all that demonstrates is that you don't really care about the academic research, or indeed the data.
Does the data data support 7 year olds compulsorily wearing masks to school? Or people scowling at each other if they don’t wear them walking outside on the street?
Whether you like to admit it or not, there’s a social trade off to wearing face coverings. There are approx 2.8m deaths per year in the US and your paper cites 33k lives saved between June and Oct if 95% of people wear masks in public. So that’s saving excess deaths worth perhaps a week or two over the year?
Is that worth it really? Given the vast bulk of the lives saved are lives that would likely be lost this year or next anyway?
Is there evidence yet on what living in such a clinical germ free fashion is doing to immune systems, particularly of the young?
What if the Disease X of the next decade is a rhinovirus. It’s not impossible, until SARS coronaviruses were widely seen as a mere nuisance. But we’ve deprived a generation from acquiring natural immunity against the killer rhinovirus, because they spent their childhood avoiding all germs at all cost.
Not everyone that hates lockdowns, masks and the like is ignorant and thinks covid is caused by 5G, that it’s harmless or invented by Bill Gates. We are just looking with a slightly wider perspective at what we’re giving up now, and what we might be risking both socially, economically and medically in the years ahead.
I hate masks and lockdowns. They are bad economically, socially, and for mental and physical health. Masks impair communication. They are uncomfortable. I would love not to wear them.
And I completely accept that this is a series of trade offs.
The reality is that we accept a small number of temporary inconveniences to avoid a lot of people dying, a long lasting de facto lockdown (which is what's happened in Arizona, Georgia and Sweden), and large numbers of people with serious lingering issues.
#LongCovid is the final refuge of corona disaster mongers. I’m yet to see the compelling evidence that shows it justifies the ongoing restrictions. In fact the most recent studies indicate that more than half of the worst cases of those with lingering symptoms fully recover within 90 days. And this number might improve further.
I don’t wish to downplay that some younger people are going to have a rough time after being infected. There are some that will. Maybe even me. But I question whether this outweighs the aggregate health impact of continued lockdowns (both direct, and indirect from weaker long term economic growth).
Here's the thing: this is something that needs a reasoned debate, but it also needs data.
And the "longcovid" story is not a new one invented by fearmongers. SeanT was reporting on long term side effects back in February. I know a number of people who have not fully recovered from it.
My view is that we should not seek "zero Covid", but that we should seek to manage it at a low level until a vaccine is available. This means we should ban the highest risk activities (nightclubs, karaoke clubs, concerts, indoor sporting events), and require people to wear masks on things like public transport.
Doing that, I believe, is enough to keep R at a relatively low level, while avoiding it running completely out of control.
The other thing that I think you missed is that places without formal lockdowns still have de facto ones. Sweden's economic performance is Q2 - if the PMIs are correct - will be the worst in Europe, and its unemployment continues to climb. If people are scared, they don't go out. It may not be a formal lockdown, but people aren't going about their normal life - instead working from home has become de facto.
My business is in Arizona. It was one of the the first to reopen in the US (which given I'm in the business of selling auto insurance, and I want people to get out and drive and buy new cars). But Arizona has been a bit of a disaster zone. Not i terms of deaths, but in terms of economic activity. Shopping malls are still deserted. Restaraunts are still closing. Driving activity and new auto purchases are down worse than in California.
So I think you've created a bit of a false dichotemy - between places that are thriving because there are no lockdowns, and places that are suffering because they have them.
I'm not sure quarterly GDP is the best comparator, there are too many measurement variables for it to be truly useful. I think comparing Q1 GDP in 2021 to Q1 in 2020 is going to be the best measure of how a country has dealt with the crisis in economic terms. A lot of the current comparisons put the UK at the bottom of the international pile but that's mainly because of a quirk in ONS measurement which ascribes variable economic value to public sector output while most (all other) countries just take spending and add a multiplier. So when the NHS and schoolsshut down for two months the education and health sub sectors in services took a huge hit despite the teachers and doctors still getting paid and the money still being spent.
It's also why the UK recovery will be faster than everywhere else because the state sector is also "recovering" at the same time. See today's figures. The comparison of who is where a year later makes the most sense to me.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
I hope you're right.
However, I'd point out that in "enclosed" situations, like the choir or the fishing vessel, you saw over 80% of people infected. This does not suggest that 75% or so of the population has natural immunity.
You don't need 75%. Social distancing will have dramatically reduced the herd immunity threshold from the originally projected level. Assume the number of people actually infected in the spring was greater than reported (many being recorded as new cases now, since the virus hangs around in the system) and a modest level of resistance from recent exposure to other coronaviruses, and you have a credible hypothesis
p.s. neither the infamous ski chalet nor the diamond princess got anywhere near 80%
I think you are confusing herd immunity with keeping the contagion under control.
If you lift all restrictions when there is herd immunity, the contagion will remain under control.
If you lift all restrictions when herd immunity has not been reached, the contagion can easily spiral out of control.
Of course herd immunity is not a binary status, and 30% of the population having immunity is better than 1%.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
The one with the big tourism industry.
There are very few tourists in France. Just look throughout Europe where mask wearing is mandatory, cases are climbing hugely.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
We realise you have a hard on for masks.
But the reality is that throughout this process, the empirical evidence for mask wearing has grown and grown. As in peer reviewed, scientific papers.
Now. You can choose to believe that Spain's spike in CV-19 cases was due to mask wearing rather than (say) re-opening nightclubs. But all that demonstrates is that you don't really care about the academic research, or indeed the data.
Does the data data support 7 year olds compulsorily wearing masks to school? Or people scowling at each other if they don’t wear them walking outside on the street?
Whether you like to admit it or not, there’s a social trade off to wearing face coverings. There are approx 2.8m deaths per year in the US and your paper cites 33k lives saved between June and Oct if 95% of people wear masks in public. So that’s saving excess deaths worth perhaps a week or two over the year?
Is that worth it really? Given the vast bulk of the lives saved are lives that would likely be lost this year or next anyway?
Is there evidence yet on what living in such a clinical germ free fashion is doing to immune systems, particularly of the young?
What if the Disease X of the next decade is a rhinovirus. It’s not impossible, until SARS coronaviruses were widely seen as a mere nuisance. But we’ve deprived a generation from acquiring natural immunity against the killer rhinovirus, because they spent their childhood avoiding all germs at all cost.
Not everyone that hates lockdowns, masks and the like is ignorant and thinks covid is caused by 5G, that it’s harmless or invented by Bill Gates. We are just looking with a slightly wider perspective at what we’re giving up now, and what we might be risking both socially, economically and medically in the years ahead.
I hate masks and lockdowns. They are bad economically, socially, and for mental and physical health. Masks impair communication. They are uncomfortable. I would love not to wear them.
And I completely accept that this is a series of trade offs.
The reality is that we accept a small number of temporary inconveniences to avoid a lot of people dying, a long lasting de facto lockdown (which is what's happened in Arizona, Georgia and Sweden), and large numbers of people with serious lingering issues.
#LongCovid is the final refuge of corona disaster mongers. I’m yet to see the compelling evidence that shows it justifies the ongoing restrictions. In fact the most recent studies indicate that more than half of the worst cases of those with lingering symptoms fully recover within 90 days. And this number might improve further.
I don’t wish to downplay that some younger people are going to have a rough time after being infected. There are some that will. Maybe even me. But I question whether this outweighs the aggregate health impact of continued lockdowns (both direct, and indirect from weaker long term economic growth).
Here's the thing: this is something that needs a reasoned debate, but it also needs data.
And the "longcovid" story is not a new one invented by fearmongers. SeanT was reporting on long term side effects back in February. I know a number of people who have not fully recovered from it.
My view is that we should not seek "zero Covid", but that we should seek to manage it at a low level until a vaccine is available. This means we should ban the highest risk activities (nightclubs, karaoke clubs, concerts, indoor sporting events), and require people to wear masks on things like public transport.
Doing that, I believe, is enough to keep R at a relatively low level, while avoiding it running completely out of control.
The other thing that I think you missed is that places without formal lockdowns still have de facto ones. Sweden's economic performance is Q2 - if the PMIs are correct - will be the worst in Europe, and its unemployment continues to climb. If people are scared, they don't go out. It may not be a formal lockdown, but people aren't going about their normal life - instead working from home has become de facto.
My business is in Arizona. It was one of the the first to reopen in the US (which given I'm in the business of selling auto insurance, and I want people to get out and drive and buy new cars). But Arizona has been a bit of a disaster zone. Not i terms of deaths, but in terms of economic activity. Shopping malls are still deserted. Restaraunts are still closing. Driving activity and new auto purchases are down worse than in California.
So I think you've created a bit of a false dichotemy - between places that are thriving because there are no lockdowns, and places that are suffering because they have them.
I don’t disagree with too much of your recommended panacea. But that’s not what’s happening in the uk. My son’s school gave a vote to teachers on the use of masks by kids. Good way of keeping them onboard and into work. But they came up with a policy of enforced mask wearing by all kids older than 7, at all times unless in the classroom. There’s not much evidence kids that age can even spread it, much less that they should be wearing masks even outside as they wait for class.
It’s but one example of how the fear messaging from the govt is mixing with British health & safety / officialdom culture and coming up with quite perverse outcomes, where the cure is without doubt causing more damage over the long term than the ailment.
Sensible risk segmentation and freedom of choice is all I ask for.
MoM GDP up 6.6%, UK economy now 11.7% smaller than in Feb. Recovery looks extremely V shaped. We're on track to recover around 95% of GDP before the end of the year, even with this new lockdown.
We’ve just made over 10% of our workforce redundant. We are not alone. Those jobs aren’t coming back any time soon. It also looks like there’s a No Deal to throw into the equation now. That final 5% will be very tough to close and in the real world it will not feel like a recovery, especially because most did not feel the effects of the collapse.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
The one with the big tourism industry.
There are very few tourists in France. Just look throughout Europe where mask wearing is mandatory, cases are climbing hugely.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
We realise you have a hard on for masks.
But the reality is that throughout this process, the empirical evidence for mask wearing has grown and grown. As in peer reviewed, scientific papers.
Now. You can choose to believe that Spain's spike in CV-19 cases was due to mask wearing rather than (say) re-opening nightclubs. But all that demonstrates is that you don't really care about the academic research, or indeed the data.
Does the data data support 7 year olds compulsorily wearing masks to school? Or people scowling at each other if they don’t wear them walking outside on the street?
Whether you like to admit it or not, there’s a social trade off to wearing face coverings. There are approx 2.8m deaths per year in the US and your paper cites 33k lives saved between June and Oct if 95% of people wear masks in public. So that’s saving excess deaths worth perhaps a week or two over the year?
Is that worth it really? Given the vast bulk of the lives saved are lives that would likely be lost this year or next anyway?
Is there evidence yet on what living in such a clinical germ free fashion is doing to immune systems, particularly of the young?
What if the Disease X of the next decade is a rhinovirus. It’s not impossible, until SARS coronaviruses were widely seen as a mere nuisance. But we’ve deprived a generation from acquiring natural immunity against the killer rhinovirus, because they spent their childhood avoiding all germs at all cost.
Not everyone that hates lockdowns, masks and the like is ignorant and thinks covid is caused by 5G, that it’s harmless or invented by Bill Gates. We are just looking with a slightly wider perspective at what we’re giving up now, and what we might be risking both socially, economically and medically in the years ahead.
I hate masks and lockdowns. They are bad economically, socially, and for mental and physical health. Masks impair communication. They are uncomfortable. I would love not to wear them.
And I completely accept that this is a series of trade offs.
The reality is that we accept a small number of temporary inconveniences to avoid a lot of people dying, a long lasting de facto lockdown (which is what's happened in Arizona, Georgia and Sweden), and large numbers of people with serious lingering issues.
#LongCovid is the final refuge of corona disaster mongers. I’m yet to see the compelling evidence that shows it justifies the ongoing restrictions. In fact the most recent studies indicate that more than half of the worst cases of those with lingering symptoms fully recover within 90 days. And this number might improve further.
I don’t wish to downplay that some younger people are going to have a rough time after being infected. There are some that will. Maybe even me. But I question whether this outweighs the aggregate health impact of continued lockdowns (both direct, and indirect from weaker long term economic growth).
Here's the thing: this is something that needs a reasoned debate, but it also needs data.
And the "longcovid" story is not a new one invented by fearmongers. SeanT was reporting on long term side effects back in February. I know a number of people who have not fully recovered from it.
My view is that we should not seek "zero Covid", but that we should seek to manage it at a low level until a vaccine is available. This means we should ban the highest risk activities (nightclubs, karaoke clubs, concerts, indoor sporting events), and require people to wear masks on things like public transport.
Doing that, I believe, is enough to keep R at a relatively low level, while avoiding it running completely out of control.
The other thing that I think you missed is that places without formal lockdowns still have de facto ones. Sweden's economic performance is Q2 - if the PMIs are correct - will be the worst in Europe, and its unemployment continues to climb. If people are scared, they don't go out. It may not be a formal lockdown, but people aren't going about their normal life - instead working from home has become de facto.
My business is in Arizona. It was one of the the first to reopen in the US (which given I'm in the business of selling auto insurance, and I want people to get out and drive and buy new cars). But Arizona has been a bit of a disaster zone. Not i terms of deaths, but in terms of economic activity. Shopping malls are still deserted. Restaraunts are still closing. Driving activity and new auto purchases are down worse than in California.
So I think you've created a bit of a false dichotemy - between places that are thriving because there are no lockdowns, and places that are suffering because they have them.
I don’t disagree with too much of your recommended panacea. But that’s not what’s happening in the uk. My son’s school gave a vote to teachers on the use of masks by kids. Good way of keeping them onboard and into work. But they came up with a policy of enforced mask wearing by all kids older than 7, at all times unless in the classroom. There’s not much evidence kids that age can even spread it, much less that they should be wearing masks even outside as they wait for class.
It’s but one example of how the fear messaging from the govt is mixing with British health & safety / officialdom culture and coming up with quite perverse outcomes, where the cure is without doubt causing more damage over the long term than the ailment.
Sensible risk segmentation and freedom of choice is all I ask for.
Yup. 1 week into Mrs RP's full time teaching assistant gig and she's absolutely clear that whilst the school are doing their best with mitigation measures you simply can't distance a school full of kids when you don't have enough space.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
The one with the big tourism industry.
There are very few tourists in France. Just look throughout Europe where mask wearing is mandatory, cases are climbing hugely.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
We realise you have a hard on for masks.
But the reality is that throughout this process, the empirical evidence for mask wearing has grown and grown. As in peer reviewed, scientific papers.
Now. You can choose to believe that Spain's spike in CV-19 cases was due to mask wearing rather than (say) re-opening nightclubs. But all that demonstrates is that you don't really care about the academic research, or indeed the data.
Does the data data support 7 year olds compulsorily wearing masks to school? Or people scowling at each other if they don’t wear them walking outside on the street?
Whether you like to admit it or not, there’s a social trade off to wearing face coverings. There are approx 2.8m deaths per year in the US and your paper cites 33k lives saved between June and Oct if 95% of people wear masks in public. So that’s saving excess deaths worth perhaps a week or two over the year?
Is that worth it really? Given the vast bulk of the lives saved are lives that would likely be lost this year or next anyway?
Is there evidence yet on what living in such a clinical germ free fashion is doing to immune systems, particularly of the young?
What if the Disease X of the next decade is a rhinovirus. It’s not impossible, until SARS coronaviruses were widely seen as a mere nuisance. But we’ve deprived a generation from acquiring natural immunity against the killer rhinovirus, because they spent their childhood avoiding all germs at all cost.
Not everyone that hates lockdowns, masks and the like is ignorant and thinks covid is caused by 5G, that it’s harmless or invented by Bill Gates. We are just looking with a slightly wider perspective at what we’re giving up now, and what we might be risking both socially, economically and medically in the years ahead.
I hate masks and lockdowns. They are bad economically, socially, and for mental and physical health. Masks impair communication. They are uncomfortable. I would love not to wear them.
And I completely accept that this is a series of trade offs.
The reality is that we accept a small number of temporary inconveniences to avoid a lot of people dying, a long lasting de facto lockdown (which is what's happened in Arizona, Georgia and Sweden), and large numbers of people with serious lingering issues.
#LongCovid is the final refuge of corona disaster mongers. I’m yet to see the compelling evidence that shows it justifies the ongoing restrictions. In fact the most recent studies indicate that more than half of the worst cases of those with lingering symptoms fully recover within 90 days. And this number might improve further.
I don’t wish to downplay that some younger people are going to have a rough time after being infected. There are some that will. Maybe even me. But I question whether this outweighs the aggregate health impact of continued lockdowns (both direct, and indirect from weaker long term economic growth).
Here's the thing: this is something that needs a reasoned debate, but it also needs data.
And the "longcovid" story is not a new one invented by fearmongers. SeanT was reporting on long term side effects back in February. I know a number of people who have not fully recovered from it.
My view is that we should not seek "zero Covid", but that we should seek to manage it at a low level until a vaccine is available. This means we should ban the highest risk activities (nightclubs, karaoke clubs, concerts, indoor sporting events), and require people to wear masks on things like public transport.
Doing that, I believe, is enough to keep R at a relatively low level, while avoiding it running completely out of control.
The other thing that I think you missed is that places without formal lockdowns still have de facto ones. Sweden's economic performance is Q2 - if the PMIs are correct - will be the worst in Europe, and its unemployment continues to climb. If people are scared, they don't go out. It may not be a formal lockdown, but people aren't going about their normal life - instead working from home has become de facto.
My business is in Arizona. It was one of the the first to reopen in the US (which given I'm in the business of selling auto insurance, and I want people to get out and drive and buy new cars). But Arizona has been a bit of a disaster zone. Not i terms of deaths, but in terms of economic activity. Shopping malls are still deserted. Restaraunts are still closing. Driving activity and new auto purchases are down worse than in California.
So I think you've created a bit of a false dichotemy - between places that are thriving because there are no lockdowns, and places that are suffering because they have them.
I don’t disagree with too much of your recommended panacea. But that’s not what’s happening in the uk. My son’s school gave a vote to teachers on the use of masks by kids. Good way of keeping them onboard and into work. But they came up with a policy of enforced mask wearing by all kids older than 7, at all times unless in the classroom. There’s not much evidence kids that age can even spread it, much less that they should be wearing masks even outside as they wait for class.
It’s but one example of how the fear messaging from the govt is mixing with British health & safety / officialdom culture and coming up with quite perverse outcomes, where the cure is without doubt causing more damage over the long term than the ailment.
Sensible risk segmentation and freedom of choice is all I ask for.
That link doesn’t work. But there’s plenty else to say that there is no conclusive evidence that asymptomatic under 12s are effective spreaders. One has to wonder why.
It’s all a bit like your long COVID fear. To what extent should we take precautions with sometimes quite profound long term consequences, to cure a problem set for which we do not have sufficient data to even come close to defining the scale of the problem?
My biggest fear right now is the polling for just how many support laws banning family gatherings bigger than 6, curfews, local “enforcement officers” and the like. The genie is out the bottle and there for all to see now - despite all the social and educational advances of the last century, all you need to do to sleep walk a population into authoritarianism is just inject a (very small) bit of fear into their lives.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
Biden is favoured to win the election 75% of the time - that's up from 69% last time I looked.
The math is blissfully simple. He should be 3/1 on. You can back him at 5/4 on (the Party) or 6/5 on (the man himself). You won't often see better betting opportunities than that.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
The one with the big tourism industry.
There are very few tourists in France. Just look throughout Europe where mask wearing is mandatory, cases are climbing hugely.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
We realise you have a hard on for masks.
But the reality is that throughout this process, the empirical evidence for mask wearing has grown and grown. As in peer reviewed, scientific papers.
Now. You can choose to believe that Spain's spike in CV-19 cases was due to mask wearing rather than (say) re-opening nightclubs. But all that demonstrates is that you don't really care about the academic research, or indeed the data.
Does the data data support 7 year olds compulsorily wearing masks to school? Or people scowling at each other if they don’t wear them walking outside on the street?
Whether you like to admit it or not, there’s a social trade off to wearing face coverings. There are approx 2.8m deaths per year in the US and your paper cites 33k lives saved between June and Oct if 95% of people wear masks in public. So that’s saving excess deaths worth perhaps a week or two over the year?
Is that worth it really? Given the vast bulk of the lives saved are lives that would likely be lost this year or next anyway?
Is there evidence yet on what living in such a clinical germ free fashion is doing to immune systems, particularly of the young?
What if the Disease X of the next decade is a rhinovirus. It’s not impossible, until SARS coronaviruses were widely seen as a mere nuisance. But we’ve deprived a generation from acquiring natural immunity against the killer rhinovirus, because they spent their childhood avoiding all germs at all cost.
Not everyone that hates lockdowns, masks and the like is ignorant and thinks covid is caused by 5G, that it’s harmless or invented by Bill Gates. We are just looking with a slightly wider perspective at what we’re giving up now, and what we might be risking both socially, economically and medically in the years ahead.
I hate masks and lockdowns. They are bad economically, socially, and for mental and physical health. Masks impair communication. They are uncomfortable. I would love not to wear them.
And I completely accept that this is a series of trade offs.
The reality is that we accept a small number of temporary inconveniences to avoid a lot of people dying, a long lasting de facto lockdown (which is what's happened in Arizona, Georgia and Sweden), and large numbers of people with serious lingering issues.
#LongCovid is the final refuge of corona disaster mongers. I’m yet to see the compelling evidence that shows it justifies the ongoing restrictions. In fact the most recent studies indicate that more than half of the worst cases of those with lingering symptoms fully recover within 90 days. And this number might improve further.
I don’t wish to downplay that some younger people are going to have a rough time after being infected. There are some that will. Maybe even me. But I question whether this outweighs the aggregate health impact of continued lockdowns (both direct, and indirect from weaker long term economic growth).
Here's the thing: this is something that needs a reasoned debate, but it also needs data.
And the "longcovid" story is not a new one invented by fearmongers. SeanT was reporting on long term side effects back in February. I know a number of people who have not fully recovered from it.
My view is that we should not seek "zero Covid", but that we should seek to manage it at a low level until a vaccine is available. This means we should ban the highest risk activities (nightclubs, karaoke clubs, concerts, indoor sporting events), and require people to wear masks on things like public transport.
Doing that, I believe, is enough to keep R at a relatively low level, while avoiding it running completely out of control.
The other thing that I think you missed is that places without formal lockdowns still have de facto ones. Sweden's economic performance is Q2 - if the PMIs are correct - will be the worst in Europe, and its unemployment continues to climb. If people are scared, they don't go out. It may not be a formal lockdown, but people aren't going about their normal life - instead working from home has become de facto.
My business is in Arizona. It was one of the the first to reopen in the US (which given I'm in the business of selling auto insurance, and I want people to get out and drive and buy new cars). But Arizona has been a bit of a disaster zone. Not i terms of deaths, but in terms of economic activity. Shopping malls are still deserted. Restaraunts are still closing. Driving activity and new auto purchases are down worse than in California.
So I think you've created a bit of a false dichotemy - between places that are thriving because there are no lockdowns, and places that are suffering because they have them.
I don’t disagree with too much of your recommended panacea. But that’s not what’s happening in the uk. My son’s school gave a vote to teachers on the use of masks by kids. Good way of keeping them onboard and into work. But they came up with a policy of enforced mask wearing by all kids older than 7, at all times unless in the classroom. There’s not much evidence kids that age can even spread it, much less that they should be wearing masks even outside as they wait for class.
It’s but one example of how the fear messaging from the govt is mixing with British health & safety / officialdom culture and coming up with quite perverse outcomes, where the cure is without doubt causing more damage over the long term than the ailment.
Sensible risk segmentation and freedom of choice is all I ask for.
That link doesn’t work. But there’s plenty else to say that there is no conclusive evidence that asymptomatic under 12s are effective spreaders. One has to wonder why.
It’s all a bit like your long COVID fear. To what extent should we take precautions with sometimes quite profound long term consequences, to cure a problem set for which we do not have sufficient data to even come close to defining the scale of the problem?
My biggest fear right now is the polling for just how many support laws banning family gatherings bigger than 6, curfews, local “enforcement officers” and the like. The genie is out the bottle and there for all to see now - despite all the social and educational advances of the last century, all you need to do to sleep walk a population into authoritarianism is just inject a (very small) bit of fear into their lives.
I wouldn't minimise "long covid" as self limiting. We simply do not know yet how much of the microvascular damage is reversible. Not everyone gets the vascular features, and generally lung micro infarcts do well, cerebral, renal and neurological much less so.
We have only known of this virus for some months and plenty yet to learn. Long term damage from SARS is quite common, 40% had long term depression and/or chronic fatigue 4 years post recovery in one Hong Kong study.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
I hope you're right.
However, I'd point out that in "enclosed" situations, like the choir or the fishing vessel, you saw over 80% of people infected. This does not suggest that 75% or so of the population has natural immunity.
You don't need 75%. Social distancing will have dramatically reduced the herd immunity threshold from the originally projected level. Assume the number of people actually infected in the spring was greater than reported (many being recorded as new cases now, since the virus hangs around in the system) and a modest level of resistance from recent exposure to other coronaviruses, and you have a credible hypothesis
p.s. neither the infamous ski chalet nor the diamond princess got anywhere near 80%
It seems to me that some folks are immune whilst others are 'resistant' and somehow the combination serves to protect lots of folks in lots of situations such as Diamond Princess, New York, and London.
However, under some close contact situations the 'resistance' seems to break down, such as meat processing plants and choir practice, where the majority have become infected.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
Question - at what point does that office environment change from a workplace where more than 6 people is legal to a place where more than 6 people being there is illegal?
Yup. 1 week into Mrs RP's full time teaching assistant gig and she's absolutely clear that whilst the school are doing their best with mitigation measures you simply can't distance a school full of kids when you don't have enough space.
We (next town along) are already seeing things fall apart - children are being sent home with symptoms only to discover that the nearest available test is over 90 miles away (it's now Lancashire or Nottingham, none in Yorkshire or the North East).
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
The one with the big tourism industry.
There are very few tourists in France. Just look throughout Europe where mask wearing is mandatory, cases are climbing hugely.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
We realise you have a hard on for masks.
But the reality is that throughout this process, the empirical evidence for mask wearing has grown and grown. As in peer reviewed, scientific papers.
Now. You can choose to believe that Spain's spike in CV-19 cases was due to mask wearing rather than (say) re-opening nightclubs. But all that demonstrates is that you don't really care about the academic research, or indeed the data.
Does the data data support 7 year olds compulsorily wearing masks to school? Or people scowling at each other if they don’t wear them walking outside on the street?
Whether you like to admit it or not, there’s a social trade off to wearing face coverings. There are approx 2.8m deaths per year in the US and your paper cites 33k lives saved between June and Oct if 95% of people wear masks in public. So that’s saving excess deaths worth perhaps a week or two over the year?
Is that worth it really? Given the vast bulk of the lives saved are lives that would likely be lost this year or next anyway?
Is there evidence yet on what living in such a clinical germ free fashion is doing to immune systems, particularly of the young?
What if the Disease X of the next decade is a rhinovirus. It’s not impossible, until SARS coronaviruses were widely seen as a mere nuisance. But we’ve deprived a generation from acquiring natural immunity against the killer rhinovirus, because they spent their childhood avoiding all germs at all cost.
Not everyone that hates lockdowns, masks and the like is ignorant and thinks covid is caused by 5G, that it’s harmless or invented by Bill Gates. We are just looking with a slightly wider perspective at what we’re giving up now, and what we might be risking both socially, economically and medically in the years ahead.
I hate masks and lockdowns. They are bad economically, socially, and for mental and physical health. Masks impair communication. They are uncomfortable. I would love not to wear them.
And I completely accept that this is a series of trade offs.
The reality is that we accept a small number of temporary inconveniences to avoid a lot of people dying, a long lasting de facto lockdown (which is what's happened in Arizona, Georgia and Sweden), and large numbers of people with serious lingering issues.
#LongCovid is the final refuge of corona disaster mongers. I’m yet to see the compelling evidence that shows it justifies the ongoing restrictions. In fact the most recent studies indicate that more than half of the worst cases of those with lingering symptoms fully recover within 90 days. And this number might improve further.
I don’t wish to downplay that some younger people are going to have a rough time after being infected. There are some that will. Maybe even me. But I question whether this outweighs the aggregate health impact of continued lockdowns (both direct, and indirect from weaker long term economic growth).
Here's the thing: this is something that needs a reasoned debate, but it also needs data.
And the "longcovid" story is not a new one invented by fearmongers. SeanT was reporting on long term side effects back in February. I know a number of people who have not fully recovered from it.
My view is that we should not seek "zero Covid", but that we should seek to manage it at a low level until a vaccine is available. This means we should ban the highest risk activities (nightclubs, karaoke clubs, concerts, indoor sporting events), and require people to wear masks on things like public transport.
Doing that, I believe, is enough to keep R at a relatively low level, while avoiding it running completely out of control.
The other thing that I think you missed is that places without formal lockdowns still have de facto ones. Sweden's economic performance is Q2 - if the PMIs are correct - will be the worst in Europe, and its unemployment continues to climb. If people are scared, they don't go out. It may not be a formal lockdown, but people aren't going about their normal life - instead working from home has become de facto.
My business is in Arizona. It was one of the the first to reopen in the US (which given I'm in the business of selling auto insurance, and I want people to get out and drive and buy new cars). But Arizona has been a bit of a disaster zone. Not i terms of deaths, but in terms of economic activity. Shopping malls are still deserted. Restaraunts are still closing. Driving activity and new auto purchases are down worse than in California.
So I think you've created a bit of a false dichotemy - between places that are thriving because there are no lockdowns, and places that are suffering because they have them.
I don’t disagree with too much of your recommended panacea. But that’s not what’s happening in the uk. My son’s school gave a vote to teachers on the use of masks by kids. Good way of keeping them onboard and into work. But they came up with a policy of enforced mask wearing by all kids older than 7, at all times unless in the classroom. There’s not much evidence kids that age can even spread it, much less that they should be wearing masks even outside as they wait for class.
It’s but one example of how the fear messaging from the govt is mixing with British health & safety / officialdom culture and coming up with quite perverse outcomes, where the cure is without doubt causing more damage over the long term than the ailment.
Sensible risk segmentation and freedom of choice is all I ask for.
That link doesn’t work. But there’s plenty else to say that there is no conclusive evidence that asymptomatic under 12s are effective spreaders. One has to wonder why.
It’s all a bit like your long COVID fear. To what extent should we take precautions with sometimes quite profound long term consequences, to cure a problem set for which we do not have sufficient data to even come close to defining the scale of the problem?
My biggest fear right now is the polling for just how many support laws banning family gatherings bigger than 6, curfews, local “enforcement officers” and the like. The genie is out the bottle and there for all to see now - despite all the social and educational advances of the last century, all you need to do to sleep walk a population into authoritarianism is just inject a (very small) bit of fear into their lives.
I wouldn't minimise "long covid" as self limiting. We simply do not know yet how much of the microvascular damage is reversible. Not everyone gets the vascular features, and generally lung micro infarcts do well, cerebral, renal and neurological much less so.
We have only known of this virus for some months and plenty yet to learn. Long term damage from SARS is quite common, 40% had long term depression and/or chronic fatigue 4 years post recovery in one Hong Kong study.
Only a handful of people are known to have succumbed to Covid in my rural community, but they are all shells, compared to what they used to be.
An interesting piece from the CDC. I can only speculate as to why our own world beating Track and Trace system has not published something on the issue. I am tempted by an FoI request.
A key point here is that the survey didn’t differentiate between indoor and outdoor dining. Indoor dining - sitting down in an enclosed air conditioned space with lots of others for an extended period of time - has obvious similarities with other known super spreading hotspots like airplanes and cruise ships. Dining outdoors much less so.
Plenty of outdoor crowding causes the spread to spike: funerals, football matches, Cheltenham festival etc.
Just as dangerous and I won't go near either indoor or outdoor dining.
I think you will find most funerals are indoors, wholly or partly.
There is a massive difference between being packed into a sporting crowd of people all shouting at the top of their voice, and a quiet dinner at the edge of the square.
If you read the article you will see that the study didn't gather this key data
Funerals are a significant source of outbreaks in Spain, I assume though it has more to do with physical greetings of long lost relatives who can’t resist hugging each other.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
I get where you are coming from Big G but if they have spent all day together in the office it's hard to see why they can't have a beer together there. The problem with the new rules is that they give the impression that it's OK to risk your health as long as it involves enriching the bosses, but not if you just want to enjoy yourself. It feels like a very Tory response to a public health crisis.
FFS, the different countries in the UK are still playing silly buggers. Scotland an under 12 doesn't count for the 6, so Wales goes under 11s...
Its to appease all the "I can't see my grandkids" whingers.
I’m not sure that’s the point of the post - which is to highlight that all U.K. administrations are basically following the same policy prescriptions whilst having nuanced differences that clearly have no scientific basis just to give the impression that they are taking their own decisions.
Bozo is doing his best to minimise the differences, by following Scotland
And murmurings in the press this morning suggest that we may be about to rapidly tweak our rules again and... follow Scotland. On the (probably reasonable!) grounds that 1) the measures are targeted mainly against young adults and 2) given that young children (if they represent a material risk vector) are probably spreading the thing like wildfire in schools anyway there's no real sensible reason to restrict them in homes - just on pure assessment of relative risk.
Not that i think the criticism that "grandparents are being prevented from seeing their grandchildren" is particularly valid anyway. Whilst there are some limitations because there is simply not enough weekends in the year, realistically you've got to be getting to 4 children to a parent before it doesn't become possible. Anything less and you can visit with one parent and 3 kids. What you can't have is big family gatherings across multiple household.
We are likely to be on No Deal WTO terms by January, agreed.
However ironically free trade Leavers may find their best hope of reaching their EEA promised land lies with a PM Starmer after the next election who would surely accept an EEA style trade deal with the EU, Boris' coalition would see that as a betrayal so the Tories are now committed to hard Brexit for a generation
If the will of the people turns towards a less extreme relationship with the EU that is what the next government will strive for. Cummings master plan can be unpicked quite quickly once power has been transferred to the grown-ups.
Therein lies the beauty of Parliamentary sovereignty. If you don't like something, you can vote in a new lot and they can change the law.
Question is, if you don't like an EU law, how do you change it? Who do you vote for?
The democratic deficit at the heart of the EU hasn't gone away.
You can't vote in a new lot, because you only control one MP. The best you can do is vote in a new representative for your particular area, and hope that other people in other areas also vote in like-minded people, and they get together and change the law.
This also works for EU laws.
It does not.
In the UK with have UK parties debating the UK issues on our UK news channels and getting watched and then voted on by the voters. We also have a good voting system that ensures every area of the UK is represented by their most popular party in that area. Our MPs get together and can pass, change or repeal any law. Change of government happens at the ballot box.
In the EU none of that is true. There are no real EU parties - yes there exists EU labels that badge on existing national parties but its not the same thing. The EU news isn't debated on EU news channels. They also have a dodgy voting system that takes power away from the voters and towards post-election political horsetrading. MEPs lack the power to pass, change or repeal any law they want to.
OK, let's accept for the sake of argument that the French Socialists have nothing to do with the Spanish Socialists and the Dutch Liberals have nothing to do with the German Liberals.
Do voters in Northern Ireland not have a democracy?
They do, though they're definitely unique to the rest of the UK.
But if the voters of Northern Ireland dislike any UK law, lets say the NI Protocol of the EU Withdrawal Act as an example, and then the MPs representing Northern Ireland constituencies work with a majority of MPs across the UK and vote to repeal the law then the law is gone. That is democracy.
If the voters of Northern Ireland want a new law and then convince a majority of MPs from across the country to back it then it becomes the law. That is democracy.
Does the same thing happen with MEPs? If a majority of MEPs vote to remove a law does it go? Can an MEP introduce a proposed new law and see it become the law because a majority of MEPs backed it?
No, because law changes aren't simply decided by the Parliament. The European Parliament is not sovereign like ours is.
How do you feel about the Internal Market bill giving Ministers the power to change/override U.K. law without reference to Parliament and without possibility of judicial review?
It is subject to UK law and if Parliament isn't happy with it then Parliament can override it and take the power it has given to Ministers back off them.
That is highly debatable. Perhaps some legal experts might like to comment. Once Parliament has given powers to ministers to act unilaterally it becomes very difficult to take them back. Not least because the Executive controls the legislative timetable and would have no interest in allowing it.
And without the possibility of judicial review there is also no ability for the courts to rule that ministers are acting contrary to Parliaments intention when ceding the powers.
It’s an Enabling Act in all but name. A massive power grab to the detriment of Parliament under the cover of “delivering Brexit and safeguarding the Union”.
Just a reminder, Philip claims to be a libertarian...
Parliament is sovereign. That runs through every part of our Constitution. If Parliament gives power to ministers it can take it back when it want. There are no legal problems at all. In theory...
The problem as we saw time and again last year is that the executive controls the parliamentary timetable. If the government doesn't want it's powers taken away then it merely has to not schedule parliamentary time to vote on it. Even with a minority government and an activist speaker MPs were only able to take control of the timetable in a very limited way. Given the attitude of the current speaker and the Government's majority I don't see that happening any time soon.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
Question - at what point does that office environment change from a workplace where more than 6 people is legal to a place where more than 6 people being there is illegal?
The difference is that office environments are required to implement safeguarding and social distancing measures.
However, it does not alter the fact that acting selfishly and irresponsibly will just see covid continue to devastate the health and economy of our nation
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I have been on and off here since 2005. I can't see much difference in opinion tbh. Unpopular incumbency will be dealt the harshest hand, but isn't that always the way?
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
The one with the big tourism industry.
There are very few tourists in France. Just look throughout Europe where mask wearing is mandatory, cases are climbing hugely.
How anyone can defend mask wearing now is beyond me. Countries need to get back to social distancing, people feel too protected in masks and don’t distance.
There was a reason that the WHO didn’t recommend masks at the start of the pandemic. They don’t work because wearing one changes peoples behaviour and as they only offer very limited protection infections are rising. Forget laboratory tests of masks, look at the real world evidence. Sweden no masks very low cases, everywhere else with masks very high cases.
We realise you have a hard on for masks.
But the reality is that throughout this process, the empirical evidence for mask wearing has grown and grown. As in peer reviewed, scientific papers.
Now. You can choose to believe that Spain's spike in CV-19 cases was due to mask wearing rather than (say) re-opening nightclubs. But all that demonstrates is that you don't really care about the academic research, or indeed the data.
Does the data data support 7 year olds compulsorily wearing masks to school? Or people scowling at each other if they don’t wear them walking outside on the street?
Whether you like to admit it or not, there’s a social trade off to wearing face coverings. There are approx 2.8m deaths per year in the US and your paper cites 33k lives saved between June and Oct if 95% of people wear masks in public. So that’s saving excess deaths worth perhaps a week or two over the year?
Is that worth it really? Given the vast bulk of the lives saved are lives that would likely be lost this year or next anyway?
Is there evidence yet on what living in such a clinical germ free fashion is doing to immune systems, particularly of the young?
What if the Disease X of the next decade is a rhinovirus. It’s not impossible, until SARS coronaviruses were widely seen as a mere nuisance. But we’ve deprived a generation from acquiring natural immunity against the killer rhinovirus, because they spent their childhood avoiding all germs at all cost.
Not everyone that hates lockdowns, masks and the like is ignorant and thinks covid is caused by 5G, that it’s harmless or invented by Bill Gates. We are just looking with a slightly wider perspective at what we’re giving up now, and what we might be risking both socially, economically and medically in the years ahead.
I hate masks and lockdowns. They are bad economically, socially, and for mental and physical health. Masks impair communication. They are uncomfortable. I would love not to wear them.
And I completely accept that this is a series of trade offs.
The reality is that we accept a small number of temporary inconveniences to avoid a lot of people dying, a long lasting de facto lockdown (which is what's happened in Arizona, Georgia and Sweden), and large numbers of people with serious lingering issues.
#LongCovid is the final refuge of corona disaster mongers. I’m yet to see the compelling evidence that shows it justifies the ongoing restrictions. In fact the most recent studies indicate that more than half of the worst cases of those with lingering symptoms fully recover within 90 days. And this number might improve further.
I don’t wish to downplay that some younger people are going to have a rough time after being infected. There are some that will. Maybe even me. But I question whether this outweighs the aggregate health impact of continued lockdowns (both direct, and indirect from weaker long term economic growth).
Here's the thing: this is something that needs a reasoned debate, but it also needs data.
And the "longcovid" story is not a new one invented by fearmongers. SeanT was reporting on long term side effects back in February. I know a number of people who have not fully recovered from it.
My view is that we should not seek "zero Covid", but that we should seek to manage it at a low level until a vaccine is available. This means we should ban the highest risk activities (nightclubs, karaoke clubs, concerts, indoor sporting events), and require people to wear masks on things like public transport.
Doing that, I believe, is enough to keep R at a relatively low level, while avoiding it running completely out of control.
The other thing that I think you missed is that places without formal lockdowns still have de facto ones. Sweden's economic performance is Q2 - if the PMIs are correct - will be the worst in Europe, and its unemployment continues to climb. If people are scared, they don't go out. It may not be a formal lockdown, but people aren't going about their normal life - instead working from home has become de facto.
My business is in Arizona. It was one of the the first to reopen in the US (which given I'm in the business of selling auto insurance, and I want people to get out and drive and buy new cars). But Arizona has been a bit of a disaster zone. Not i terms of deaths, but in terms of economic activity. Shopping malls are still deserted. Restaraunts are still closing. Driving activity and new auto purchases are down worse than in California.
So I think you've created a bit of a false dichotemy - between places that are thriving because there are no lockdowns, and places that are suffering because they have them.
I don’t disagree with too much of your recommended panacea. But that’s not what’s happening in the uk. My son’s school gave a vote to teachers on the use of masks by kids. Good way of keeping them onboard and into work. But they came up with a policy of enforced mask wearing by all kids older than 7, at all times unless in the classroom. There’s not much evidence kids that age can even spread it, much less that they should be wearing masks even outside as they wait for class.
It’s but one example of how the fear messaging from the govt is mixing with British health & safety / officialdom culture and coming up with quite perverse outcomes, where the cure is without doubt causing more damage over the long term than the ailment.
Sensible risk segmentation and freedom of choice is all I ask for.
That link doesn’t work. But there’s plenty else to say that there is no conclusive evidence that asymptomatic under 12s are effective spreaders. One has to wonder why.
It’s all a bit like your long COVID fear. To what extent should we take precautions with sometimes quite profound long term consequences, to cure a problem set for which we do not have sufficient data to even come close to defining the scale of the problem?
My biggest fear right now is the polling for just how many support laws banning family gatherings bigger than 6, curfews, local “enforcement officers” and the like. The genie is out the bottle and there for all to see now - despite all the social and educational advances of the last century, all you need to do to sleep walk a population into authoritarianism is just inject a (very small) bit of fear into their lives.
The answer is that we run a test. We divide the UK into three different areas: one where schools have no social distancing, and continue as normal; one where there are moderate precautions, and one where there is only distance learning.
We can then look at the infection rates in the three areas and make an informed decision about what each of those choices means for infection rates.
But the worry I have when I read your posts is that - if there's evidence you don't like, on "long Covid" or children being carriers - then you are mentally primed to dismiss it as just the ravings of authoritarians.
Interesting but a little lop sided. Mr Meeks does not give enough credit for the fact that overwhelmingly UK people are moderate centrists and a fortiori so are a good number of Brexit voters.
A decent comparison is Scottish nationalism. They are very like Brexit voters - moderate, decent, tolerant, filled with ideals and principle, wedded to long term solutions and the history of national identity spurring them on to moderate but deeply held political conviction. For myself I agree with their Brexiteer mirror images, and disagree with the SNP.
For those who genuinely preferred UK independence to being in the EU there was no choice but to vote for and with all sorts of oddities - naturally. Just as moderate Scottish independence supporters have no choice but to support the SNP with all its evasions, contradictions and weaknesses.
Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
Question - at what point does that office environment change from a workplace where more than 6 people is legal to a place where more than 6 people being there is illegal?
The difference is that office environments are required to implement safeguarding and social distancing measures.
However, it does not alter the fact that acting selfishly and irresponsibly will just see covid continue to devastate the health and economy of our nation
Why would you assume that the workers having a drink in the office are acting any differently in social distancing terms to during the day? There may even be managers there who have a legal responsibility to ensure that this is the case.
Ukrainian church leader who called Covid-19 'God's punishment' for same-sex marriage tests positive for virus
If he'd worked hard to prevent same sex marriages, he would have been spared. CV19 was God's way of punishing him for not fighting hard enough against them.
Both options are possible but by striking down just the moderates it's hard to work out which side God is really on. Unless he just really dislikes indecision.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
I get where you are coming from Big G but if they have spent all day together in the office it's hard to see why they can't have a beer together there. The problem with the new rules is that they give the impression that it's OK to risk your health as long as it involves enriching the bosses, but not if you just want to enjoy yourself. It feels like a very Tory response to a public health crisis.
Any office environment is required to follow safeguarding and social distancing and in some cases wearing face masks.
Once you introduce drinking into this environment socialising becomes much more unsafe
I would just comment that all government's in this crisis needs businesses to get back within a safe environment to secure peoples jobs, not enriching bosses
I expect the vast majority of people will not act selfishly recognising that we all have to play our part in defeating this wicked disease
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
It doesn't seem to be merely age of infection that is behind the current low mortality. In this recent German study, mortality was down in all age groups:
It doesn't seem to be merely age of infection that is behind the current low mortality. In this recent German study, mortality was down in all age groups:
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I have been on and off here since 2005. I can't see much difference in opinion tbh. Unpopular incumbency will be dealt the harshest hand, but isn't that always the way?
Keep up the good work.
The major difference, I’ve been around since 2005 as well is the reduction in active, vocal Lib Dems, reflecting the outside world. There does appear to be more people pushing strict party lines rather than opinion. It still remains an excellent window into how middle class, professional UK thinks with a good spread of views from other countries. I doubt there is anywhere like it and all the views help the punter to decide how they view the offered odds.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
Question - at what point does that office environment change from a workplace where more than 6 people is legal to a place where more than 6 people being there is illegal?
The difference is that office environments are required to implement safeguarding and social distancing measures.
However, it does not alter the fact that acting selfishly and irresponsibly will just see covid continue to devastate the health and economy of our nation
Why would you assume that the workers having a drink in the office are acting any differently in social distancing terms to during the day? There may even be managers there who have a legal responsibility to ensure that this is the case.
If the manager ensures all public health measures are maintained including safeguarding and social distancing while drinking then no problem
Interesting but a little lop sided. Mr Meeks does not give enough credit for the fact that overwhelmingly UK people are moderate centrists and a fortiori so are a good number of Brexit voters.
A decent comparison is Scottish nationalism. They are very like Brexit voters - moderate, decent, tolerant, filled with ideals and principle, wedded to long term solutions and the history of national identity spurring them on to moderate but deeply held political conviction. For myself I agree with their Brexiteer mirror images, and disagree with the SNP.
For those who genuinely preferred UK independence to being in the EU there was no choice but to vote for and with all sorts of oddities - naturally. Just as moderate Scottish independence supporters have no choice but to support the SNP with all its evasions, contradictions and weaknesses.
Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature.
Yes. One of the main reasons for voting Leave among people who I've spoken to was simply the £350m for the NHS. Many of them didn't have particularly strong feelings either way about the EU or immigration and didn't know or care about things like free trade.
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
I hope you're right.
However, I'd point out that in "enclosed" situations, like the choir or the fishing vessel, you saw over 80% of people infected. This does not suggest that 75% or so of the population has natural immunity.
You don't need 75%. Social distancing will have dramatically reduced the herd immunity threshold from the originally projected level. Assume the number of people actually infected in the spring was greater than reported (many being recorded as new cases now, since the virus hangs around in the system) and a modest level of resistance from recent exposure to other coronaviruses, and you have a credible hypothesis
p.s. neither the infamous ski chalet nor the diamond princess got anywhere near 80%
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
I won't be. It is absolutely legal for more than 6 of us to be in office and factory. My point about others is that the evening down the pub that 5 of us have organised next week will absolutely breech the rule of 6. Because there will be more than 6 people in the pub. "Ah but you won't be socially mixing" says the government. Which as anyone who has ever been in a pub knows is bollocks.
The new rules are a nonsense. The local high schools tip their kids out who all walk home in a large group, albeit a smaller group than then have spent all day in. That is legal and safe But if they start playing football as they cross the park? Apparently they are acting "selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis".
Interesting but a little lop sided. Mr Meeks does not give enough credit for the fact that overwhelmingly UK people are moderate centrists and a fortiori so are a good number of Brexit voters.
A decent comparison is Scottish nationalism. They are very like Brexit voters - moderate, decent, tolerant, filled with ideals and principle, wedded to long term solutions and the history of national identity spurring them on to moderate but deeply held political conviction. For myself I agree with their Brexiteer mirror images, and disagree with the SNP.
For those who genuinely preferred UK independence to being in the EU there was no choice but to vote for and with all sorts of oddities - naturally. Just as moderate Scottish independence supporters have no choice but to support the SNP with all its evasions, contradictions and weaknesses.
Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature.
I think Alistair's point has always been about the means of victory, and the reasons credited to it, rather than the victory itself.
Now this could be naive - you make take the view that Brexit was going to be a shitshow whatever happened, but one can make a case that had it been won on the back of an explicit commitment to prioritise freedom of trade, and even better with some sort of EEA/EFTA prospectus, and played less on anti-immigration and nationalist feeling then the outcomes now could have been very different.
Scottish Independence could be the same. The advantage that SINDY would have is that if a referendum would be won then this would be on the back of Government support who were then much better placed to take control of the exit process from day 1. On the other side i think the difficulties, even with good will on both sides, will be far more complex.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
Indeed, to say that I'm suddenly pro-EU because I don't want the government to break the law is absolutely ridiculous.
It doesn't seem to be merely age of infection that is behind the current low mortality. In this recent German study, mortality was down in all age groups:
Here in Wales masks are still not mandatory. I would like Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gethin to be made aware of the finding.
MoM GDP up 6.6%, UK economy now 11.7% smaller than in Feb. Recovery looks extremely V shaped. We're on track to recover around 95% of GDP before the end of the year, even with this new lockdown.
Max, can you give a source for that? Is that not somewhat less of a recovery than your office was forecasting?
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
Indeed, you can disagree with the Government without it changing your opinion on that issue.
I was in that position during May's tenure too. Didn't mean I was a Remainer again, it just meant I disagreed with May and what she was doing.
Where I do think this site is unrepresentative is that I think there's a shortage of people who were against May's deal and for what Boris is doing relative to the general public . . . but that's OK. The site doesn't need to be 100% representative.
Interesting but a little lop sided. Mr Meeks does not give enough credit for the fact that overwhelmingly UK people are moderate centrists and a fortiori so are a good number of Brexit voters.
A decent comparison is Scottish nationalism. They are very like Brexit voters - moderate, decent, tolerant, filled with ideals and principle, wedded to long term solutions and the history of national identity spurring them on to moderate but deeply held political conviction. For myself I agree with their Brexiteer mirror images, and disagree with the SNP.
For those who genuinely preferred UK independence to being in the EU there was no choice but to vote for and with all sorts of oddities - naturally. Just as moderate Scottish independence supporters have no choice but to support the SNP with all its evasions, contradictions and weaknesses.
Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature.
Yes. One of the main reasons for voting Leave among people who I've spoken to was simply the £350m for the NHS. Many of them didn't have particularly strong feelings either way about the EU or immigration and didn't know or care about things like free trade.
Don’t be silly. Every morning they say a prayer to the god Poseidon, hoping, praying, begging, for the return of our fishing waters. It’s in touching distance.
Interesting but a little lop sided. Mr Meeks does not give enough credit for the fact that overwhelmingly UK people are moderate centrists and a fortiori so are a good number of Brexit voters.
A decent comparison is Scottish nationalism. They are very like Brexit voters - moderate, decent, tolerant, filled with ideals and principle, wedded to long term solutions and the history of national identity spurring them on to moderate but deeply held political conviction. For myself I agree with their Brexiteer mirror images, and disagree with the SNP.
For those who genuinely preferred UK independence to being in the EU there was no choice but to vote for and with all sorts of oddities - naturally. Just as moderate Scottish independence supporters have no choice but to support the SNP with all its evasions, contradictions and weaknesses.
Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature.
Yes. One of the main reasons for voting Leave among people who I've spoken to was simply the £350m for the NHS. Many of them didn't have particularly strong feelings either way about the EU or immigration and didn't know or care about things like free trade.
It doesn't seem to be merely age of infection that is behind the current low mortality. In this recent German study, mortality was down in all age groups:
Here in Wales masks are still not mandatory. I would like Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gethin to be made aware of the finding.
Is Wales experiencing a particular resurgence compared to the rest of the UK? Or are the vast majority wearing masks without being asked?
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
I have been very vocal in condemning Boris on this to the extent I believe he should resign and I absolutely agree HMG is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
However, I still want the divorce from the EU confirmed at the end of the year and continue as a conservative party member
Quite a big trade surplus this month, due to an decline in physical imports.
Despite still being in the SM which has been impoverishing this country for more than a decade with ultimately unsustainable deficits. Is this a Covid effect or a Brexit effect? Either way it is welcome.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
Indeed, to say that I'm suddenly pro-EU because I don't want the government to break the law is absolutely ridiculous.
Why don't you just admit that you've changed your phone wallpaper to a picture of Michael Barnier???
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
I have been very vocal in condemning Boris on this to the extent I believe he should resign and I absolutely agree HMG is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
However, I still want the divorce from the EU confirmed at the end of the year and continue as a conservative party member
What part of our vassal state-age are you willing to retain in order to get a deal? 🤓
MoM GDP up 6.6%, UK economy now 11.7% smaller than in Feb. Recovery looks extremely V shaped. We're on track to recover around 95% of GDP before the end of the year, even with this new lockdown.
Max, can you give a source for that? Is that not somewhat less of a recovery than your office was forecasting?
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
I won't be. It is absolutely legal for more than 6 of us to be in office and factory. My point about others is that the evening down the pub that 5 of us have organised next week will absolutely breech the rule of 6. Because there will be more than 6 people in the pub. "Ah but you won't be socially mixing" says the government. Which as anyone who has ever been in a pub knows is bollocks.
The new rules are a nonsense. The local high schools tip their kids out who all walk home in a large group, albeit a smaller group than then have spent all day in. That is legal and safe But if they start playing football as they cross the park? Apparently they are acting "selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis".
Its. Bollocks. Mate.
In defence of the government, it is impossible to give advice that is both straightforward and deals correctly with every possible circumstance!
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I have been on and off here since 2005. I can't see much difference in opinion tbh. Unpopular incumbency will be dealt the harshest hand, but isn't that always the way?
Keep up the good work.
The major difference, I’ve been around since 2005 as well is the reduction in active, vocal Lib Dems, reflecting the outside world. There does appear to be more people pushing strict party lines rather than opinion. It still remains an excellent window into how middle class, professional UK thinks with a good spread of views from other countries. I doubt there is anywhere like it and all the views help the punter to decide how they view the offered odds.
You started about the same time as me. We've seen the balance change many times and in many ways over that time but I agree that it remains an outstanding forum for varied and intelligent discussion.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
Question - at what point does that office environment change from a workplace where more than 6 people is legal to a place where more than 6 people being there is illegal?
The difference is that office environments are required to implement safeguarding and social distancing measures.
However, it does not alter the fact that acting selfishly and irresponsibly will just see covid continue to devastate the health and economy of our nation
With apologies for me sitting here genuinely laughing out loud at your posts. If I go to the office for the day as I am twice over the next fortnight I will sit at my desk. By a window which I had open even before the pox. Colleagues have their desks. That is both legal and not acting "selfishly in defiance of a public health crisis". If we then crack open a case of Heinekens at 5pm and continue sitting where we have been how is that selfish and irresponsible?
I can't gather indoors in a group larger than 6 as its "selfish and irresponsible". Yet I can in the workplace. A school. The pub. My son can spend all day in a classroom of 25 and walk home in a similar sized group, yet if 7 of them kick a ball around they are being "selfish and irresponsible".
The reason why this country has done so badly with the pox is because the government make up bullshit rules that are so patently absurd that some genuinely do act selfishly and irresponsibly.
The silver lining if you're GOP is you could say the Democrats are just getting their vote out early. But I'd still say this is good thus far for the blue team.
MoM GDP up 6.6%, UK economy now 11.7% smaller than in Feb. Recovery looks extremely V shaped. We're on track to recover around 95% of GDP before the end of the year, even with this new lockdown.
I expect we'll see another big MoM increase when the August figures come out (with the Eat Out deal especially helping) and could be quite close to 100% in August, but then we might see a drop back off in September.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
I have been very vocal in condemning Boris on this to the extent I believe he should resign and I absolutely agree HMG is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
However, I still want the divorce from the EU confirmed at the end of the year and continue as a conservative party member
What part of our vassal state-age are you willing to retain in order to get a deal? 🤓
I want an amicable divorce but if not it will be no deal
Re Diana Rigg, I've been trying to get round to watching On Her Majesty's Secret Service for about 20 years. They don't show it on TV very often.
Lazenby is terrible, but the rest of the film is ok. I would go as far as to say had Connery starred as Bond, it would have been his finest.
The film is brilliant because it is based very closely on Fleming's book and is directed by Peter Hunt, who is a terrific director. The score by John Barry is also one of his best - excellent.
Lazenby is actually ok for a newbie (and again I put a lot of that down to Hunt) but is spoiled by being dubbed for almost half the film.
The bits he gets right are the moving scenes with Tracy, which I think really work.
Interesting but a little lop sided. Mr Meeks does not give enough credit for the fact that overwhelmingly UK people are moderate centrists and a fortiori so are a good number of Brexit voters.
A decent comparison is Scottish nationalism. They are very like Brexit voters - moderate, decent, tolerant, filled with ideals and principle, wedded to long term solutions and the history of national identity spurring them on to moderate but deeply held political conviction. For myself I agree with their Brexiteer mirror images, and disagree with the SNP.
For those who genuinely preferred UK independence to being in the EU there was no choice but to vote for and with all sorts of oddities - naturally. Just as moderate Scottish independence supporters have no choice but to support the SNP with all its evasions, contradictions and weaknesses.
Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature.
Yes. One of the main reasons for voting Leave among people who I've spoken to was simply the £350m for the NHS. Many of them didn't have particularly strong feelings either way about the EU or immigration and didn't know or care about things like free trade.
Thats OK. The PM is exactly the same. However, all will know and care about things like free trade when our ability to move basic items across our border ceases overnight on New Year's Eve.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
Indeed, you can disagree with the Government without it changing your opinion on that issue.
I was in that position during May's tenure too. Didn't mean I was a Remainer again, it just meant I disagreed with May and what she was doing.
Where I do think this site is unrepresentative is that I think there's a shortage of people who were against May's deal and for what Boris is doing relative to the general public . . . but that's OK. The site doesn't need to be 100% representative.
By posting your point of view all day, every day, surely the frequency of postings for that point of view offsets the postings of the manifold malcontents.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I have been on and off here since 2005. I can't see much difference in opinion tbh. Unpopular incumbency will be dealt the harshest hand, but isn't that always the way?
Keep up the good work.
The major difference, I’ve been around since 2005 as well is the reduction in active, vocal Lib Dems, reflecting the outside world. There does appear to be more people pushing strict party lines rather than opinion. It still remains an excellent window into how middle class, professional UK thinks with a good spread of views from other countries. I doubt there is anywhere like it and all the views help the punter to decide how they view the offered odds.
It's definitely a demographic that tends to the older, wealthier and male. Supporters of Brexit and Johnson are well represented, but of a particular type.
Could do with more Irish input IMO. There were a couple of really interesting contributors: GreenMachine and someone whose name I have forgotten that commented on NI politics from a UUP stance.
Interesting but a little lop sided. Mr Meeks does not give enough credit for the fact that overwhelmingly UK people are moderate centrists and a fortiori so are a good number of Brexit voters.
A decent comparison is Scottish nationalism. They are very like Brexit voters - moderate, decent, tolerant, filled with ideals and principle, wedded to long term solutions and the history of national identity spurring them on to moderate but deeply held political conviction. For myself I agree with their Brexiteer mirror images, and disagree with the SNP.
For those who genuinely preferred UK independence to being in the EU there was no choice but to vote for and with all sorts of oddities - naturally. Just as moderate Scottish independence supporters have no choice but to support the SNP with all its evasions, contradictions and weaknesses.
Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature.
I don't think the SNP comparison is valid because while SNP voters are spread across the spectrum on social issues like immigration, law and order, feminism etc (and I am guessing are more liberal than Unionists on average given the difference in age profile) there is overwhelming evidence that Leave voters skew sharply to the right on these questions (eg https://britainthinks.com/pdfs/Leavers-and-Remainers-true-tribes-or-trite-tropes-Autosaved.pdf). For instance, the best predictor of Leave vs Remain is views on the death penalty. Leavers are not, on average, centrist moderates who just happen to dislike the EU, although of course some are.
MoM GDP up 6.6%, UK economy now 11.7% smaller than in Feb. Recovery looks extremely V shaped. We're on track to recover around 95% of GDP before the end of the year, even with this new lockdown.
Max, can you give a source for that? Is that not somewhat less of a recovery than your office was forecasting?
Thanks. That is a slightly disappointing bounce. There has to be a concern that as furlough and EOTHO fade away there will be a further loss of upward momentum in Q3/4.
Quite a big trade surplus this month, due to an decline in physical imports.
Despite still being in the SM which has been impoverishing this country for more than a decade with ultimately unsustainable deficits. Is this a Covid effect or a Brexit effect? Either way it is welcome.
Well, yes and no.
It is good that services exports seem quite unaffected, but the reduction in goods imports is mostly down to reductions in petroleum products, vehicles and machinery.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
I have been very vocal in condemning Boris on this to the extent I believe he should resign and I absolutely agree HMG is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
However, I still want the divorce from the EU confirmed at the end of the year and continue as a conservative party member
Therefor HMG and the PM will take your continued membership as 100% support for their actions.
Yes, it seems that the law officers in HMG seems to have determined that their role is no longer to advise the Government on what they must do to avoid staying within the law (with obligation to resign if ministers act in defiance of this), but now their role is to advise the Government on how they can break the law without risk of prosecution/legal consequences.
This is how far we've fallen in such a rapid period of time.
And i still return to the point that this bill is hiding far greater issues of constitutional importance than just the ability of ministers to break international law. It allows them to break/rewrite national law without reference to Parliament and with explicit protection from Judicial Review and the courts. It should be called the Enabling Act.
Biden is favoured to win the election 75% of the time - that's up from 69% last time I looked.
The math is blissfully simple. He should be 3/1 on. You can back him at 5/4 on (the Party) or 6/5 on (the man himself). You won't often see better betting opportunities than that.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
I have been very vocal in condemning Boris on this to the extent I believe he should resign and I absolutely agree HMG is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
However, I still want the divorce from the EU confirmed at the end of the year and continue as a conservative party member
What part of our vassal state-age are you willing to retain in order to get a deal? 🤓
I want an amicable divorce but if not it will be no deal
It doesn't seem to be merely age of infection that is behind the current low mortality. In this recent German study, mortality was down in all age groups:
Here in Wales masks are still not mandatory. I would like Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gethin to be made aware of the finding.
Is Wales experiencing a particular resurgence compared to the rest of the UK? Or are the vast majority wearing masks without being asked?
Wales is seeing an increase in covid as is the rest of the UK
I have noticed an increase in mask wearing but not that substantial
The silver lining if you're GOP is you could say the Democrats are just getting their vote out early. But I'd still say this is good thus far for the blue team.
And you can still get Biden at 11/10 to win the State. This is remarkable given that he has a small but steady lead in the polls there.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I think the problem has been that a number of vocal leavers - say @MaxPB, @Casino_Royale, @Richard_Tyndall, @DavidL and myself - have found ourselves in the position of criticising the government over their proposed Internal Markets Bill.
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
I have been very vocal in condemning Boris on this to the extent I believe he should resign and I absolutely agree HMG is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
However, I still want the divorce from the EU confirmed at the end of the year and continue as a conservative party member
Well yes. And this is the bit I find most objectionable, it's a "all people who are not with me are against me" attitude. If you don't back us passing a stupid law, then you must be a closet Remainer.
I am not the biggest Boris fan. I thought him better than May, but have never loved the "lovable rogue" image he's created for himself.
But the slipshod way that the Internal Markets Bill has been drafted (being incompatible with our membership of a bunch of international bodeies), that it has been released at a time when the UK is trying to replicate existing tax treaties with individual EU states, make me rather cross.
If you think the EU is being unreasonable, then say so and withdraw from the Withdrawal Agreement. Don't attempt to make domestic law incompatible with Treaty Obligations. Because that's just being a wanker.
I don't think people are going to lose much sleep on the legal consequences of breaking the rule of 6. Who in practical terms is going to enforce it? Besides which people aren't as stupid as the government, they can see the absurdity of what has been put forward.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
If you wish to act selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis you will contribute to the continuation of this destructive disease to the detriment of the health and economy of our nation
I won't be. It is absolutely legal for more than 6 of us to be in office and factory. My point about others is that the evening down the pub that 5 of us have organised next week will absolutely breech the rule of 6. Because there will be more than 6 people in the pub. "Ah but you won't be socially mixing" says the government. Which as anyone who has ever been in a pub knows is bollocks.
The new rules are a nonsense. The local high schools tip their kids out who all walk home in a large group, albeit a smaller group than then have spent all day in. That is legal and safe But if they start playing football as they cross the park? Apparently they are acting "selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis".
Its. Bollocks. Mate.
In defence of the government, it is impossible to give advice that is both straightforward and deals correctly with every possible circumstance!
Hardly: "Transmission of the virus in enclosed spaces and close proximity means that we are going to have to reinstate some of the measures previously lifted. You MUST maintain 2m distancing from each other at all times. In addition you must now wear a mask at all times when you inside any building that isn't your home or on public transport and in taxis."
Done. No inconsistencies. No absurdities. Stay the hell away from each other and wear a mask.
MoM GDP up 6.6%, UK economy now 11.7% smaller than in Feb. Recovery looks extremely V shaped. We're on track to recover around 95% of GDP before the end of the year, even with this new lockdown.
Max, can you give a source for that? Is that not somewhat less of a recovery than your office was forecasting?
Thanks. That is a slightly disappointing bounce. There has to be a concern that as furlough and EOTHO fade away there will be a further loss of upward momentum in Q3/4.
I made the point earlier in the week that this place has regressed from being a balanced mix to an overwhelming pro EU, anti Boris abbatoir. No problem with that I'm not pro Boris but it makes for very dull, one sided conversation.
I log on 2 or 3 days later and see more of the same in a header from Alastair Meeks.
Mr Smithson this is your site and your prerogative but you might wonder why the number of posters and contributions has fallen.
I have been on and off here since 2005. I can't see much difference in opinion tbh. Unpopular incumbency will be dealt the harshest hand, but isn't that always the way?
Keep up the good work.
The major difference, I’ve been around since 2005 as well is the reduction in active, vocal Lib Dems, reflecting the outside world. There does appear to be more people pushing strict party lines rather than opinion. It still remains an excellent window into how middle class, professional UK thinks with a good spread of views from other countries. I doubt there is anywhere like it and all the views help the punter to decide how they view the offered odds.
You started about the same time as me. We've seen the balance change many times and in many ways over that time but I agree that it remains an outstanding forum for varied and intelligent discussion.
Are you implying that we occasionally go off topic? Moderators please!
Re Diana Rigg, I've been trying to get round to watching On Her Majesty's Secret Service for about 20 years. They don't show it on TV very often.
Lazenby is terrible, but the rest of the film is ok. I would go as far as to say had Connery starred as Bond, it would have been his finest.
The film is brilliant because it is based very closely on Fleming's book and is directed by Peter Hunt, who is a terrific director. The score by John Barry is also one of his best - excellent.
Lazenby is actually ok for a newbie (and again I put a lot of that down to Hunt) but is spoiled by being dubbed for almost half the film.
The bits he gets right are the moving scenes with Tracy, which I think really work.
The chemistry doesn't work, not least because Rigg and Lazenby couldn't bear each other.
It doesn't seem to be merely age of infection that is behind the current low mortality. In this recent German study, mortality was down in all age groups:
Here in Wales masks are still not mandatory. I would like Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gethin to be made aware of the finding.
Is Wales experiencing a particular resurgence compared to the rest of the UK? Or are the vast majority wearing masks without being asked?
Wales is seeing an increase in covid as is the rest of the UK
I have noticed an increase in mask wearing but not that substantial
That doesn't really address the point which is to question whether masks have any material impact (in the way England/Scotland are implementing them, anyway). If in one part of the UK usage is very low, whilst it is largely universal elsewhere (with the gaping exceptions, of course).
According to one report, every member of the coronavirus subcommittee was against the "rule of six" apart from Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, with Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, among the most vocal opponents.
The silver lining if you're GOP is you could say the Democrats are just getting their vote out early. But I'd still say this is good thus far for the blue team.
Comments
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/10/seema-verma-medicaid-expenses-411539
When Seema Verma, the Trump administration's top Medicaid official, went to a reporter's home in November 2018 for a "Girl's Night" thrown in her honor, taxpayers footed the bill to organize the event: $2,933.
When Verma wrote an op-ed on Fox News' website that fall, touting President Donald Trump's changes to Obamacare, taxpayers got charged for one consultant's price to place it: $977...
...The efforts were steered by Pam Stevens, a Republican communications consultant and former Trump administration official working to raise the brand of Verma, who leads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The prices were the amount a consulting company billed the government for her services, based on her invoices, which were obtained by congressional Democrats.
They are among the revelations included in a sweeping congressional investigation chronicling how Verma spent more than $3.5 million on a range of GOP-connected consultants, who polished her public profile, wrote her speeches and Twitter posts, brokered meetings with high-profile individuals — and even billed taxpayers for connecting Verma with fellow Republicans in Congress.
The 49-year-old Verma, who advised then-Gov. Mike Pence in Indiana on health policy before joining the Trump administration, has strongly rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing in her consulting practices. In October 2019, she told a House committee that “all the contracts we have at CMS are based on promoting the work of CMS” and the spending was “consistent with how the agency has used resources in the past.”
But the probe — conducted by Democrats across four congressional committees — found that Verma surrounded herself with a rotating cast of at least 15 highly paid communications consultants during her first two years in office, even as she publicly called for fiscal restraint and championed policies like work requirements for Americans on Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income people...
Democrats seem to be doing reasonably well in managing the news cycle in the run up to the election.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
Intuitively I would expect outdoor events to be safer, but it is perhaps of no matter to us in drizzly autumnL England. Dining al fresco won't be tenable for much longer.
Straight in the bin.
It’s but one example of how the fear messaging from the govt is mixing with British health & safety / officialdom culture and coming up with quite perverse outcomes, where the cure is without doubt causing more damage over the long term than the ailment.
Sensible risk segmentation and freedom of choice is all I ask for.
However, I'd point out that in "enclosed" situations, like the choir or the fishing vessel, you saw over 80% of people infected. This does not suggest that 75% or so of the population has natural immunity.
Johnson (and out of courtesy to you I have restrained from calling him "Shagger" as I normally do) didn't read the deal. His deal. The deal he signed as PM. The deal he then fought an election to secure. That deal. Didn't read it. Didn't understand it. The tweet from the FT earlier saying No10 grew hostile over the summer as it understood the implications of the deal speaks volumes.
That isn't being pro EU. It's just pointing out the epic fail of not reading something before you sign it. And whilst Philip is absolutely right as he endlessly restates the sovereignty of the UK parliament allows it to change the law I have never disagreed with him - it is the wisdom of doing so with the glaringly obvious ramifications. Well, glaringly obvious to former Tory PMs and leaders and diplomats and civil servants but apparently not obvious to people who don't read things before they sign them.
Brexit happened. We left. It is what we do now that matters. Pointing out that the EU has a long stated position on its external border is not being pro EU. Pointing to the unsquareable circle of leaving the EEA and CU (neither of which are the EU) and maintaining our Good Friday agreement obligations is not pro EU. It is just reality. A reality that the PM appears not have have read.
p.s. neither the infamous ski chalet nor the diamond princess got anywhere near 80%
Just as an example, the winter semester at Berlin Unis will again be online except for courses which cannot be taught using distance learning, such as chemistry practicals.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/hint-of-covid-19-immunity-3-sailors-with-antibodies-spared-in-outbreak-at-sea/?amp=1
Both of those are Situations where 80+% of people were infected.
The reason we don't see that in the real world is because people self isolate as cases rise. If there's no possibility of self isolation, then you get much higher levels of infection.
It's also why the UK recovery will be faster than everywhere else because the state sector is also "recovering" at the same time. See today's figures. The comparison of who is where a year later makes the most sense to me.
If you lift all restrictions when there is herd immunity, the contagion will remain under control.
If you lift all restrictions when herd immunity has not been reached, the contagion can easily spiral out of control.
Of course herd immunity is not a binary status, and 30% of the population having immunity is better than 1%.
It’s all a bit like your long COVID fear. To what extent should we take precautions with sometimes quite profound long term consequences, to cure a problem set for which we do not have sufficient data to even come close to defining the scale of the problem?
My biggest fear right now is the polling for just how many support laws banning family gatherings bigger than 6, curfews, local “enforcement officers” and the like. The genie is out the bottle and there for all to see now - despite all the social and educational advances of the last century, all you need to do to sleep walk a population into authoritarianism is just inject a (very small) bit of fear into their lives.
Let me give you an example. There are several of us leaving my company next month. Ordinarily we'd have a big piss up. But rule of 6 says that having spent all day working together it is unsafe and illegal to go down the pub. So the proposed solution is to have the piss up in the office (as used to be the tradition when I was a junior advertising sales bod in the magazine industry 20 years ago).
We have only known of this virus for some months and plenty yet to learn. Long term damage from SARS is quite common, 40% had long term depression and/or chronic fatigue 4 years post recovery in one Hong Kong study.
However, under some close contact situations the 'resistance' seems to break down, such as meat processing plants and choir practice, where the majority have become infected.
Not that i think the criticism that "grandparents are being prevented from seeing their grandchildren" is particularly valid anyway. Whilst there are some limitations because there is simply not enough weekends in the year, realistically you've got to be getting to 4 children to a parent before it doesn't become possible. Anything less and you can visit with one parent and 3 kids. What you can't have is big family gatherings across multiple household.
The problem as we saw time and again last year is that the executive controls the parliamentary timetable. If the government doesn't want it's powers taken away then it merely has to not schedule parliamentary time to vote on it. Even with a minority government and an activist speaker MPs were only able to take control of the timetable in a very limited way. Given the attitude of the current speaker and the Government's majority I don't see that happening any time soon.
However, it does not alter the fact that acting selfishly and irresponsibly will just see covid continue to devastate the health and economy of our nation
Keep up the good work.
We can then look at the infection rates in the three areas and make an informed decision about what each of those choices means for infection rates.
But the worry I have when I read your posts is that - if there's evidence you don't like, on "long Covid" or children being carriers - then you are mentally primed to dismiss it as just the ravings of authoritarians.
Edit to add: here's a Harvard piece on children as spreaders https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/08/looking-at-children-as-the-silent-spreaders-of-sars-cov-2/#:~:text=The researchers note that although,the virus into their homes.
A decent comparison is Scottish nationalism. They are very like Brexit voters - moderate, decent, tolerant, filled with ideals and principle, wedded to long term solutions and the history of national identity spurring them on to moderate but deeply held political conviction. For myself I agree with their Brexiteer mirror images, and disagree with the SNP.
For those who genuinely preferred UK independence to being in the EU there was no choice but to vote for and with all sorts of oddities - naturally. Just as moderate Scottish independence supporters have no choice but to support the SNP with all its evasions, contradictions and weaknesses.
Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature.
Once you introduce drinking into this environment socialising becomes much more unsafe
I would just comment that all government's in this crisis needs businesses to get back within a safe environment to secure peoples jobs, not enriching bosses
I expect the vast majority of people will not act selfishly recognising that we all have to play our part in defeating this wicked disease
So, I don't think the issue is that Leavers have left the site (are there any that you can think of that were here three months ago, that are not here now?), but more the government is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
https://twitter.com/foxinsoxuk/status/1304312706518994944?s=09
It doesn't seem to be merely age of infection that is behind the current low mortality. In this recent German study, mortality was down in all age groups:
"Mr Meeks makes good and interesting points but his argument is not helped by partisan caricature. "
If only we had someone to put the other side with comparable force and elegance.
Edit: In fairness, we do have have several such posters but they mostly appear 'below the line'.
Transparency, public trust and good organisation seem to be the keys
https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-08-17/how-taiwan-battling-coronavirus-tech-crowdsourced-data-and-trust
It is such a basic prerequisite that I can't believe some of these polls are being released.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-08-fishing-boat-outbreak-virus-immunity.html
The new rules are a nonsense. The local high schools tip their kids out who all walk home in a large group, albeit a smaller group than then have spent all day in. That is legal and safe But if they start playing football as they cross the park? Apparently they are acting "selfishly and in defiance of a public health crisis".
Its. Bollocks. Mate.
Now this could be naive - you make take the view that Brexit was going to be a shitshow whatever happened, but one can make a case that had it been won on the back of an explicit commitment to prioritise freedom of trade, and even better with some sort of EEA/EFTA prospectus, and played less on anti-immigration and nationalist feeling then the outcomes now could have been very different.
Scottish Independence could be the same. The advantage that SINDY would have is that if a referendum would be won then this would be on the back of Government support who were then much better placed to take control of the exit process from day 1. On the other side i think the difficulties, even with good will on both sides, will be far more complex.
I was in that position during May's tenure too. Didn't mean I was a Remainer again, it just meant I disagreed with May and what she was doing.
Where I do think this site is unrepresentative is that I think there's a shortage of people who were against May's deal and for what Boris is doing relative to the general public . . . but that's OK. The site doesn't need to be 100% representative.
and I absolutely agree HMG is behaving in an incompetent and self defeating manner.
However, I still want the divorce from the EU confirmed at the end of the year and continue as a conservative party member
(Joke.)
https://twitter.com/ONS/status/1304299097717964802?s=19
I can't gather indoors in a group larger than 6 as its "selfish and irresponsible". Yet I can in the workplace. A school. The pub. My son can spend all day in a classroom of 25 and walk home in a similar sized group, yet if 7 of them kick a ball around they are being "selfish and irresponsible".
The reason why this country has done so badly with the pox is because the government make up bullshit rules that are so patently absurd that some genuinely do act selfishly and irresponsibly.
https://twitter.com/Pulpstar/status/1304317637434933248
The silver lining if you're GOP is you could say the Democrats are just getting their vote out early. But I'd still say this is good thus far for the blue team.
Lazenby is actually ok for a newbie (and again I put a lot of that down to Hunt) but is spoiled by being dubbed for almost half the film.
The bits he gets right are the moving scenes with Tracy, which I think really work.
Could do with more Irish input IMO. There were a couple of really interesting contributors: GreenMachine and someone whose name I have forgotten that commented on NI politics from a UUP stance.
It is good that services exports seem quite unaffected, but the reduction in goods imports is mostly down to reductions in petroleum products, vehicles and machinery.
This is how far we've fallen in such a rapid period of time.
And i still return to the point that this bill is hiding far greater issues of constitutional importance than just the ability of ministers to break international law. It allows them to break/rewrite national law without reference to Parliament and with explicit protection from Judicial Review and the courts. It should be called the Enabling Act.
I have noticed an increase in mask wearing but not that substantial
I am not the biggest Boris fan. I thought him better than May, but have never loved the "lovable rogue" image he's created for himself.
But the slipshod way that the Internal Markets Bill has been drafted (being incompatible with our membership of a bunch of international bodeies), that it has been released at a time when the UK is trying to replicate existing tax treaties with individual EU states, make me rather cross.
If you think the EU is being unreasonable, then say so and withdraw from the Withdrawal Agreement. Don't attempt to make domestic law incompatible with Treaty Obligations. Because that's just being a wanker.
"Transmission of the virus in enclosed spaces and close proximity means that we are going to have to reinstate some of the measures previously lifted. You MUST maintain 2m distancing from each other at all times. In addition you must now wear a mask at all times when you inside any building that isn't your home or on public transport and in taxis."
Done. No inconsistencies. No absurdities. Stay the hell away from each other and wear a mask.
It is still one of the best Bonds.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/10/boris-johnson-facing-cabinet-unrest-rule-six/