The only thing I can see in relation to Warwick on twitter is horse racing results.
More twitter bollocks then.
It does seem this morning as if people on the tw@tterverse are getting rather excitable. According to tw@tter Boris has secretly been away, faked the baptism of his kid, the government have lied about the tracking app to the parliamentary select committee and now I presume somebody is claiming that Boris personally buried a load of COVID victims under Warwick Racecourse.
Everyone knows he buries them at Chequers. Do keep up.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
There are roughly 164k cancer deaths in the UK per annum or 449 a day. It does put it into perspective a bit.
Another useful figure is that the world population, blighted by Covid has increased by a net 59m this year according to Worldometer. If this is Gaia's attempt to control the human population its pathetic.
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Not something I have ever agreed with, but I am aware that some vicars are disinclined to baptise infants born out of wedlock.
I bet those same vicars don't give a damn about parents and godparents making promises they have no intention of keeping, regarding the upbringing of the child within the Christian Church.
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
If it's that slow we'll all have died of old age before it becomes a problem.
Again, can journalists perhaps not first check with somebody has actually trialled the app. Double sourcing and all that.
Am told the briefer only mentioned the testing part of app, not the tracing part.
Theorem One Of Journalism - Nothing exists unless it is specifically stated in large font, in simple words on page one of a press release. Which needs to be read in a soothing voice to the journalist.
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Not something I have ever agreed with, but I am aware that some vicars are disinclined to baptise infants born out of wedlock.
I bet those same vicars don't give a damn about parents and godparents making promises they have no intention of keeping, regarding the upbringing of the child within the Christian Church.
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
The one thing the government really should be clear on/should have been clear on is on how to wear a mask correctly.
The amount of people I see wearing a mask incorrectly is amusing/annoying.
My father says his inner Karen comes out and wants to tell these people off.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Yup, firstly you shouldn't be sending a boffin out to explain things when it's ministers who make the decisions, and secondly if you are going with a boffin, best not to go with the one whose initial response was a world-class failure.
Thirded. We need someone who takes a more holistic view. New Zealand is a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward.
What do you mean? In what sense is "New Zealand a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward"?
As far as I can see, New Zealand's fast response has been very successful at the keeping overall death count down without damaging its economy any more than other countries have damaged theirs.
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
More to the point, why are the champions of this flawed moded allowed vast and unaccountable power over the people of Great Britain.
We're going to need a new politics once this is done (If it ever is). This isn;t working.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
Gupta claimed the population was substantially immunised by April through asymptomatic herd immunity. Since then she has disputed the evidence that comprehensively shows this assertion to be nonsense: Serology tests that confirmed mainstream predictions are unfit for purpose because they miss this undetected herd-immunised population. Subsequent spikes also contradict the substantially herd-immunised population theory. Gupta herself rejects the obvious explanation that lockdowns restricting social interactions have an effect in reducing infection.
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
The model wasn't presented today. Just the result of exponential growth. Which happened in real life, way back in.... 2020.
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll 'History Today for PBers.'
You see that Vanilla Forums? That's your Mum that is.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
There are roughly 164k cancer deaths in the UK per annum or 449 a day. It does put it into perspective a bit.
Another useful figure is that the world population, blighted by Covid has increased by a net 59m this year according to Worldometer. If this is Gaia's attempt to control the human population its pathetic.
Really? I mean is cancer contagious?
Not sure Covid is contagious either. Probably infectious.
But Whitty's worst case scenario had deaths at less than half the rate for cancer. Or, to put it another way, the number to die of Covid to date in the UK is about the same number as die of cancer here in 93 days.
I am not saying we just ignore it. Absolutely not. I accept proportionate responses are needed. I have suggested some in this thread. But this is not the end of the world whatever Sean thought. I am genuinely concerned that somewhat silly graphs like that produced this morning is going to lead to a significant overreaction.
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll 'History Today for PBers.'
You see that Vanilla Forums? That's your Mum that is.
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
The one thing the government really should be clear on/should have been clear on is on how to wear a mask correctly.
The amount of people I see wearing a mask incorrectly is amusing/annoying.
My father says his inner Karen comes out and wants to tell these people off.
I think this forms a good part of those more sensible / informed individuals who aren't convinced that masks work particularly well outside of the medical setting. You see some many people wandering along, go to enter a shop, quickly whip out their mask, put it on poorly, do their shopping, immediately come out, whip it off, touch their face. So the virus could easily be on the mask and you are now just infecting yourself.
It isn't just "wearing it properly", it is having one that fits properly. I was informed that at some hospitals, due to PPE shortages they were down to just 2-3 different variants of masks and that everybody has a particular "fit" of mask and that there were medical professionals who couldn't work because the remaining variants didn't provide anywhere near good enough fit.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
Gupta claimed the population was substantially immunised by April through asymptomatic herd immunity. Since then she has disputed the evidence that comprehensively shows this assertion to be nonsense: Serology tests that confirmed mainstream predictions are unfit for purpose because they miss this undetected herd-immunised population. Subsequent spikes also contradict the substantially herd-immunised population theory. Gupta herself rejects the obvious explanation that lockdowns restricting social interactions have an effect in reducing infection.
But then Gupta can read a graph that shows deaths peaked before lockdown measures could have had any effects whatsoever. Compulsory masking wasn;t introduced until deaths and hospitalisations flatlined.
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll do 'History Today for PBers.'
I had a Ladybird book about Warwick the Kingmaker as a child. It was one of my favourites. Do you still have it?
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
Gupta claimed the population was substantially immunised by April through asymptomatic herd immunity. Since then she has disputed the evidence that comprehensively shows this assertion to be nonsense: Serology tests that confirmed mainstream predictions are unfit for purpose because they miss this undetected herd-immunised population. Subsequent spikes also contradict the substantially herd-immunised population theory. Gupta herself rejects the obvious explanation that lockdowns restricting social interactions have an effect in reducing infection.
But then Gupta can read a graph that shows deaths peaked before lockdown measures could have had any effects whatsoever.
We had a de facto lockdown before we had a de jure lockdown.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
That is simply not true. The 7-day average for covid-19 deaths in France is currently 53. It fell to as low as 6 during August.
There must be conservatives on the supreme court who are worried that the majority of americans lose all faith in the supreme court as an institution who must be against pushing through a nomination.
There is one - Roberts. Thomas and Alito ? You’re joking. Kavanaugh clearly doesn’t give much of a damn about public opinion; Gorsuch, unlikely, but time will tell.
If the Republicans seat another Justice after what they pulled with Garland, because it’s ‘within their rights’, I think it almost certain a Democratic Senate majority will expand the court, since that is equally ‘within their rights’.
Doubt Dems would get 50 senators lined up on that.
I think it's a pretty simple decision for a man with no scruples. Mitch is going to make sure there's a conservative majority.
Why do you doubt that? Seems to be an increasingly mainstream view in the Democratic Party. The GOP has been trampling on conventions for years, now its time for the Dems to play dirty otherwise their legislative agenda will just be picked apart by the court for years to come.
Oh I agree that the democrats *should* wake up and realize they are playing by rules the other side have been ignoring for years. But they aren't going to.
Biden said he wouldn't try it last year. Even if he changes his mind, they would need to win the Senate AND have basically all Democratic senators on board. The likes of Joe Manchin are just not going to go along with it.
The conservative minority in america effectively has a blocking majority in the Senate, it's effectively the same as the 19th Century conservative blocking majority in the House of Lords, which only (mostly) ended when the Liberals won general elections fought on the issue of reducing the power of the HoL in 1910, and passed the subsequent 1911 Parliament Act.
It's hard to see how the US can become a democracy though.
There is one thing the Democrats might be able to do.
It would be to encourage the growth of the cities in the lower population states. If they can see cities in Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, even Idaho, grow then they will change the rural/urban balance in those states and put Democrats in a better place for the Senate.
There must be conservatives on the supreme court who are worried that the majority of americans lose all faith in the supreme court as an institution who must be against pushing through a nomination.
There is one - Roberts. Thomas and Alito ? You’re joking. Kavanaugh clearly doesn’t give much of a damn about public opinion; Gorsuch, unlikely, but time will tell.
If the Republicans seat another Justice after what they pulled with Garland, because it’s ‘within their rights’, I think it almost certain a Democratic Senate majority will expand the court, since that is equally ‘within their rights’.
Doubt Dems would get 50 senators lined up on that.
I think it's a pretty simple decision for a man with no scruples. Mitch is going to make sure there's a conservative majority.
Why do you doubt that? Seems to be an increasingly mainstream view in the Democratic Party. The GOP has been trampling on conventions for years, now its time for the Dems to play dirty otherwise their legislative agenda will just be picked apart by the court for years to come.
Oh I agree that the democrats *should* wake up and realize they are playing by rules the other side have been ignoring for years. But they aren't going to.
Biden said he wouldn't try it last year. Even if he changes his mind, they would need to win the Senate AND have basically all Democratic senators on board. The likes of Joe Manchin are just not going to go along with it.
The conservative minority in america effectively has a blocking majority in the Senate, it's effectively the same as the 19th Century conservative blocking majority in the House of Lords, which only (mostly) ended when the Liberals won general elections fought on the issue of reducing the power of the HoL in 1910, and passed the subsequent 1911 Parliament Act.
It's hard to see how the US can become a democracy though.
There is one thing the Democrats might be able to do.
It would be to encourage the growth of the cities in the lower population states. If they can see cities in Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, even Idaho, grow then they will change the rural/urban balance in those states and put Democrats in a better place for the Senate.
South Dakota has often elected Democrat senators - George McGovern being an obvious example.
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll do 'History Today for PBers.'
I had a Ladybird book about Warwick the Kingmaker as a child. It was one of my favourites. Do you still have it?
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
The one thing the government really should be clear on/should have been clear on is on how to wear a mask correctly.
The amount of people I see wearing a mask incorrectly is amusing/annoying.
My father says his inner Karen comes out and wants to tell these people off.
I think this forms a good part of those more sensible / informed individuals who aren't convinced that masks work particularly well outside of the medical setting. You see some many people wandering along, go to enter a shop, quickly whip out their mask, put it on poorly, do their shopping, immediately come out, whip it off, touch their face. So the virus could easily be on the mask and you are now just infecting yourself.
It isn't just "wearing it properly", it is having one that fits properly. I was informed that at some hospitals, due to PPE shortages they were down to just 2-3 different variants of masks and that everybody has a particular "fit" of mask and that there were medical professionals who couldn't work because the remaining variants didn't provide anywhere near good enough fit.
Do we know how long the virus remains viable on fabric?
To be honest, if the action of a mask is primarily to block droplets, not air, and the virus does not live that long, who cares if they are just whipping it on and off. That seems a tiny, tiny detail in the grand scheme of things.
Seems to be a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
There are roughly 164k cancer deaths in the UK per annum or 449 a day. It does put it into perspective a bit.
Another useful figure is that the world population, blighted by Covid has increased by a net 59m this year according to Worldometer. If this is Gaia's attempt to control the human population its pathetic.
Really? I mean is cancer contagious?
Not sure Covid is contagious either. Probably infectious.
But Whitty's worst case scenario had deaths at less than half the rate for cancer. Or, to put it another way, the number to die of Covid to date in the UK is about the same number as die of cancer here in 93 days.
I am not saying we just ignore it. Absolutely not. I accept proportionate responses are needed. I have suggested some in this thread. But this is not the end of the world whatever Sean thought. I am genuinely concerned that somewhat silly graphs like that produced this morning is going to lead to a significant overreaction.
The real danger is that argue as we might as to whether the graph showed an exponential increase ( @FF43 said that it was "hidden"), if they do impose a draconian lockdown and the rate of deaths decreases or stays the same they can say "there, lockdowns work" and use them any time they goddamn please.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll do 'History Today for PBers.'
I had a Ladybird book about Warwick the Kingmaker as a child. It was one of my favourites. Do you still have it?
* An extension to the furlough scheme; * restrictions on University accommodation, possibly to foreign students only; *another tranche of grants for the lower earning self employed. *The cancellation of Christmas
I think he will focus on household indoor mingling and outlaw indoor meetings of different households.
Unless its in the pub. Thats ok.
That's a lot better because it is regulated.
That's why I thnk early closing hours for pubs is a bad idea. peopel will move from a regukated environment to an unregulated one.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
There are roughly 164k cancer deaths in the UK per annum or 449 a day. It does put it into perspective a bit.
Another useful figure is that the world population, blighted by Covid has increased by a net 59m this year according to Worldometer. If this is Gaia's attempt to control the human population its pathetic.
Really? I mean is cancer contagious?
Not sure Covid is contagious either. Probably infectious.
But Whitty's worst case scenario had deaths at less than half the rate for cancer. Or, to put it another way, the number to die of Covid to date in the UK is about the same number as die of cancer here in 93 days.
I am not saying we just ignore it. Absolutely not. I accept proportionate responses are needed. I have suggested some in this thread. But this is not the end of the world whatever Sean thought. I am genuinely concerned that somewhat silly graphs like that produced this morning is going to lead to a significant overreaction.
The real danger is that argue as we might as to whether the graph showed an exponential increase ( @FF43 said that it was "hidden"), if they do impose a draconian lockdown and the rate of deaths decreases or stays the same they can say "there, lockdowns work" and use them any time they goddamn please.
Regardless of what would have happened otherwise.
On the plus side, from the government's point of view, is that anything they do (including nothing, but we won't talk about that) is guaranteed to work. Genius!
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll 'History Today for PBers.'
You see that Vanilla Forums? That's your Mum that is.
* An extension to the furlough scheme; * restrictions on University accommodation, possibly to foreign students only; *another tranche of grants for the lower earning self employed. *The cancellation of Christmas
I don't think he'll cancel Christmas; rule of 6 relaxed for one, maybe two days.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
Deaths are on the way up there, too.</blockquot
So we are destroying our economy to prevent a seven day average of 50 people a day from dying in six weeks. Possibly.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
I mean, there is an increase, but its tiny and nowhere near what they had in April/March.
Another thing that's odd about France is that their testing has been stuck at 10m for a couple of weeks now. Presumably they are no longer reporting how many tests they are doing.
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll 'History Today for PBers.'
You see that Vanilla Forums? That's your Mum that is.
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
Ultimately it's up to the population to practise the best possible hygiene. Governments do need to keep hammering the message in clear terms, which they haven't really done.
Without getting into ridiculous spin, I suggest they should also talk about hygiene interventions such as masks as an enabler of activity rather than as a constraint on freedom. Masks allow you to do activities safely that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. It's about living with the virus in the medium term, making choices about what activity is important to us and discarding the rest if it's an infection risk. And choosing to do what we can to minimise infection to other people.
* An extension to the furlough scheme; * restrictions on University accommodation, possibly to foreign students only; *another tranche of grants for the lower earning self employed. *The cancellation of Christmas
I don't think he'll cancel Christmas; rule of 6 relaxed for one, maybe two days.
There must be conservatives on the supreme court who are worried that the majority of americans lose all faith in the supreme court as an institution who must be against pushing through a nomination.
There is one - Roberts. Thomas and Alito ? You’re joking. Kavanaugh clearly doesn’t give much of a damn about public opinion; Gorsuch, unlikely, but time will tell.
If the Republicans seat another Justice after what they pulled with Garland, because it’s ‘within their rights’, I think it almost certain a Democratic Senate majority will expand the court, since that is equally ‘within their rights’.
Doubt Dems would get 50 senators lined up on that.
I think it's a pretty simple decision for a man with no scruples. Mitch is going to make sure there's a conservative majority.
Why do you doubt that? Seems to be an increasingly mainstream view in the Democratic Party. The GOP has been trampling on conventions for years, now its time for the Dems to play dirty otherwise their legislative agenda will just be picked apart by the court for years to come.
Oh I agree that the democrats *should* wake up and realize they are playing by rules the other side have been ignoring for years. But they aren't going to.
Biden said he wouldn't try it last year. Even if he changes his mind, they would need to win the Senate AND have basically all Democratic senators on board. The likes of Joe Manchin are just not going to go along with it.
The conservative minority in america effectively has a blocking majority in the Senate, it's effectively the same as the 19th Century conservative blocking majority in the House of Lords, which only (mostly) ended when the Liberals won general elections fought on the issue of reducing the power of the HoL in 1910, and passed the subsequent 1911 Parliament Act.
It's hard to see how the US can become a democracy though.
Hardly, the Democrats had a huge Senate majority of 57 to just 41 for the Republicans as recently as 2008.
The fact West Virginia is a socially conservative state that only elects socially conservative Democrats, a similar situation to most border and southern states, does not mean the Democrats cannot get a big majority there however it simply reflects the fact that most Americans are not social liberals, that is not a problem of democracy however
Totally wrong. And: try reading the article. "Because there are a lot of largely rural, low-population states, the average state — which reflects the composition of the Senate — has 35 percent of its population in rural areas and only 14 percent in urban core areas, even though the country as a whole — including dense, high-population states like New York, Texas and California — has about 25 percent of the population in each group. That’s a pretty serious skew. It means that the Senate, de facto, has two or three times as much rural representation as urban core representation … even though there are actually about an equal number of voters in each bucket nationwide.
And of course, this has all sorts of other downstream consequences. Since rural areas tend to be whiter, it means the Senate represents a whiter population, too. In the U.S. as a whole, 60 percent of the population is non-Hispanic white and 40 percent of the population is nonwhite.1 But in the average state, 68 percent of people are white and 32 percent are nonwhite."
"the Senate is effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole, which means that Democrats are likely to win it only in the event of a near-landslide in their favor nationally. That’s likely to make the Republican majority on the Supreme Court pretty durable."
not only is the Senate anti-democratic, it is also anti-democratic in a racist way.
So what, the House seats are allocated on the basis of population and had a Republican majority from 2010 to 2018 including from 2010 to 2014 when the Senate had a Democratic majority. So the idea the Democrats can never win the Senate is absurd.
All you are posting is left liberal whining, totally ignoring the balance of power the founding fathers put into the US constitution to ensure no state was ignored and all states gained equal representation in the Senate and contributed, even if the House seats were determined by population, with the EC being a halfway house, with EC votes awarded by population but every state getting a minimal representation of electors.
California for example has 53 US Representatives, Wyoming just 1.
I know you worship the "founding fathers" as god-like beings, but I don't, and your account of their motivation is just stupid propaganda.
The House also has a pro-Republican bias due to gerrymandering and Democrat voter inefficiency, it does not have PR, or even remotely reasonable boundaries in many cases. So your "point" about the House is moronic.
Are you disputing the facts in the 538 article about the Senate? And if so which ones? I'd love to hear your expertise.
It doesn't matter. The system is the system what is whinging about it going to achieve?
To change the system can't be done with a majority of the House as happened in the UK with the Parliament Actin the Commons. To change the system requires the consent of two-thirds of the States and those States are never under any circumstances going to agree to that.
The Democrats need to find a way of appealing more to the other States - they did when they won a massive majority of the Senate only a few years ago. Whinging about the system won't achieve change.
What on earth makes you think that me pointing out certain facts on this forum is going to "achieve change"? Like I said, it's hard to see how the US becomes a democracy.
Obviously these facts are uncomfortable for certain posters on here, but they remain facts.
Anyone who uses the word "whinging" to describe facts or opinions they don't like obviously has nothing useful to say.
I apologise for the intemperate language, but the point behind it remains.
I want the Democrats to win - or more importantly I want Trump's GOP to be smashed. But many who support the Democrats seem to think that saying that it is "so unfair" like a Harry Enfield Kevin and Perry sketch is more productive than the Democrats actually figuring out how to win in the States they need to win in.
The USA is a Democracy, it is a Federal Democracy of States though. The Democrats need to figure out how to win across the Federation and not just in the high populace States.
OK, but I am not in the US, nor posting on a US forum, so whatever I write is hardly likely to be productive nor unproductive. My opinion remains that the US is a highly flawed democracy, certainly compared to the least-flawed democracies (eg Scandinavian countries), and that the way an increasingly small minority can keep a majority in the Senate is part of the problem. This does not constitute advice to the Dems on how to win the next election!
The whole of the population of Scandinavia combined is smaller than the population of the US states of California, Texas or Florida.
Sweden is the same size as Michigan, Denmark or Norway are the same size as Maryland or Wisconsin so it is not a like for like comparison.
The EU is more the equivalent of the US than Scandinavia is
OK I wonder what is going on here. I posted a link to a sort-of on topic article showing how favourable the Senate is for the Republicans, and the responses are:
1. "Whinging "it's unfair" won't help the democrats win an election." ??? I never suggested pointing out how much the senate currently favours the Republicans would help the Democrats.
2. "Posting on PB about how unfair it is won't change the US constitution." ??? Do people think that posting on here about China arresting dissidents is going to stop China arresting dissidents? Not much point posting anything (which is no doubt true, yet you can say that about practically every post!)
3. "The Democrats had a majority as recently as 2014." Sure, but that was based partly on Democrats having Senators from quite Republican states - a thing which is disappearing. And demographics are probably going to continue to make the Senate even less favourable to Democrats.
4. "You can't expect the US to have the democratic standards of smaller democracies." This is an interesting argument, and perhaps has some merit. It would seem to support the idea of Scottish independence, for example, if smaller democracies are better democracies. Certainly, the US is more democratic than India "the largest democracy in the world" where Modi can arrest people who disagree with him with impunity. But not sure how relevant it is to the Senate being very favourable to the Republicans compared to their support.
5. "The founding fathers intended it to be like this." - like a weird appeal to the authority of scripture.
6. "It is good like this so the small states don't get overwhelmed by the big states" At least a relevant argument, although the "states" look like particularly artificial constructions to me, so I don't agree.
7. "The US is like the EU" especially weird from people who love the US and hate the EU. Plus it really, really isn't.
This kind of thing doesn't happen with criticism of other countries, it's as if people are identified with the US and are willing to make all kinds of twisted arguments to defend the indefensible - maybe some are indeed Americans, in which case it's understandable. But still, a bit weird.
It maybe an argument for Scotland to be independent of both the UK and the EU, it is not an argument for Scotland to leave the UK to become a mere state of the even larger EU, note of the Scandinavian nations Norway never joined the EU and Sweden and Denmark never joined the Euro
You seem to have destroyed your own argument there.
No, the argument would be either the states in the US leave the Union and become independent nations and the EU breaks up or those Unions ensure sufficient respect for each individual state within them
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
The one thing the government really should be clear on/should have been clear on is on how to wear a mask correctly.
The amount of people I see wearing a mask incorrectly is amusing/annoying.
My father says his inner Karen comes out and wants to tell these people off.
I think this forms a good part of those more sensible / informed individuals who aren't convinced that masks work particularly well outside of the medical setting. You see some many people wandering along, go to enter a shop, quickly whip out their mask, put it on poorly, do their shopping, immediately come out, whip it off, touch their face. So the virus could easily be on the mask and you are now just infecting yourself.
The primary aim of joe public wearing masks is to minimise the amount of virus in the air being breathed in. If there is virus on your mask it is very likely that it is your virus, that you are spreading to your hands. As long as most people are wearing masks, the chances that you get someone elses virus on the mask is low. A secondary benefit of wearing masks is to reduce the level of exposure to the virus or "viral load", which seems to have a dramatic effect on the severity of the disease. Having some virus from someone else caught in your mask, transferring a proportion onto your fingers and then a proportion getting into your mouth, is still a lower exposure than breathing the virus in directly from the air.
Of course regular hand washing and not fiddling with masks is a really important prevention method, but getting everyone to wear a mask when indoors or when close to other people plays an important reduction in transmisiion even if not everyone is wahing their hands all the time.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
Deaths are on the way up there, too.
So we are destroying our economy to prevent a seven day average of 50 people a day from dying in six weeks. Possibly.
I give up.
That's the trouble with exponential increases. They start very small, but get very big.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
I mean, there is an increase, but its tiny and nowhere near what they had in April/March.
Another thing that's odd about France is that their testing has been stuck at 10m for a couple of weeks now. Presumably they are no longer reporting how many tests they are doing.
Spain is a bit bumpier but pretty much the same pattern.
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
Ultimately it's up to the population to practise the best possible hygiene. Governments do need to keep hammering the message in clear terms, which they haven't really done.
Without getting into ridiculous spin, I suggest they should also talk about hygiene interventions such as masks as an enabler of activity rather than as a constraint on freedom. Masks allow you to do activities safely that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. It's about living with the virus in the medium term, making choices about what activity is important to us and discarding the rest if it's an infection risk. And choosing to do what we can to minimise infection to other people.
Absolubtely. Masks allow the economy to open up (Discretionary shopping, hairdressing, nail bars, in person meetings) more than it otherwise would.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
I mean, there is an increase, but its tiny and nowhere near what they had in April/March.
Another thing that's odd about France is that their testing has been stuck at 10m for a couple of weeks now. Presumably they are no longer reporting how many tests they are doing.
That doesn't change the fact it's up by a factor of ten since the summer. I don't see how it can be argued they aren't going up.
Yup, firstly you shouldn't be sending a boffin out to explain things when it's ministers who make the decisions, and secondly if you are going with a boffin, best not to go with the one whose initial response was a world-class failure.
Thirded. We need someone who takes a more holistic view. New Zealand is a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward.
What do you mean? In what sense is "New Zealand a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward"?
As far as I can see, New Zealand's fast response has been very successful at the keeping overall death count down without damaging its economy any more than other countries have damaged theirs.
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
Ultimately it's up to the population to practise the best possible hygiene. Governments do need to keep hammering the message in clear terms, which they haven't really done.
Without getting into ridiculous spin, I suggest they should also talk about hygiene interventions such as masks as an enabler of activity rather than as a constraint on freedom. Masks allow you to do activities safely that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. It's about living with the virus in the medium term, making choices about what activity is important to us and discarding the rest if it's an infection risk. And choosing to do what we can to minimise infection to other people.
"Masks allow you to do activities safely that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do" is, I suggest, exactly the sort of dangerous exaggeration that has led to the second wave.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
I mean, there is an increase, but its tiny and nowhere near what they had in April/March.
Another thing that's odd about France is that their testing has been stuck at 10m for a couple of weeks now. Presumably they are no longer reporting how many tests they are doing.
Spain is a bit bumpier but pretty much the same pattern.
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll 'History Today for PBers.'
You see that Vanilla Forums? That's your Mum that is.
I honestly thought the MWE was lost to history, as so few of the teenagers watching it would have got away with stealing the VCR, and it was never going to be shown again nowadays. Well done that man for bringing back the memories! Whatever became of Rob Newman?
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Strictly, the statement that No 10 says was “wrong” is the one that said he landed at the airport at 2 pm. Easy to see how that could support a Clinton-denial.
Though is either of the parents RC? Mixing up the Abbey and Cathedral feels like the sort of mistake made by someone who doesn't frequent either. (Though the idea that Boris's exhaustion is due to diligent preparation for reception into the Holy Mother Church is a cheering one.)
LOL.
Don't Churches of England (etc) keep a record of baptisms any more.
Recently found a very interesting, and informative, one which has solved an ancestral mystery for two families..
Not something I have ever agreed with, but I am aware that some vicars are disinclined to baptise infants born out of wedlock.
There are still a few vicars who refuse to marry divorcees or baptise infants out of wedlock but they are very much a minority now, especially in the Anglican Church as opposed to the Catholic Church
There is absolutely no chance of us reaching 50k cases a day by mid October. As the number of cases increase there are a series of factors which slow down the exponential element. People get more cautious and scared, there are fewer targets of opportunity for the virus, certain particularly vulnerable areas (such as care homes) will have special measures brought into effect etc.
None of this means that we won't have a significant figure by then, quite probably at least half that figure and even 100 deaths a day a month later is something to be taken very seriously indeed. I just find it disappointing that the basic statistical models we had at the start of this (in terms of which the only people not to have had the virus by now would be anyone stuck on a space station) are still being used instead of laughed at.
It seems that even stripping out the hyperbole this was a call to further action and that we will be hearing that from Boris tomorrow.
I don't see a problem here. They are telling us that it WILL be 50K cases unless we change our behaviour. Their aim is to get us to change our behaviour.
The problem is that it is not true. And therefore we are inevitably going to over react in the same way that we did with the original lockdown. If we are looking at a much more realistic, nuanced model we can also have a more realistic, nuanced response.
We need to reinforce hand, face, space. We need to stop idiots going on foreign holidays and coming back here to spread infection by mandatory, enforced quarantine. We need to think hard about risk vectors such as public transport. We will have to accept more sport without spectators, disappointing as that is. We do need to move to more risk segmentation where some vulnerable groups are much more restricted than others.
But we don't need to shut down all the restaurants and pubs again, we don't need to stop people going to University or school (although the former will be our biggest challenge), we don't want to close down the parts of our economy we have got moving.
I am favour of a nuanced response. However from the figures I would have a gloomier take than your analysis.
Firstly, I wouldn't say the initial lockdown was an overreaction. It was late being applied and we only got got somewhat below R=1, even in maximum lockdown. The UK had the sixth worst death rate in the world. Even so, the lockdown saved many, many lives lives.
Because R under lockdown is only slightly less than one, we don't have a lot of headroom before we get to exponential curve territory, which we are now in again. Our choices are about how quickly we let the epidemic grow again. We do have individual and collective choices and we should be aware what they are and what the risks are. Then we need to apply those choices.
We had slightly more than 4 months of almost continually falling figures from mid April to mid August. That suggests to me that throughout that period R was <1, whatever the government was saying. If you add in the massive increase in testing that occurred over that period which should have found more cases it is possible that the rate was significantly less than 1, at least for parts of it. </p>
R was between 0.6 and 0.9 under core lockdown as I recall. It is unnecessary for R to be less than 1 once you have the cases suppressed. Unfortunately R is well of excess of 1 now. We need to get better at hygiene and testing and reduce our activities if we want to avoid the epidemic going out of control again. Those are our choices. We should be making them.
The hygiene guidance has been clear. I'm not sure what more the government could be expected to do on that front.
Ultimately it's up to the population to practise the best possible hygiene. Governments do need to keep hammering the message in clear terms, which they haven't really done.
Without getting into ridiculous spin, I suggest they should also talk about hygiene interventions such as masks as an enabler of activity rather than as a constraint on freedom. Masks allow you to do activities safely that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. It's about living with the virus in the medium term, making choices about what activity is important to us and discarding the rest if it's an infection risk. And choosing to do what we can to minimise infection to other people.
"Masks allow you to do activities safely that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do" is, I suggest, exactly the sort of dangerous exaggeration that has led to the second wave.
Why?
[Not least because almost no-one has talked about masks in these terms]
* An extension to the furlough scheme; * restrictions on University accommodation, possibly to foreign students only; *another tranche of grants for the lower earning self employed. *The cancellation of Christmas
I think he will focus on household indoor mingling and outlaw indoor meetings of different households.
Unless its in the pub. Thats ok.
That's a lot better because it is regulated.
That's why I thnk early closing hours for pubs is a bad idea. peopel will move from a regukated environment to an unregulated one.
I honestly cannot comprehend the "regulated" comment you and others keep making. Its a pub. Tables not set that far apart. People move around. All breathing the same air. Getting merry.
If it is too high a risk to have 7 people familiar to each other meet in a house how can be it be an acceptable risk to have 70 in a pub? If they all go to the pub and see people they know is the advice to leave else they be fined for mingling? Or just go mingle with people they don't know?
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
The model wasn't presented today. Just the result of exponential growth. Which happened in real life, way back in.... 2020.
Except by the time that your average journalist had worked out how to spell exponential, it had stopped. Indeed, as others have pointed out, it has not operated in any country in the world for more than 2-3 weeks, typically at the start of the outbreak when the numbers are small.
This is not information, it is propaganda and it is false. Things are bad enough without misleading people.
The talk being all about transmission and how to stop it is foolish.
Treatment is as important a factor - how quickly you can cure someone of it, and what are the common factors of successful cases, and severe cases? -Has the average turn-around time of a hospital case gone down, and if so, from what, to what? -Which treatment protocols are working, and is this best practice being shared NHS-wide and is the best international knowledge also being accessed? -What are people's blood tests showing us? We know that the fat and old are disproportionately affected, so what minerals and vitamins are the severest cases always deficient in? Is anyone even noticing or recording this?
Covid is already clearly not a death sentence in most cases - the case for lockdown is already diminished by the improvements in treatment, and it should and could be diminishing further. Leading us smoothly to it being vaccinated away.
Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick KG (22 November 1428 – 14 April 1471), known as Warwick the Kingmaker, was an English nobleman, administrator, and military commander. The eldest son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, he became Earl of Warwick through marriage, and was the wealthiest and most powerful English peer of his age, with political connections that went beyond the country's borders. One of the leaders in the Wars of the Roses, originally on the Yorkist side but later switching to the Lancastrian side, he was instrumental in the deposition of two kings, which led to his epithet of "Kingmaker".
I mean I'm happy to educate you all on history, I mean I did it for Morris Dancer, and if we're going into another lockdown, then I'll 'History Today for PBers.'
You see that Vanilla Forums? That's your Mum that is.
I honestly thought the MWE was lost to history, as so few of the teenagers watching it would have got away with stealing the VCR, and it was never going to be shown again nowadays. Well done that man for bringing back the memories!
Radio 4 extra has been broadcasting it recently, which is why I saw a couple of youtube episodes a few weeks ago. So I guess there might be a mini-mini-revival.
What strikes me is that, at the time, I thought that Newman was better than Baddiel was better than Punt and Dennis. Knowing how the careers have panned out and watching old MWE episodes, it is clear that Punt and Dennis were by far the better commedians, whereas Newman was little more than a third rate impersonator. I guess I was more influenced by "cool" in my 20s than I suspected.
Yup, firstly you shouldn't be sending a boffin out to explain things when it's ministers who make the decisions, and secondly if you are going with a boffin, best not to go with the one whose initial response was a world-class failure.
Thirded. We need someone who takes a more holistic view. New Zealand is a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward.
What do you mean? In what sense is "New Zealand a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward"?
As far as I can see, New Zealand's fast response has been very successful at the keeping overall death count down without damaging its economy any more than other countries have damaged theirs.
"New Zealand’s economic retraction is higher than Australia’s 7% and Canada at 11.5%, but much less than in India, Singapore and the UK."
Yes, of course New Zealand has suffered adverse economic effects, but they are no worse than those that many other countries (including the UK) have suffered. But they have had far fewer deaths, so any "salutary" lesson from New Zealand is that we should have done what they did!
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
The model wasn't presented today. Just the result of exponential growth. Which happened in real life, way back in.... 2020.
Except by the time that your average journalist had worked out how to spell exponential, it had stopped. Indeed, as others have pointed out, it has not operated in any country in the world for more than 2-3 weeks, typically at the start of the outbreak when the numbers are small.
This is not information, it is propaganda and it is false. Things are bad enough without misleading people.
TBF it was preceded by a big "if". But yes, it is propaganda as a scare tactic.
Yup, firstly you shouldn't be sending a boffin out to explain things when it's ministers who make the decisions, and secondly if you are going with a boffin, best not to go with the one whose initial response was a world-class failure.
Thirded. We need someone who takes a more holistic view. New Zealand is a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward.
What do you mean? In what sense is "New Zealand a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward"?
As far as I can see, New Zealand's fast response has been very successful at the keeping overall death count down without damaging its economy any more than other countries have damaged theirs.
"New Zealand’s economic retraction is higher than Australia’s 7% and Canada at 11.5%, but much less than in India, Singapore and the UK." But they have had far fewer deaths, so any "salutary" lesson from New Zealand is that we should have done what they did!
Which would have been impossible for many many reasons.
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
The model wasn't presented today. Just the result of exponential growth. Which happened in real life, way back in.... 2020.
Except by the time that your average journalist had worked out how to spell exponential, it had stopped. Indeed, as others have pointed out, it has not operated in any country in the world for more than 2-3 weeks, typically at the start of the outbreak when the numbers are small.
This is not information, it is propaganda and it is false. Things are bad enough without misleading people.
TBF it was preceded by a big "if". But yes, it is propaganda as a scare tactic.
How many deaths would there have been in Sweden if no measures were taken? That's the test, surely, and I am not sure if there is any country where that could be determined.
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
The model wasn't presented today. Just the result of exponential growth. Which happened in real life, way back in.... 2020.
Except by the time that your average journalist had worked out how to spell exponential, it had stopped. Indeed, as others have pointed out, it has not operated in any country in the world for more than 2-3 weeks, typically at the start of the outbreak when the numbers are small.
This is not information, it is propaganda and it is false. Things are bad enough without misleading people.
TBF it was preceded by a big "if". But yes, it is propaganda as a scare tactic.
I'm sure as hell getting one of the Gin ones.. and whisky ones...and....
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
The model wasn't presented today. Just the result of exponential growth. Which happened in real life, way back in.... 2020.
Except by the time that your average journalist had worked out how to spell exponential, it had stopped. Indeed, as others have pointed out, it has not operated in any country in the world for more than 2-3 weeks, typically at the start of the outbreak when the numbers are small.
This is not information, it is propaganda and it is false. Things are bad enough without misleading people.
TBF it was preceded by a big "if". But yes, it is propaganda as a scare tactic.
How many deaths would there have been in Sweden if no measures were taken? That's the test, surely, and I am not sure if there is any country where that could be determined.
Yup, firstly you shouldn't be sending a boffin out to explain things when it's ministers who make the decisions, and secondly if you are going with a boffin, best not to go with the one whose initial response was a world-class failure.
Thirded. We need someone who takes a more holistic view. New Zealand is a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward.
What do you mean? In what sense is "New Zealand a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward"?
As far as I can see, New Zealand's fast response has been very successful at the keeping overall death count down without damaging its economy any more than other countries have damaged theirs.
"New Zealand’s economic retraction is higher than Australia’s 7% and Canada at 11.5%, but much less than in India, Singapore and the UK."
Yes, of course New Zealand has suffered adverse economic effects, but they are no worse than those that many other countries (including the UK) have suffered. But they have had far fewer deaths, so any "salutary" lesson from New Zealand is that we should have done what they did!
No, we should have done what South Korea did, ie masks and social distancing from the start but no full lockdown.
South Korean economic contraction just 0.8% in 2020 and South Korean deaths per head just 8 per million compared to a global average of 123.9 per million
Yup, firstly you shouldn't be sending a boffin out to explain things when it's ministers who make the decisions, and secondly if you are going with a boffin, best not to go with the one whose initial response was a world-class failure.
Thirded. We need someone who takes a more holistic view. New Zealand is a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward.
What do you mean? In what sense is "New Zealand a very salutary lesson for anyone who thinks a zero covid approach is the way forward"?
As far as I can see, New Zealand's fast response has been very successful at the keeping overall death count down without damaging its economy any more than other countries have damaged theirs.
"New Zealand’s economic retraction is higher than Australia’s 7% and Canada at 11.5%, but much less than in India, Singapore and the UK." But they have had far fewer deaths, so any "salutary" lesson from New Zealand is that we should have done what they did!
Which would have been impossible for many many reasons.
Yeah, we ain't Sweden or New Zealand
Pop density NZ 15/km square Pop density Sweden 25/km square Pop density England 275/km square.
Countries like South Korea, Japan and Spain (A high lived density) are more similiar to an 'England'.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
I must have missed the cancer that you could infect dozens of people with in a single pub crawl. And you've also completely missed the exponential issue.
As for "As Dr Gupta predicted..." I also missed the bit where it all went away in March because most of us had already had it. Or when it all faded away when the death toll reached three or four thousand.
All you ever do is insist that "Dr Gupta" and "The Oxford Team" (although most professors in Oxford disagree with her thoughts, but if you make it a thing, it makes it sound more plausible) must be right, regardless of what reality says. Because if she's right, we can stop everything and everything goes back to normal.
A massive win for wishful thinking over reality there.
The point of the graph is that it, like hospitalisations, is on a fast upwards trajectory. This means that the spring has slipped and it's bounding upwards.
You're like the person who fell off the Empire State Building, and, on passing the eightieth floor, said, "Hey, this falling's not a problem, nothing to worry about."
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
The model wasn't presented today. Just the result of exponential growth. Which happened in real life, way back in.... 2020.
Except by the time that your average journalist had worked out how to spell exponential, it had stopped. Indeed, as others have pointed out, it has not operated in any country in the world for more than 2-3 weeks, typically at the start of the outbreak when the numbers are small.
This is not information, it is propaganda and it is false. Things are bad enough without misleading people.
We'll know as soon as this week. If the numbers stay at 3 500 on average, it's not exponential. If it goes over 4000 it is.
What point is he trying to make here? If Covid was going to kill 20k people a year without significant suppression, we wouldnt implement significant suppression. The problem is it would kill something around 100k-500k people a year if we did nothing, not 20k - this is fairly obvious from the numbers with suppression which are already much more than 20k.
Is he just thick or does randomly spouting facts that are not relevant count for argument these days.
Both he and Hannan are in the intersection of "I don't want this to be a thing" and "I don't understand exponentials or what has actually happened"
France, September 19
13,500 cases
26 deaths
According to Whitty this will be 54 deaths a day in a month's time. That, if anything, looks a little optimistic to me.
We don't know there will would have been 500k dead if we had done nothing. We only know that Ferguson's model predicted that. The Swedes dispute the inputs to his model. They have mitigated but nothing like our levels and they have had nowhere near the proportional 500k figure.
Ferguson predicted more than 80,000 deaths for Sweden. Titanically out, even with their less stringent procedures.
Yep. The model doesn't fit real world data. Why isn't this being more widely discussed?
More to the point, why is the same flawed model being churned out again today?
The model wasn't presented today. Just the result of exponential growth. Which happened in real life, way back in.... 2020.
Except by the time that your average journalist had worked out how to spell exponential, it had stopped. Indeed, as others have pointed out, it has not operated in any country in the world for more than 2-3 weeks, typically at the start of the outbreak when the numbers are small.
This is not information, it is propaganda and it is false. Things are bad enough without misleading people.
TBF it was preceded by a big "if". But yes, it is propaganda as a scare tactic.
How many deaths would there have been in Sweden if no measures were taken? That's the test, surely, and I am not sure if there is any country where that could be determined.
Now there's an idea for a reality TV show. "I'm a Covidiot, get me a party". Take 5000 "It's no worse than flu" proponents to live on an isolated island and see what happens. There would have to be some seeding of the virus, and a representative cross section of ages.
I do love that phrase 'forced to deny'. The Guardian or the Mail prints some bonkers non-story. Spokesman points out it's a bonkers non-story. That gives the newspaper an excuse for another piece saying the politician has been 'forced to deny it'.
Deaths in England (daily numbers and seven-day average). Bear in mind that this is a significantly lagged indicator and reflects the case levels seen three weeks earlier and hospitalisations seen two weeks earlier.
The highest is 35 FFS. 35.
Cancer?
Note the date range. It was up to a thousand a day at the peak.
Its a pandemic. The pattern is, they come, they peak, they fade. Exactly as Dr Gupta predicted.
This one seems to be on its way back up again. Not exactly going as planned.
Cases are up but its been widely discussed about how many are false. France has 13,5000 cases yesterday and has had 3000 plus for weeks.
Deaths? yesterday there were 26.
I mean FFS
For now, but can't you see the trajectory?
No I bloody can't. France got to 4,000 cases weeks ago and has rarely gone below. Did they panic and introduce economy destroying lockdowns? Nope.
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
I mean, there is an increase, but its tiny and nowhere near what they had in April/March.
Another thing that's odd about France is that their testing has been stuck at 10m for a couple of weeks now. Presumably they are no longer reporting how many tests they are doing.
That doesn't change the fact it's up by a factor of ten since the summer. I don't see how it can be argued they aren't going up.
Taking France's 7 day moving average 19th: 52 12th: 30 5th: 13
Yeah, that's going up. Or flat as I think some people calling it.
There must be conservatives on the supreme court who are worried that the majority of americans lose all faith in the supreme court as an institution who must be against pushing through a nomination.
There is one - Roberts. Thomas and Alito ? You’re joking. Kavanaugh clearly doesn’t give much of a damn about public opinion; Gorsuch, unlikely, but time will tell.
If the Republicans seat another Justice after what they pulled with Garland, because it’s ‘within their rights’, I think it almost certain a Democratic Senate majority will expand the court, since that is equally ‘within their rights’.
Doubt Dems would get 50 senators lined up on that.
I think it's a pretty simple decision for a man with no scruples. Mitch is going to make sure there's a conservative majority.
Why do you doubt that? Seems to be an increasingly mainstream view in the Democratic Party. The GOP has been trampling on conventions for years, now its time for the Dems to play dirty otherwise their legislative agenda will just be picked apart by the court for years to come.
Oh I agree that the democrats *should* wake up and realize they are playing by rules the other side have been ignoring for years. But they aren't going to.
Biden said he wouldn't try it last year. Even if he changes his mind, they would need to win the Senate AND have basically all Democratic senators on board. The likes of Joe Manchin are just not going to go along with it.
The conservative minority in america effectively has a blocking majority in the Senate, it's effectively the same as the 19th Century conservative blocking majority in the House of Lords, which only (mostly) ended when the Liberals won general elections fought on the issue of reducing the power of the HoL in 1910, and passed the subsequent 1911 Parliament Act.
It's hard to see how the US can become a democracy though.
Hardly, the Democrats had a huge Senate majority of 57 to just 41 for the Republicans as recently as 2008.
The fact West Virginia is a socially conservative state that only elects socially conservative Democrats, a similar situation to most border and southern states, does not mean the Democrats cannot get a big majority there however it simply reflects the fact that most Americans are not social liberals, that is not a problem of democracy however
Totally wrong. And: try reading the article. "Because there are a lot of largely rural, low-population states, the average state — which reflects the composition of the Senate — has 35 percent of its population in rural areas and only 14 percent in urban core areas, even though the country as a whole — including dense, high-population states like New York, Texas and California — has about 25 percent of the population in each group. That’s a pretty serious skew. It means that the Senate, de facto, has two or three times as much rural representation as urban core representation … even though there are actually about an equal number of voters in each bucket nationwide.
And of course, this has all sorts of other downstream consequences. Since rural areas tend to be whiter, it means the Senate represents a whiter population, too. In the U.S. as a whole, 60 percent of the population is non-Hispanic white and 40 percent of the population is nonwhite.1 But in the average state, 68 percent of people are white and 32 percent are nonwhite."
"the Senate is effectively 6 to 7 percentage points redder than the country as a whole, which means that Democrats are likely to win it only in the event of a near-landslide in their favor nationally. That’s likely to make the Republican majority on the Supreme Court pretty durable."
not only is the Senate anti-democratic, it is also anti-democratic in a racist way.
So what, the House seats are allocated on the basis of population and had a Republican majority from 2010 to 2018 including from 2010 to 2014 when the Senate had a Democratic majority. So the idea the Democrats can never win the Senate is absurd.
All you are posting is left liberal whining, totally ignoring the balance of power the founding fathers put into the US constitution to ensure no state was ignored and all states gained equal representation in the Senate and contributed, even if the House seats were determined by population, with the EC being a halfway house, with EC votes awarded by population but every state getting a minimal representation of electors.
California for example has 53 US Representatives, Wyoming just 1.
I know you worship the "founding fathers" as god-like beings, but I don't, and your account of their motivation is just stupid propaganda.
The House also has a pro-Republican bias due to gerrymandering and Democrat voter inefficiency, it does not have PR, or even remotely reasonable boundaries in many cases. So your "point" about the House is moronic.
Are you disputing the facts in the 538 article about the Senate? And if so which ones? I'd love to hear your expertise.
It doesn't matter. The system is the system what is whinging about it going to achieve?
To change the system can't be done with a majority of the House as happened in the UK with the Parliament Actin the Commons. To change the system requires the consent of two-thirds of the States and those States are never under any circumstances going to agree to that.
The Democrats need to find a way of appealing more to the other States - they did when they won a massive majority of the Senate only a few years ago. Whinging about the system won't achieve change.
What on earth makes you think that me pointing out certain facts on this forum is going to "achieve change"? Like I said, it's hard to see how the US becomes a democracy.
Obviously these facts are uncomfortable for certain posters on here, but they remain facts.
Anyone who uses the word "whinging" to describe facts or opinions they don't like obviously has nothing useful to say.
I apologise for the intemperate language, but the point behind it remains.
I want the Democrats to win - or more importantly I want Trump's GOP to be smashed. But many who support the Democrats seem to think that saying that it is "so unfair" like a Harry Enfield Kevin and Perry sketch is more productive than the Democrats actually figuring out how to win in the States they need to win in.
The USA is a Democracy, it is a Federal Democracy of States though. The Democrats need to figure out how to win across the Federation and not just in the high populace States.
OK, but I am not in the US, nor posting on a US forum, so whatever I write is hardly likely to be productive nor unproductive. My opinion remains that the US is a highly flawed democracy, certainly compared to the least-flawed democracies (eg Scandinavian countries), and that the way an increasingly small minority can keep a majority in the Senate is part of the problem. This does not constitute advice to the Dems on how to win the next election!
The whole of the population of Scandinavia combined is smaller than the population of the US states of California, Texas or Florida.
Sweden is the same size as Michigan, Denmark or Norway are the same size as Maryland or Wisconsin so it is not a like for like comparison.
The EU is more the equivalent of the US than Scandinavia is
OK I wonder what is going on here. I posted a link to a sort-of on topic article showing how favourable the Senate is for the Republicans, and the responses are:
1. "Whinging "it's unfair" won't help the democrats win an election." ??? I never suggested pointing out how much the senate currently favours the Republicans would help the Democrats.
2. "Posting on PB about how unfair it is won't change the US constitution." ??? Do people think that posting on here about China arresting dissidents is going to stop China arresting dissidents? Not much point posting anything (which is no doubt true, yet you can say that about practically every post!)
3. "The Democrats had a majority as recently as 2014." Sure, but that was based partly on Democrats having Senators from quite Republican states - a thing which is disappearing. And demographics are probably going to continue to make the Senate even less favourable to Democrats.
4. "You can't expect the US to have the democratic standards of smaller democracies." This is an interesting argument, and perhaps has some merit. It would seem to support the idea of Scottish independence, for example, if smaller democracies are better democracies. Certainly, the US is more democratic than India "the largest democracy in the world" where Modi can arrest people who disagree with him with impunity. But not sure how relevant it is to the Senate being very favourable to the Republicans compared to their support.
5. "The founding fathers intended it to be like this." - like a weird appeal to the authority of scripture.
6. "It is good like this so the small states don't get overwhelmed by the big states" At least a relevant argument, although the "states" look like particularly artificial constructions to me, so I don't agree.
7. "The US is like the EU" especially weird from people who love the US and hate the EU. Plus it really, really isn't.
This kind of thing doesn't happen with criticism of other countries, it's as if people are identified with the US and are willing to make all kinds of twisted arguments to defend the indefensible - maybe some are indeed Americans, in which case it's understandable. But still, a bit weird.
It maybe an argument for Scotland to be independent of both the UK and the EU, it is not an argument for Scotland to leave the UK to become a mere state of the even larger EU, note of the Scandinavian nations Norway never joined the EU and Sweden and Denmark never joined the Euro
Gaining 75%-95% control of the major levers of power that you don't currently have is a win in my book.
I think it was @isam who asked a good question the other day: where is the critique of covid policy from the left?
He's right that most of the critique has been from rightwing commentators (although not necessarily from a party-political / overtly rightwing standpoint).
Thought it was interesting too see these two pieces in the Guardian, from Zoe Williams and John Harris.
It seems like am authoritarian, left wing policy from Boris to me - that's why Starmer cant criticise it; all he can do is say he agrees., but would implement it more effectively
There is nothing between Boris' Tories, Sir Keir's Labour, Sir Ed's Lib Dems and the Greens, Scot Nats and Welshies in the HofC when it comes to a vision to see us through Covid - can anyone point to any of them saying they would have done anything differently? Farage looks like being the only one to offer the significant minority/possible majority who disagree with the Westminster bubble a choice - again.
It will probably be labelled as xenophobic again to remind people that the oligarch in Perugia, Evgeny Lebedev is the son of a KGB and FSB agent who worked at the London embassy and somehow managed to acquire $4bn. The father, the (ex?) KGB/FSB agent is also often in Perugia and meets Johnson.
The son has recently been appointed by Johnson to the House of Lords.
This week we also find out that Putins former deputy finance minister, married to Lubov Chernukhin who paid the Tory party £160k to play tennis with Johnson and Cameron (and another £1.5m for other reasons), received $8m from another Russian oligarch with ties to Putin.
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3Mrfut-FSw
Result? many more cases, but the deaths are the effing same. The trajectory of that rocket would be a crash into the mountain.
FFS. It was guidence about how maths work.
The amount of people I see wearing a mask incorrectly is amusing/annoying.
My father says his inner Karen comes out and wants to tell these people off.
As far as I can see, New Zealand's fast response has been very successful at the keeping overall death count down without damaging its economy any more than other countries have damaged theirs.
We're going to need a new politics once this is done (If it ever is). This isn;t working.
That's your Mum that is.
But Whitty's worst case scenario had deaths at less than half the rate for cancer. Or, to put it another way, the number to die of Covid to date in the UK is about the same number as die of cancer here in 93 days.
I am not saying we just ignore it. Absolutely not. I accept proportionate responses are needed. I have suggested some in this thread. But this is not the end of the world whatever Sean thought. I am genuinely concerned that somewhat silly graphs like that produced this morning is going to lead to a significant overreaction.
It isn't just "wearing it properly", it is having one that fits properly. I was informed that at some hospitals, due to PPE shortages they were down to just 2-3 different variants of masks and that everybody has a particular "fit" of mask and that there were medical professionals who couldn't work because the remaining variants didn't provide anywhere near good enough fit.
To be honest, if the action of a mask is primarily to block droplets, not air, and the virus does not live that long, who cares if they are just whipping it on and off. That seems a tiny, tiny detail in the grand scheme of things.
Seems to be a classic case of perfect being the enemy of good.
Regardless of what would have happened otherwise.
That's why I thnk early closing hours for pubs is a bad idea. peopel will move from a regukated environment to an unregulated one.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fQ64zCM5Rgk
I mean, there is an increase, but its tiny and nowhere near what they had in April/March.
Another thing that's odd about France is that their testing has been stuck at 10m for a couple of weeks now. Presumably they are no longer reporting how many tests they are doing.
Without getting into ridiculous spin, I suggest they should also talk about hygiene interventions such as masks as an enabler of activity rather than as a constraint on freedom. Masks allow you to do activities safely that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. It's about living with the virus in the medium term, making choices about what activity is important to us and discarding the rest if it's an infection risk. And choosing to do what we can to minimise infection to other people.
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=sheriff+of+nottingham+and+cancel+christmas&docid=608032636208615104&mid=69FDA93DA7AF1D40281A69FDA93DA7AF1D40281A&view=detail&FORM=VIRE
Of course regular hand washing and not fiddling with masks is a really important prevention method, but getting everyone to wear a mask when indoors or when close to other people plays an important reduction in transmisiion even if not everyone is wahing their hands all the time.
[Not least because almost no-one has talked about masks in these terms]
If it is too high a risk to have 7 people familiar to each other meet in a house how can be it be an acceptable risk to have 70 in a pub? If they all go to the pub and see people they know is the advice to leave else they be fined for mingling? Or just go mingle with people they don't know?
This is not information, it is propaganda and it is false. Things are bad enough without misleading people.
Treatment is as important a factor - how quickly you can cure someone of it, and what are the common factors of successful cases, and severe cases?
-Has the average turn-around time of a hospital case gone down, and if so, from what, to what?
-Which treatment protocols are working, and is this best practice being shared NHS-wide and is the best international knowledge also being accessed?
-What are people's blood tests showing us? We know that the fat and old are disproportionately affected, so what minerals and vitamins are the severest cases always deficient in? Is anyone even noticing or recording this?
Covid is already clearly not a death sentence in most cases - the case for lockdown is already diminished by the improvements in treatment, and it should and could be diminishing further. Leading us smoothly to it being vaccinated away.
What strikes me is that, at the time, I thought that Newman was better than Baddiel was better than Punt and Dennis. Knowing how the careers have panned out and watching old MWE episodes, it is clear that Punt and Dennis were by far the better commedians, whereas Newman was little more than a third rate impersonator. I guess I was more influenced by "cool" in my 20s than I suspected.
"New Zealand’s economic retraction is higher than Australia’s 7% and Canada at 11.5%, but much less than in India, Singapore and the UK."
Yes, of course New Zealand has suffered adverse economic effects, but they are no worse than those that many other countries (including the UK) have suffered. But they have had far fewer deaths, so any "salutary" lesson from New Zealand is that we should have done what they did!
https://twitter.com/MrHarryCole/status/1308021541788168192?s=20
Easy distinction to draw.
South Korean economic contraction just 0.8% in 2020 and South Korean deaths per head just 8 per million compared to a global average of 123.9 per million
https://asiatimes.com/2020/08/south-korea-to-be-oecd-star-in-2020-growth/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Pop density NZ 15/km square
Pop density Sweden 25/km square
Pop density England 275/km square.
Countries like South Korea, Japan and Spain (A high lived density) are more similiar to an 'England'.
And you've also completely missed the exponential issue.
As for "As Dr Gupta predicted..." I also missed the bit where it all went away in March because most of us had already had it.
Or when it all faded away when the death toll reached three or four thousand.
All you ever do is insist that "Dr Gupta" and "The Oxford Team" (although most professors in Oxford disagree with her thoughts, but if you make it a thing, it makes it sound more plausible) must be right, regardless of what reality says. Because if she's right, we can stop everything and everything goes back to normal.
A massive win for wishful thinking over reality there.
The point of the graph is that it, like hospitalisations, is on a fast upwards trajectory. This means that the spring has slipped and it's bounding upwards.
You're like the person who fell off the Empire State Building, and, on passing the eightieth floor, said, "Hey, this falling's not a problem, nothing to worry about."
This looks pretty exponential to me:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=gbr&areas=fra&areas=esp&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usca&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=ustx&byDate=0&cumulative=0&logScale=0&perMillion=0&values=cases
NEW THREAD
19th: 52
12th: 30
5th: 13
Yeah, that's going up. Or flat as I think some people calling it.
There is nothing between Boris' Tories, Sir Keir's Labour, Sir Ed's Lib Dems and the Greens, Scot Nats and Welshies in the HofC when it comes to a vision to see us through Covid - can anyone point to any of them saying they would have done anything differently? Farage looks like being the only one to offer the significant minority/possible majority who disagree with the Westminster bubble a choice - again.
We won't have enough rope when the end comes.