Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
It just all seems a bit wanky to me. I'd rather ask questions that make sense, or that we have some hope of answering. Perhaps I'm just not very clever, I had to ask Google what jejune meant.
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Covid might do it for us, anyway. I saw a report in the FT yesterday about the future of aviation. The midway prediction was that airlines will be back to pre Covid levels of business by about 2023.
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
Is Survey Monkey a gigantic voodoo poll?
It's not Voodoo but it does rely on more numbers, less stratification of respondents.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Covid might do it for us, anyway. I saw a report in the FT yesterday about the future of aviation. The midway prediction was that airlines will be back to pre Covid levels of business by about 2023.
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Isn't that in large part because of the rise of the universal adoption of video conferencing?
Kind of makes people appreciate that flying half way across the globe for a single meeting then flying back may not actually be necessary afterall.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Definitely a factor. That church in Korea, that shrine in Iran....
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
It just all seems a bit wanky to me. I'd rather ask questions that make sense, or that we have some hope of answering. Perhaps I'm just not very clever, I had to ask Google what jejune meant.
I don't know what the great philosophers say, but the weak anthropic principle makes a lot of sense to me.
It basically says that the universe is as it is because we're here to see it. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't be here to ask the question. There are so many aspects that had to be just right for us to emerge (fine structure constant, big moon, just the right amount of water, solar output / atmospheric constitution, etc.) that survivorship bias must surely be a thing.
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
It just all seems a bit wanky to me. I'd rather ask questions that make sense, or that we have some hope of answering. Perhaps I'm just not very clever, I had to ask Google what jejune meant.
I don't know what the great philosophers say, but the weak anthropic principle makes a lot of sense to me.
It basically says that the universe is as it is because we're here to see it. It was otherwise, we wouldn't be here to ask the question. There are so many aspects that had to be just right for us to emerge (fine structure constant, big moon, just the right amount of water, solar output / atmospheric constitution, etc.) that survivorship bias must surely be a thing.
Unless there are multiple or maybe infinite parallel universes, which means one was bound to evolve conscious life, namely, ours.
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
It just all seems a bit wanky to me. I'd rather ask questions that make sense, or that we have some hope of answering. Perhaps I'm just not very clever, I had to ask Google what jejune meant.
It's much easier, rewarding and practical to proceed from the premise of existence rather than engage in an ontological wankfest as appears to be occurring here.
Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Covid might do it for us, anyway. I saw a report in the FT yesterday about the future of aviation. The midway prediction was that airlines will be back to pre Covid levels of business by about 2023.
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Isn't that in large part because of the rise of the universal adoption of video conferencing?
Kind of makes people appreciate that flying half way across the globe for a single meeting then flying back may not actually be necessary afterall.
I can't wait to get back on to the Eurostar to GdN. I would even suffer Schipol if it meant I was in Herengracht shortly afterwards.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Covid might do it for us, anyway. I saw a report in the FT yesterday about the future of aviation. The midway prediction was that airlines will be back to pre Covid levels of business by about 2023.
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Isn't that in large part because of the rise of the universal adoption of video conferencing?
Kind of makes people appreciate that flying half way across the globe for a single meeting then flying back may not actually be necessary afterall.
Will be one of the big plusses coming out of this – the pressure to travel for business for, as you say, one or two meetings was bonkers from an environmental standpoint –– and exhausting too!
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
I'd add Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University.
He argues that it is likely we are living in a computer simulation hosted by a technologically advanced civilization. https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html To me it is as convincing an argument for why we exist as any other and more convincing that most.
I would go further and argue that the simulation we live in is being run by a child who has got bored and switched on disaster mode.
Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
Leadsom price was beyond bonkers.
Wasn't it thought to have been due to a forgotten bot that kept buying long after her realistic chances had vanished?
Good Wisconsin numbers there for Trump, amongst the closest he has been in that pivotal swing state especially when not a single pollster had Trump ahead in Wisconsin in 2016 and he won it anyway,
Even if Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, if he holds Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona he will be re elected
Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
Leadsom price was beyond bonkers.
I said at the time that Andrea Leadsom to believe she was in with a chance.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
It just all seems a bit wanky to me. I'd rather ask questions that make sense, or that we have some hope of answering. Perhaps I'm just not very clever, I had to ask Google what jejune meant.
I don't know what the great philosophers say, but the weak anthropic principle makes a lot of sense to me.
It basically says that the universe is as it is because we're here to see it. It was otherwise, we wouldn't be here to ask the question. There are so many aspects that had to be just right for us to emerge (fine structure constant, big moon, just the right amount of water, solar output / atmospheric constitution, etc.) that survivorship bias must surely be a thing.
Unless there are multiple or maybe infinite parallel universes, which means one was bound to evolve conscious life, namely, ours.
Yes, I think that is really a corollary of the WAP. I suppose another alternative is an endless succession of different universes.
On topic, I think the poll is a pointer both to a major Johnson's strength, and a major Johnson weakness.
Johnson is often good at sensing the national mood and going with it. In this case, "yeah, I kind of see the point of the rule but am not a grass". And that's broadly been Johnson's vibe in his comments on it. That's a real talent politically - he knew it before polls confirmed it, and often judges that sort of thing well.
The trouble is that surfing the national mood is definitely NOT his job just now. The serious job is to maximise compliance among a weary public with a restriction intended to save lives. Clarity is all important - the rule is the rule, if you breach it and your neighbour shops you then she's right and you're wrong, pal. He'd get short term heat over that for being a killjoy, but it's the right thing to do for the good of the country and hopefully for him he'd reap the reward in the longer term. But he has far too much desire to be adored in the moment, as is obvious from other aspects of his life.
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
Heidegger was a Nazi. Also he begets Derrida and I can't be fucked with Derrida.
A surprising number of great European intellectuals at least flirted with Nazism. Le Corbusier is another.
Why are you surprised. Intellectuals often love dictatorship - just as long as they are the ones in the Eagles Nest, not the Gestapo cells.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Covid might do it for us, anyway. I saw a report in the FT yesterday about the future of aviation. The midway prediction was that airlines will be back to pre Covid levels of business by about 2023.
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Isn't that in large part because of the rise of the universal adoption of video conferencing?
Kind of makes people appreciate that flying half way across the globe for a single meeting then flying back may not actually be necessary afterall.
Will be one of the big plusses coming out of this – the pressure to travel for business for, as you say, one or two meetings was bonkers from an environmental standpoint –– and exhausting too!
My sense from the Zoom and Teams calls I have been doing with various clients, contacts and partners around the world is that people are desperate to get out and about again. They like aspects of the new normal but are dying inside that it may mean less travel. Our events business has plumeted, of course, but has had some real success in pivoting to online. However, we are gettig nowhere near the traction we got from physical events. My guess is that once they are up and running again the first year back will be huge.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
I never said I agreed with him. My point was more that a highly intelligent, well-informed person is entertaining this idea, so God knows what the great unwashed are thinking.
FWIW I do not think he is provably wrong. His theory is decidedly unorthodox and very probably mistaken, but 100% impossible? No.
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
I'd add Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University.
He argues that it is likely we are living in a computer simulation hosted by a technologically advanced civilization. https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html To me it is as convincing an argument for why we exist as any other and more convincing that most.
I would go further and argue that the simulation we live in is being run by a child who has got bored and switched on disaster mode.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
Well, if the Chinese did that, they are idiots.
The supply chain disruptions alone have caused people to seriously reconsider where the next generation of various things is going to be sourced from.
Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
Is Survey Monkey a gigantic voodoo poll?
I don't believe so.
The classic voodoo poll is one where the sample is self-selecting (e.g. a Twitter or newspaper website "poll").
I don't think Survey Monkey do that with their polls, even though their wider brand is a sort of cheap and cheerful way of getting a link out to whoever wants to take part. I think for the election polling it's a methodologically legitimate operation, albeit not necessarily a highly rated pollster with a long and successful track record.
Anecdotally, I sense Brits are now properly scared. Masks are universal on London transport (if you can spot any passengers). Maskless people in supermarkets are a rarity, and get hard stares. Pubs and restaurants are strictly obeying the new rules already.
It may be different elsewhere in the country but in London nearly everyone is now wary.
I don't know what part of London you travel in but in East London the notion of universal mask wearing on the tubes is risible.
My estimation from the last two days of travelling from east London into the centre has been 80% compliance with full face covering, 15% with the mask pulled down over the mouth or chin and 5% not wearing them at all. 0% enforcement and 0% attempting to stop or remind any passenger entering a station without a mask.
I'd also wonder about the correlation about non-mask compliance and fare evasion.
I do accept there are many areas where the acceptance of and abidance with the rules is strong but in my part of the world, even in shops and supermarkets, it isn't and I have to yet to see a single store employee challenge an individual not wearing a mask - I suspect they are terrified of the viral YouTube video from the anti-mask brigade.
TfL need to buy millions of disposable masks (there’s no supply problems any more), and routinely both hand them out and hand out fines for non-compliance.
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
I'd add Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University.
He argues that it is likely we are living in a computer simulation hosted by a technologically advanced civilization. https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html To me it is as convincing an argument for why we exist as any other and more convincing that most.
I would go further and argue that the simulation we live in is being run by a child who has got bored and switched on disaster mode.
My theory is that God exists, the trouble is He's always been a bit of a drinker, and just recently He's being trying ketamine
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
Makes sense, the scheme is only really useful for skilled manufacturing jobs.
Which are the ones you need to preserve and protect.
I agree with that, broadly speaking. But don't be surprised if Sunak's stock takes a hit when the unemployment rate soars and people ask why his scheme hasn't stopped people losing their jobs.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
Well, if the Chinese did that, they are idiots.
The supply chain disruptions alone have caused people to seriously reconsider where the next generation of various things is going to be sourced from.
It makes no sense. The Chinese "business model" is already winning i.e. steal IP / evolve existing products, use their massive labour force and currency manipulation to be undercut the competition, dominate an industry, buy up remaining Western companies for further IP / development and pump money into developing countries (with loads of strings attached).
Before COVID, I doubt anybody but a few specialists really understood just how dominant China is in so many sectors now e.g. world pharma production is totally reliant on China production of base chemicals or just how much of the tech sector the likes of Tencent have bought up. They were quietly taking over the world without the need to be fighting any physical wars.
Why disrupt this winning business model. It makes no sense to do so. Now a huge spotlight has been directed on the West over-reliance on China. The pressure is now to do something about that going forward (I have my doubts any leaders really will, as it will result in short term price increases).
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
Heidegger was a Nazi. Also he begets Derrida and I can't be fucked with Derrida.
A surprising number of great European intellectuals at least flirted with Nazism. Le Corbusier is another.
Why are you surprised. Intellectuals often love dictatorship - just as long as they are the ones in the Eagles Nest, not the Gestapo cells.
Or one of Corbusier's country houses rather than his concrete tower blocks.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
I never said I agreed with him. My point was more that a highly intelligent, well-informed person is entertaining this idea, so God knows what the great unwashed are thinking.
FWIW I do not think he is provably wrong. His theory is decidedly unorthodox and very probably mistaken, but 100% impossible? No.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
Why would anyone make a biological weapon that is especially lethal to the ageing, less productive members of society but leaves the youngsters virtually untouched? Surely some variant of the Spanish (actually probably American, natch) flu would have made more sense.
YouGov. Actual Crosstabs that make sense. Joy unbridaled.
Indeed!
In fact the YouGov figures are a bit disappointing for Biden. Survey Monkey's are much more to his liking but it's little more than a Voodoo Poll.
There has again been a number of interesting polls posted on RCP - seven for the Presidential race and various others. It's another mixed bag but generally you have to look less hard for good news for the challenger. Virginia, surprisingly, is the best of the seven for Trump, but as Alistair indicated earlier the cross-tables reveal some absurd adjustments. Iowa is the stand-out poll for Biden. It's not a million miles out from other pollsters either so maybe something is happening there.
Good Wisconsin numbers there for Trump, amongst the closest he has been in that pivotal swing state especially when not a single pollster had Trump ahead in Wisconsin in 2016 and he won it anyway,
Even if Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, if he holds Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona he will be re elected
At least 5 points down a month from the election when 90% of voters say they have made up their minds is not good for Trump
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
I never said I agreed with him. My point was more that a highly intelligent, well-informed person is entertaining this idea, so God knows what the great unwashed are thinking.
FWIW I do not think he is provably wrong. His theory is decidedly unorthodox and very probably mistaken, but 100% impossible? No.
And mine that he's likely not very well informed.
Better than you are. "way beyond anyone's technical ability" is just as wrong as wrong could be.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
Why would anyone make a biological weapon that is especially lethal to the ageing, less productive members of society but leaves the youngsters virtually untouched? Surely some variant of the Spanish (actually probably American, natch) flu would have made more sense.
It's also quite a bit less different from the bat coronaviruses (easier mutation) than, for example, SARS was. And SARS was traced back through natural mutation all the way, eventually.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
improbable. probably.
The point is more that it could not have been done without leaving such tracks.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
improbable. probably.
We know this lab in Wuhan was investigating coronaviruses in bats.
Is it absolutely impossible that a secret team discovered a novel bat coronavirus that would, in its peculiar ways, particularly impact western economies which succeed because of their freedom, liberalism, and individidualism, whereas the same virus would be less destructive of conforming, autocratic societies like China, which are able to control and surveil their populations with much greater ease?
We've discussed this before. Even if this scenario is highly improbable it would make a great plot for a Hollywood movie.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
It was a wind up HYUFD. Note my sign off. You are right, there is no difference.
Although from a personal perspective the pub wins hands down.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
Why would anyone make a biological weapon that is especially lethal to the ageing, less productive members of society but leaves the youngsters virtually untouched? Surely some variant of the Spanish (actually probably American, natch) flu would have made more sense.
Search me, I am just pointing out that we are dealing in possibilities.
To fck society up but leave a vigorous, enslavable young workforce for when you invade in 2022 would be one answer, though.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
Why would anyone make a biological weapon that is especially lethal to the ageing, less productive members of society but leaves the youngsters virtually untouched? Surely some variant of the Spanish (actually probably American, natch) flu would have made more sense.
Search me, I am just pointing out that we are dealing in possibilities.
To fck society up but leave a vigorous, enslavable young workforce for when you invade in 2022 would be one answer, though.
Many things are possible, but it only really makes sense to devote brain space to the ones that aren't wildly improbable.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
improbable. probably.
The point is more that it could not have been done without leaving such tracks.
Why not? It's just a lot of As, Cs, Gs and Ts. Non-metaphorically, what would a "track" look like?
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
Well, if the Chinese did that, they are idiots.
The supply chain disruptions alone have caused people to seriously reconsider where the next generation of various things is going to be sourced from.
It makes no sense. The Chinese "business model" is already winning i.e. steal IP / evolve existing products, use their massive labour force and currency manipulation to be undercut the competition, dominate an industry, buy up remaining Western companies for further IP / development and pump money into developing countries (with loads of strings attached).
Before COVID, I doubt anybody but a few specialists really understood just how dominant China is in so many sectors now e.g. world pharma production is totally reliant on China production of base chemicals or just how much of the tech sector the likes of Tencent have bought up. They were quietly taking over the world without the need to be fighting any physical wars.
Why disrupt this winning business model. It makes no sense to do so. Now a huge spotlight has been directed on the West over-reliance on China. The pressure is now to do something about that going forward (I have my doubts any leaders really will, as it will result in short term price increases).
One reason could be to make the world look away (even more) as China destroys its Uighur community, clamps down on Hong Kong, and generally jails its people in a hi tech prison.
And a disease that kills the old is quite useful to societies with ageing populations - Asia being the worst in this case.
There are pluses in this virus, for China. And look at this, its economy is recovering strongly, and is expected to record positive GDP growth for 2020.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
improbable. probably.
The point is more that it could not have been done without leaving such tracks.
Why not? It's just a lot of As, Cs, Gs and Ts. Non-metaphorically, what would a "track" look like?
At the end of the day, it's all just quarks and leptons.
New scheme already proving a success in my limited circles, one person reporting that they have been asked to come back, someone who was previously resisting going back to work. Now that some amount of work is required to qualify there is going to be huge pressure on people previously happy to sit on their arses to stop doing so and come to some kind of agreement with their workplaces for reduced hours or something like that.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
Well, if the Chinese did that, they are idiots.
The supply chain disruptions alone have caused people to seriously reconsider where the next generation of various things is going to be sourced from.
It makes no sense. The Chinese "business model" is already winning i.e. steal IP / evolve existing products, use their massive labour force and currency manipulation to be undercut the competition, dominate an industry, buy up remaining Western companies for further IP / development and pump money into developing countries (with loads of strings attached).
Before COVID, I doubt anybody but a few specialists really understood just how dominant China is in so many sectors now e.g. world pharma production is totally reliant on China production of base chemicals or just how much of the tech sector the likes of Tencent have bought up. They were quietly taking over the world without the need to be fighting any physical wars.
Why disrupt this winning business model. It makes no sense to do so. Now a huge spotlight has been directed on the West over-reliance on China. The pressure is now to do something about that going forward (I have my doubts any leaders really will, as it will result in short term price increases).
One reason could be to make the world look away (even more) as China destroys its Uighur community, clamps down on Hong Kong, and generally jails its people in a hi tech prison.
And a disease that kills the old is quite useful to societies with ageing populations - Asia being the worst in this case.
There are pluses in this virus, for China. And look at this, its economy is recovering strongly, and is expected to record positive GDP growth for 2020.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
Why would anyone make a biological weapon that is especially lethal to the ageing, less productive members of society but leaves the youngsters virtually untouched? Surely some variant of the Spanish (actually probably American, natch) flu would have made more sense.
Another possibility is that this is a mixture of cock up and conspiracy.
Given the malign and rather paranoid nature of the CCP its quite likely they are developing nasty bioweapons, like novel coronaviruses. As we can now see, these weapons would be more effective than any ordinary weapon, in terms of damaging enemies without destroying the world.
Maybe that lab in Wuhan was charged with finding such viruses, for use in emergency, if, say, the USA threatened nuclear war over Taiwan. The idea would be to develop the bug, and a vaccine to go with it, so China could infect and then save the planet, becoming completely hegemonic.
But then some worker in the Wuhan lab got drunk on cheap Chinese whisky, and decided to sell a couple of bats in the wet market, and chose the wrong bats, and the deadly virus was released by accident, before they had the vaccine ready.
I shall sell this idea to Netflix (or whichever Chinese company buys up Netflix next year)
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
improbable. probably.
We know this lab in Wuhan was investigating coronaviruses in bats.
Is it absolutely impossible that a secret team discovered a novel bat coronavirus that would, in its peculiar ways, particularly impact western economies which succeed because of their freedom, liberalism, and individidualism, whereas the same virus would be less destructive of conforming, autocratic societies like China, which are able to control and surveil their populations with much greater ease?
We've discussed this before. Even if this scenario is highly improbable it would make a great plot for a Hollywood movie.
But COVID impacts less on individualistic people and more on those who socialise.
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
improbable. probably.
We know this lab in Wuhan was investigating coronaviruses in bats.
Is it absolutely impossible that a secret team discovered a novel bat coronavirus that would, in its peculiar ways, particularly impact western economies which succeed because of their freedom, liberalism, and individidualism, whereas the same virus would be less destructive of conforming, autocratic societies like China, which are able to control and surveil their populations with much greater ease?
We've discussed this before. Even if this scenario is highly improbable it would make a great plot for a Hollywood movie.
But COVID impacts less on individualistic people and more on those who socialise.
But it impacts more on individualistic SOCIETIES, full of people resistant to mask wearing, surveillance, compulsory vaccines. eg The United States of America
The way we dealt with the 1968/69 flu epidemic was arguably better, for the simple reason that most people from the time can't even remember it.
In some ways 1968 was a lot worse that this time.
Its brutal to say it but many of the people classed as 'vulnerable' today would have been classed as 'already dead' in 1968, because medicine was streets behind what they can do now. These people would simply have already passed. Their co-morbidities would have got there before corona got a chance.
the 1968 epidemic would have cut into what we regard as 'healthy' much more.
Modern medicine has grown a crop of humans like we have never seen before, and it would be just like nature to come up with something to harvest that crop. Which is essentially what has happened
I had Covid-complient drinks with a very smart friend in a Highgate pub last night (patio heaters, temperature checks, track and trace, booked table for two hours, the works).
He's been dealing with China for a couple of decades, in his business; he knows the country very well, before the Plague he visited it half a dozen times a year (including Wuhan).
He's extremely level headed, a calmly successful businessman. To my astonishment he thinks it quite possible the Chinese deliberately manufactured the virus so as to damage the West, and increase Chinese power.
I was a bit gobsmacked.
And what's his expertise in virology ? Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Not so. The only paper I have seen on the subject (in Nature I think) said that the virus couldn't be man made because a scientist would have done it a bit differently, *not* couldn't have done it at all.
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
improbable. probably.
The point is more that it could not have been done without leaving such tracks.
Why not? It's just a lot of As, Cs, Gs and Ts. Non-metaphorically, what would a "track" look like?
Sorry, ACGU. It's an RNA virus. Standards of pedantry slipping here.
Cats are perfectly able to do the same. They just can't be arsed.
So you agree with me then?
Cats aren't useless.
They are just useless to humans.
This reminds me of a mock question when I was studying philosophy for my degree: What is the point of sparrows?
Underlying the flippantly-worded question is the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value. The latter meaning "providing utility to humans" and the former meaning "having value in itself - i.e. in accord with nature".
Assuming you mean domesticated cats, they, like domesticated dogs, are a human construct. The result of centuries of genetic-engineering-by-humans for human need. Therefore they are, I would argue, part of the human realm rather than the natural realm. Therefore, it follows, they have bags of instrumental value but no intrinsic value.
Tigers, in contrast, have bags of intrinsic value but no, or very little, instrumental value. Therefore they - like so many other species - are fucked. (See Attenborough programme the other night and weep.)
There's a whole tourist industry based around tiger watching - and it's a highly lucrative industry in otherwise poor areas of India. So that's not really true
The point is that their value is (or, rather, should be) bound up in intrinsic value rather than value to humans (regardless of the quantity of value to humans).
This debate reminds me of a famous theological question/answer
Why does it rain?
No scientist can really answer that. They can explain HOW it rains, the mechanism of evaporation, precipitation, and so on, but not the WHY
A believer, on the other hand, can say: it rains to feed the wheat that grows to feed mankind, so that he may sing the praise of God.
Religion often gives you an answer to WHY, which is hugely important to human happiness.
The question why does it rain is just a meaningless question. There is a physical mechanism that leads to rainfall, but trying to find some deeper meaning is pointless. Anyway, your answer only invites more questions. Why is there a God and why would she want us to sing to her?
You may find this pointless, but the question was sufficient to make Ludwig Wittgenstein something of a believer.
That is to say: "Why is there anything at all?" - or, as he put it:
"Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is." Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.44
To ask why is to presuppose that it was a conscious choice, which basically invites the answer "because God". It just is, try to enjoy it and don't ruin it for everyone else.
I disagree. Because why does anything exist at all? is a good question. If the underlying principle of everything was, say, "simplicity", then nothing would exist at all, as that would be much simpler than all this stuff. Maybe the only alternative underlying principle of everything is "confusion", which would explain a lot. And it makes all the shit easier to take, if the only alternative is nothing existing at all.
It is also one of the great questions of philosophy. It has been directly addressed, over the centuries, by Aristotle, Aquinas, Liebniz, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein and Stephen Hawking, amongst many others. Martin Heidegger called it the "fundamental question of metaphysics", so dismissing it as a triviality is somewhat jejune.
I'd add Nick Bostrom, Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University.
He argues that it is likely we are living in a computer simulation hosted by a technologically advanced civilization. https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html To me it is as convincing an argument for why we exist as any other and more convincing that most.
I would go further and argue that the simulation we live in is being run by a child who has got bored and switched on disaster mode.
Thought that for while
Simulation Theory is essentially god for tech loving atheists. Nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t answer the question, who/what created the thing that created us.
With my limited cranial capacity it is much more straightforward just to take it that existence is eternal and our universe is a mere bubble within an infinite plain. There’s no beginning or end because there is no time. Just a plain upon which basic particle building blocks have an explosion of ever increasing complexity, before eventually drifting via entropy into a cool and endless glow.
In short, there’s as much point worrying about what happens to your consciousness after life as there is worrying about what it was up to before you were born. If there is no time, there is no before and after. There’s just little bubbles of complexity sitting on an endless plain variously composed of particle building blocks and cool glows of heat death.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
I don't actually agree with this, and think the obsessive desire for total consistency in COVID restrictions is utterly wrong-headed.
The purpose of COVID restrictions short of full lockdown is simply to reduce and not to eliminate the situations where the virus can be passed.
I understand the church's cry that you're probably less likely to catch something there than at the pub, and feel sympathy for devout Christians and so on, but that really isn't the point. Closing the church reduces transmission compared with not closing it, and with low risk that the church won't be there for people in six months time. Closing the pub also reduces transmission compared with not closing it, but there is a high risk it just won't reopen (and more jobs are on the line, and more taxes etc).
Seems to me some people are after a foolish consistency and want to ignore plainly relevant economic considerations and pretend they aren't there.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
But at least there is some point to going out for a meal or down the pub.
Good Wisconsin numbers there for Trump, amongst the closest he has been in that pivotal swing state especially when not a single pollster had Trump ahead in Wisconsin in 2016 and he won it anyway,
Even if Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, if he holds Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona he will be re elected
At least 5 points down a month from the election when 90% of voters say they have made up their minds is not good for Trump
The RCP final poll average in Wisconsin had Trump 6.5% down in 2016 and Trump won the state by 0.7% so if he is only 5% down on the same error Trump will win Wisconsin again in November.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
In 1968/69 my mum was a first year medical student, and also had a part-time job in a medical laboratory. She can't recall the flu epidemic from that time, despite the fact it killed 80,000 people in the UK and between one and four million globally, and her memory is pretty good generally speaking.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
Have you chosen a date for your wedding? I heard a radio prog on which someone had fixed a date for Aug 2021...
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Covid might do it for us, anyway. I saw a report in the FT yesterday about the future of aviation. The midway prediction was that airlines will be back to pre Covid levels of business by about 2023.
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Isn't that in large part because of the rise of the universal adoption of video conferencing?
Kind of makes people appreciate that flying half way across the globe for a single meeting then flying back may not actually be necessary afterall.
Will be one of the big plusses coming out of this – the pressure to travel for business for, as you say, one or two meetings was bonkers from an environmental standpoint –– and exhausting too!
My sense from the Zoom and Teams calls I have been doing with various clients, contacts and partners around the world is that people are desperate to get out and about again. They like aspects of the new normal but are dying inside that it may mean less travel. Our events business has plumeted, of course, but has had some real success in pivoting to online. However, we are gettig nowhere near the traction we got from physical events. My guess is that once they are up and running again the first year back will be huge.
Just finished a Zoom meeting of a group to which I belong. All over 55's. We've around 300 members, 100 or so of whom normally attend the monthly meeting which this replaced. We had about 20 at this meeting and nowhere the interaction we normally get. Admittedly it was a rather masculine subject and the majority of our members are female, but even so.
Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, said its citizens “also love freedom, but we also care about seriousness”, responding to Boris Johnson’s suggestion that the UK’s rate of coronavirus infection was worse than both Italy and Germany’s because Britons loved their freedom more.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
Lots of problems with this.
Firstly, that quite a lot of religious people voted Tory simply shouldn't be a consideration. Once elected, governments are there for the entire population not just to pay back those who supported them.
Secondly, land ownership means 0% of sod all in this context. The land the Church owns and manages is still there whether churches themselves are open over the next few months or not.
Thirdly, honestly how much do Cathedral gift shops and cafes contribute to the economy? I don't want to be harsh, and genuinely feel awful personally for people working there or anywhere that can't operate due to restrictions. But in terms of the national economy as a whole, this is almost invisibly tiny stuff.
Can anyone explain to me the hoo har about Vallance owning GSK stock ?
Bloody hell, I read the headline and thought it was about some sort of startup company. I mean, everybody owns GSK one way or another. And some numpty this morning was celebrating that story, plus Carrie goes on hols, as evidence of the superexcellence of our press.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
But that’s not your church, the building etc
Taking communion every week is also a vital spiritual role for Christians.
The Tories won 58% of the Anglican vote at GE17 for example and 63% of the Jewish vote and 40% of the Catholic vote (the Tories even won the Catholic vote in 2019) and the Tories also won the Methodist, Baptist and Church of Scotland vote.
The Protestant and Jewish vote is now part of the Tory base and cannot be ignored, only 32% of those with no religious affiliation vote Tory so they are not part of the Tory base and can be ignored on this if they object to places of worship re opening.
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Covid might do it for us, anyway. I saw a report in the FT yesterday about the future of aviation. The midway prediction was that airlines will be back to pre Covid levels of business by about 2023.
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Isn't that in large part because of the rise of the universal adoption of video conferencing?
Kind of makes people appreciate that flying half way across the globe for a single meeting then flying back may not actually be necessary afterall.
Will be one of the big plusses coming out of this – the pressure to travel for business for, as you say, one or two meetings was bonkers from an environmental standpoint –– and exhausting too!
My sense from the Zoom and Teams calls I have been doing with various clients, contacts and partners around the world is that people are desperate to get out and about again. They like aspects of the new normal but are dying inside that it may mean less travel. Our events business has plumeted, of course, but has had some real success in pivoting to online. However, we are gettig nowhere near the traction we got from physical events. My guess is that once they are up and running again the first year back will be huge.
As I mentioned upthread - I can't wait to get on the Eurostar to Paris, or go to Milan, Zurich & Geneva. Even to Schipol.
I have been out to dinner twice since March 23rd and need to get a few more of those in the diary also.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
But that’s not your church, the building etc
Taking communion every week is also a vital spiritual role for Christians.
The Tories won 58% of the Anglican vote at GE17 for example and 63% of the Jewish vote and 40% of the Catholic vote and the Tories also won the Methodist, Baptist and Church of Scotland vote.
The Christian and Jewish vote is now part of the Tory base and cannot be ignored, only 32% of those with no religious affiliation vote Tory so they are not part of the Tory base and can be ignored on this if they object to places of worship re opening.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
But that’s not your church, the building etc
Taking communion every week is also a vital spiritual role for Christians.
The Tories won 58% of the Anglican vote at GE17 for example and 63% of the Jewish vote and 40% of the Catholic vote and the Tories also won the Methodist, Baptist and Church of Scotland vote.
The Christian and Jewish vote is now part of the Tory base and cannot be ignored, only 32% of those with no religious affiliation vote Tory so they are not part of the Tory base and can be ignored on this if they object to places of worship re opening.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
But that’s not your church, the building etc
Taking communion every week is also a vital spiritual role for Christians.
The Tories won 58% of the Anglican vote at GE17 for example and 63% of the Jewish vote and 40% of the Catholic vote and the Tories also won the Methodist, Baptist and Church of Scotland vote.
The Protestant and Jewish vote is now part of the Tory base and cannot be ignored, only 32% of those with no religious affiliation vote Tory so they are not part of the Tory base and can be ignored on this if they object to places of worship re opening.
China pledging to be carbon neutral by 2060 is absolutely massive news. If they do that then it will absolutely dwarf anything we may do by 2050 in significance.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Covid might do it for us, anyway. I saw a report in the FT yesterday about the future of aviation. The midway prediction was that airlines will be back to pre Covid levels of business by about 2023.
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Isn't that in large part because of the rise of the universal adoption of video conferencing?
Kind of makes people appreciate that flying half way across the globe for a single meeting then flying back may not actually be necessary afterall.
Will be one of the big plusses coming out of this – the pressure to travel for business for, as you say, one or two meetings was bonkers from an environmental standpoint –– and exhausting too!
My sense from the Zoom and Teams calls I have been doing with various clients, contacts and partners around the world is that people are desperate to get out and about again. They like aspects of the new normal but are dying inside that it may mean less travel. Our events business has plumeted, of course, but has had some real success in pivoting to online. However, we are gettig nowhere near the traction we got from physical events. My guess is that once they are up and running again the first year back will be huge.
It may be a good idea to make travel bookings for the second half of next year and beyond as soon as possible.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
Lots of problems with this.
Firstly, that quite a lot of religious people voted Tory simply shouldn't be a consideration. Once elected, governments are there for the entire population not just to pay back those who supported them.
Secondly, land ownership means 0% of sod all in this context. The land the Church owns and manages is still there whether churches themselves are open over the next few months or not.
Thirdly, honestly how much do Cathedral gift shops and cafes contribute to the economy? I don't want to be harsh, and genuinely feel awful personally for people working there or anywhere that can't operate due to restrictions. But in terms of the national economy as a whole, this is almost invisibly tiny stuff.
Wrong, you win an election on your manifesto and to reward your supporters primarily and to make it more likely you will be re elected.
In cathedral cities cathedrals bring in lots of tourists and worshippers
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
But that’s not your church, the building etc
Taking communion every week is also a vital spiritual role for Christians.
The Tories won 58% of the Anglican vote at GE17 for example and 63% of the Jewish vote and 40% of the Catholic vote and the Tories also won the Methodist, Baptist and Church of Scotland vote.
The Christian and Jewish vote is now part of the Tory base and cannot be ignored, only 32% of those with no religious affiliation vote Tory so they are not part of the Tory base and can be ignored on this if they object to places of worship re opening.
So if you don’t vote Tory your view can be ignored! Explains a lot.
Corbyn would of course have ignored the views of Tories had he won so yes the Tories will reward their core vote now they have a majority of 80 and rightly so.
Though even Corbyn would have had to take account of one religious group, the Muslim vote in terms of keeping Mosques open as Muslims vote Labour in even higher numbers than the non religious
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
Lots of problems with this.
Firstly, that quite a lot of religious people voted Tory simply shouldn't be a consideration. Once elected, governments are there for the entire population not just to pay back those who supported them.
Secondly, land ownership means 0% of sod all in this context. The land the Church owns and manages is still there whether churches themselves are open over the next few months or not.
Thirdly, honestly how much do Cathedral gift shops and cafes contribute to the economy? I don't want to be harsh, and genuinely feel awful personally for people working there or anywhere that can't operate due to restrictions. But in terms of the national economy as a whole, this is almost invisibly tiny stuff.
This argument is flawed. You can't measure everything in terms of % of GDP. Air is an obvious example. Agriculture is an insignificant % of GDP but still manages 75-80% of the land while feeding us too. Try doing without it.
Churches/other religions/other institutions which bring people together, provide all sorts of local services (sacred and secular), like say all the local hockey teams and 5 a side football players provide about zero to GDP but massively to the gross human decent experience and community measure. The list is endless. Grandparents' child care is GDP zero, real world massive.
So - if this morning’s newspaper reports are true - there will be no help for the one sector which has been specifically targeted by the latest restrictions: the hospitality sector, despite it being apparently a source of only 5% of the increase in infections.
If true, a disgrace.
This sector has lost most of its spring/summer season, will lose the Xmas/NY season, possibly the start of the next spring season and, even while open, is losing a very significant percentage of its normal trading. Early closing will do little to help stop the virus’s spread but will do a great deal of damage to this sector.
I really hope the newspaper reports are wrong.
In other news Trump makes it clear he’s going to steal the election.
Please tell me there’s some good news somewhere.
2.5 hours to go until we find out.
I don't trust media reports. Remember Peston saying he'd been authoritatively told that the Chancellor had no major news to announce . . . about 30 minutes before the Chancellor announced the furlough scheme?
The media have to sell column inches and develop clickbait. Lets find out what the Chancellor actually announces, I'd be shocked if there's no help for hospitality considering his summer job support scheme was almost exclusively targetted at hospitality.
I work in Hospitality so I am hopeful that something can be done. The current restrictions require more staff to earn less money - this is not really sustainable, and hopefully something can be done specifically to address this.
The second point I don’t see on here is with regards to evidence. I obviously have an interest here but the I don’t see the evidence that cases now being detected are actually linked to a rise in hospitalisations and deaths, which sure surely be the key metric as they are what is supposed to differentiate this from other seasonal viruses.
I agree.
Here you go: (Hospitalisations in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
(Deaths in England by day - bars are raw numbers, line is 7-day average)
Where did you get this from - I`ve been looking for similar without luck?
Can I confirm - these are hospitalisations due to Covid - rather than total daily hospitalisations?
You can create your own graphs comparing what you like - the data is on the "Data" tab on each area.
Can you revise your doubling period estimate from a few days ago? I recall you had the doubling time listed for a number of days showing how it had changed.
(95% sure it was you...)
Sure.
Current doubling time is 9.7 days. The average doubling time over the past seven days has been 12.2 days, with a maximum doubling time of 15.9 days and a minimum of 7.5 days. (The trajectory isn't constant - sometimes steeper and sometimes slower)
It's better than it was a week ago, when the doubling time was 7.5 days (average over the preceding week had been 8.0 days, with a maximum of 11.3 days and a minimum of 6.3 days).
I think it's improving, but slowly. At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating (if you see what I mean). This improvement, though is slow - it'd take nearly 20 days for it to level off unless that rate of levelling increases. I hope it improves a bit faster. God knows, I don't want more restrictions.
Do you really mean "At least the rate of acceleration has stopped accelerating"? Accelleration is the second derivative and the rate of accelleration is the third derivative. If the third derivative has stopped accellerating then the fifth derivative is 0. (!)
At least if the 5th derivative is zero then the growth cannot be exponentiial :-)
I presume you mean the number of hospitsations have stopped accelerating, meaning the second derivative is zero. All this reminds me of the famous quote by Nixon on inflation.
Yeah. I'm not the most eloquent, sometimes.
The doubling period had been getting shorter and shorter. This - over the past few days - seems to have started to reverse. I bloody well hope it's not just a blip (very short time period to extrapolate out from). If so, we may - just may - have shifted the exponent down sufficiently.
However, I would highlight a warning of motivated reasoning - it's something I very much want to be true. That adds a strong warning to the analysis from me.
What do you make of Israel? Their situation is now borderline catastrophic. They're going back into Absolute Lockdown, and they had 11,000 new cases yesterday
Some are blaming schools, others are blaming conservative Jews and Muslims, who are still congregating.
To me it is quite ominous, as Israel - with its surveillance systems, and sealed borders, and hi tech society - is a country which SHOULD have controlled this.
Organised religion.
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Utter rubbish, my church has compulsory mask wearing, hand sanitiser on arrival and departure and social distancing in pews
But your church isn't every church/mosque/.... and some have had appalling adherence to sensible behaviour. What is more there is no necessity to attend in person. Not being there is better protection than social distancing, masks and sanitizer.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
If you ban in person church, mosque and temple attendance you must also close pubs, restaurants, gyms, indoor cinemas and non essential shops too, as long as they remain open then so should churches. There are just as many pubs breaching guidance as places of worship, probably more.
End of
Does your church contribute to the economy? If not then it’s fair game for shutting down with the current government.
This government won the Anglican, Catholic and Jewish vote at the last election and it is culturally as well as economically more conservative. A lot of Tory members like me and a lot of Tory MPs are also regular church goers. Plus of course a large percentage of land in England is owned by the Church of England, including commercial premises and of course there are cafes and gift shops in our great cathedrals so yes it does contribute to the economy
But that’s not your church, the building etc
Taking communion every week is also a vital spiritual role for Christians.
The Tories won 58% of the Anglican vote at GE17 for example and 63% of the Jewish vote and 40% of the Catholic vote and the Tories also won the Methodist, Baptist and Church of Scotland vote.
The Christian and Jewish vote is now part of the Tory base and cannot be ignored, only 32% of those with no religious affiliation vote Tory so they are not part of the Tory base and can be ignored on this if they object to places of worship re opening.
So if you don’t vote Tory your view can be ignored! Explains a lot.
Corbyn would of course have ignored the views of Tories had he won so yes the Tories will reward their core vote now they have a majority of 80 and rightly so
On less than50% of the vote representing a minority of electors.
Comments
Biden should be on about 80% in the market I think. Trump being close to evens is as inexplicable as the support that Leadsom had in the market at the Tory leadership election.
If they do, there's really no excuse for the USA not to start taking things seriously.
Up to 40 backbench Tories want to vote against the Government. If Starmer supports the Government that is not helpful to BoZo...
https://twitter.com/JGForsyth/status/1309113072334888964
However the reasonable worst case scenario (not extreme worst case) was that airline business will not return to pre-virus levels of activity until... 2039.
TWENTY YEARS. A human generation.
If that pans out then feck knows what the rest of the world economy will be doing
Why would you criticise the government as not fit for purpose, then give it six months to do whatever it wanted?
Massive vector everywhere.
Ban it!
Kind of makes people appreciate that flying half way across the globe for a single meeting then flying back may not actually be necessary afterall.
Would have been remarkable to have even one of them headed by a woman until fairly recently.
It basically says that the universe is as it is because we're here to see it. If it were otherwise, we wouldn't be here to ask the question. There are so many aspects that had to be just right for us to emerge (fine structure constant, big moon, just the right amount of water, solar output / atmospheric constitution, etc.) that survivorship bias must surely be a thing.
I am, now what?
He argues that it is likely we are living in a computer simulation hosted by a technologically advanced civilization.
https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
To me it is as convincing an argument for why we exist as any other and more convincing that most.
I would go further and argue that the simulation we live in is being run by a child who has got bored and switched on disaster mode.
Even if Trump loses Michigan and Pennsylvania, if he holds Wisconsin, Florida and Arizona he will be re elected
Clearly it's not beyond the moral compass of the current regime, but it's way beyond anyone's technical ability to do any such thing.
Johnson is often good at sensing the national mood and going with it. In this case, "yeah, I kind of see the point of the rule but am not a grass". And that's broadly been Johnson's vibe in his comments on it. That's a real talent politically - he knew it before polls confirmed it, and often judges that sort of thing well.
The trouble is that surfing the national mood is definitely NOT his job just now. The serious job is to maximise compliance among a weary public with a restriction intended to save lives. Clarity is all important - the rule is the rule, if you breach it and your neighbour shops you then she's right and you're wrong, pal. He'd get short term heat over that for being a killjoy, but it's the right thing to do for the good of the country and hopefully for him he'd reap the reward in the longer term. But he has far too much desire to be adored in the moment, as is obvious from other aspects of his life.
Yours, a completely unbiased atheist.
FWIW I do not think he is provably wrong. His theory is decidedly unorthodox and very probably mistaken, but 100% impossible? No.
The supply chain disruptions alone have caused people to seriously reconsider where the next generation of various things is going to be sourced from.
The classic voodoo poll is one where the sample is self-selecting (e.g. a Twitter or newspaper website "poll").
I don't think Survey Monkey do that with their polls, even though their wider brand is a sort of cheap and cheerful way of getting a link out to whoever wants to take part. I think for the election polling it's a methodologically legitimate operation, albeit not necessarily a highly rated pollster with a long and successful track record.
Edit here you go: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
"It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted7,11. Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used19."
improbable. probably.
End of
Before COVID, I doubt anybody but a few specialists really understood just how dominant China is in so many sectors now e.g. world pharma production is totally reliant on China production of base chemicals or just how much of the tech sector the likes of Tencent have bought up. They were quietly taking over the world without the need to be fighting any physical wars.
Why disrupt this winning business model. It makes no sense to do so. Now a huge spotlight has been directed on the West over-reliance on China. The pressure is now to do something about that going forward (I have my doubts any leaders really will, as it will result in short term price increases).
In fact the YouGov figures are a bit disappointing for Biden. Survey Monkey's are much more to his liking but it's little more than a Voodoo Poll.
There has again been a number of interesting polls posted on RCP - seven for the Presidential race and various others. It's another mixed bag but generally you have to look less hard for good news for the challenger. Virginia, surprisingly, is the best of the seven for Trump, but as Alistair indicated earlier the cross-tables reveal some absurd adjustments. Iowa is the stand-out poll for Biden. It's not a million miles out from other pollsters either so maybe something is happening there.
And SARS was traced back through natural mutation all the way, eventually.
Is it absolutely impossible that a secret team discovered a novel bat coronavirus that would, in its peculiar ways, particularly impact western economies which succeed because of their freedom, liberalism, and individidualism, whereas the same virus would be less destructive of conforming, autocratic societies like China, which are able to control and surveil their populations with much greater ease?
We've discussed this before. Even if this scenario is highly improbable it would make a great plot for a Hollywood movie.
Although from a personal perspective the pub wins hands down.
To fck society up but leave a vigorous, enslavable young workforce for when you invade in 2022 would be one answer, though.
And a disease that kills the old is quite useful to societies with ageing populations - Asia being the worst in this case.
There are pluses in this virus, for China. And look at this, its economy is recovering strongly, and is expected to record positive GDP growth for 2020.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/china-economy-gdp-goldman-oneill-2020-9-1029609792#
Given the malign and rather paranoid nature of the CCP its quite likely they are developing nasty bioweapons, like novel coronaviruses. As we can now see, these weapons would be more effective than any ordinary weapon, in terms of damaging enemies without destroying the world.
Maybe that lab in Wuhan was charged with finding such viruses, for use in emergency, if, say, the USA threatened nuclear war over Taiwan. The idea would be to develop the bug, and a vaccine to go with it, so China could infect and then save the planet, becoming completely hegemonic.
But then some worker in the Wuhan lab got drunk on cheap Chinese whisky, and decided to sell a couple of bats in the wet market, and chose the wrong bats, and the deadly virus was released by accident, before they had the vaccine ready.
I shall sell this idea to Netflix (or whichever Chinese company buys up Netflix next year)
With my limited cranial capacity it is much more straightforward just to take it that existence is eternal and our universe is a mere bubble within an infinite plain. There’s no beginning or end because there is no time. Just a plain upon which basic particle building blocks have an explosion of ever increasing complexity, before eventually drifting via entropy into a cool and endless glow.
In short, there’s as much point worrying about what happens to your consciousness after life as there is worrying about what it was up to before you were born. If there is no time, there is no before and after. There’s just little bubbles of complexity sitting on an endless plain variously composed of particle building blocks and cool glows of heat death.
The purpose of COVID restrictions short of full lockdown is simply to reduce and not to eliminate the situations where the virus can be passed.
I understand the church's cry that you're probably less likely to catch something there than at the pub, and feel sympathy for devout Christians and so on, but that really isn't the point. Closing the church reduces transmission compared with not closing it, and with low risk that the church won't be there for people in six months time. Closing the pub also reduces transmission compared with not closing it, but there is a high risk it just won't reopen (and more jobs are on the line, and more taxes etc).
Seems to me some people are after a foolish consistency and want to ignore plainly relevant economic considerations and pretend they aren't there.
That would be very good news for Trump
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/wi/wisconsin_trump_vs_clinton-5659.html
Firstly, that quite a lot of religious people voted Tory simply shouldn't be a consideration. Once elected, governments are there for the entire population not just to pay back those who supported them.
Secondly, land ownership means 0% of sod all in this context. The land the Church owns and manages is still there whether churches themselves are open over the next few months or not.
Thirdly, honestly how much do Cathedral gift shops and cafes contribute to the economy? I don't want to be harsh, and genuinely feel awful personally for people working there or anywhere that can't operate due to restrictions. But in terms of the national economy as a whole, this is almost invisibly tiny stuff.
He may be talking sense or nonsense but he is incredibly convincing. Quite the opposite of Johnson.
The Tories won 58% of the Anglican vote at GE17 for example and 63% of the Jewish vote and 40% of the Catholic vote (the Tories even won the Catholic vote in 2019) and the Tories also won the Methodist, Baptist and Church of Scotland vote.
The Protestant and Jewish vote is now part of the Tory base and cannot be ignored, only 32% of those with no religious affiliation vote Tory so they are not part of the Tory base and can be ignored on this if they object to places of worship re opening.
http://www.brin.ac.uk/religious-affiliation-and-party-choice-at-the-2017-general-election/
I have been out to dinner twice since March 23rd and need to get a few more of those in the diary also.
In cathedral cities cathedrals bring in lots of tourists and worshippers
Though even Corbyn would have had to take account of one religious group, the Muslim vote in terms of keeping Mosques open as Muslims vote Labour in even higher numbers than the non religious
Churches/other religions/other institutions which bring people together, provide all sorts of local services (sacred and secular), like say all the local hockey teams and 5 a side football players provide about zero to GDP but massively to the gross human decent experience and community measure. The list is endless. Grandparents' child care is GDP zero, real world massive.