Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
Umm, selection bias? Those who didn't die of disease had a full life...
Given the length of time it can seemingly take to get over Covid I'm prepared to wait a while yet.
In everyday life, we're used to a sliding scaling of risk, and corresponding sliding scale of precautions to manage those risks (though there's evidence people actually make many mistakes e.g. consistently overrate small risks and expend disproportionate efforts to mitigate them; Spiegelhalter published a lot of interesting stuff on this years ago, for those interested). I think this explains the attractiveness of a "Covid Alert Level" or similar, where in the red-zone we apply one code of social conduct, in the amber-zone a less strenuous one and so on. In principle, we should be able to apply measures proportional to the situation. In practice, because Exponential Growth Is Bad and uncertainty is high, I doubt application will ever be very granular - foot lightly on brake versus slamming the pedal down seem likely to be the two main choices.
Something Graham Medley has talked about is a kind of "R budgeting", whereby we find a set of restrictions we can live under that keep R at or below 1. Theoretically this sounds like a good way of producing a comprehensible code we can live by, and sounds like it should be sustainable in the long-run. But actually it would mean a bit of juggling in and out, his most famous suggestion being when schools returned after summer, some additional restriction like closing the pubs might be needed to balance things out. Winter means people spend more time indoors, so something else would have to change. Even if we had perfect knowledge of how social risks should balance, we shouldn't expect required regulations or social codes of conduct to be reassuringly stable. The darker cloud hanging over this is can we find a way of life that keeps R around or below 1 that is genuinely liveable, and psychologically and economically sustainable?
Restrictions may not need to be so onerous with other interventions like better contact-tracing, control of potential super-spreading events, maybe technological improvements like fast tests for contagiousness ... but at present, at least based on the UK and to some extent wider European experience, we should at least admit the possibility that we're not going to be able to stay on top of this thing without a bout or two more of some nasty socio-economic medicine. We can't just copy-and-paste the rules and regs from Sweden, or whoever is poster boy du jour, because of differences in everything from commuting patterns to household sizes to frequency of hugs and kisses, so what's sustainable in one country might not work in another. (Will also be interesting to see what happens in the Swedish winter when people mix indoors more.) I'm not saying we can't learn anything from other countries' experience, but I wonder if we'd ever have enough information to be able to successfully "fine-tune" an R budget - which would likely be an experimental, incremental process with further confusing rule changes and U-turns required - and we certainly can't borrow another country's wholesale.
It's worth noting that the R budget would gradually become more generous as the number of people who have had Covid slowly increased. This would at least give hope that there was light at the end of the tunnel.
Actually it's not obvious that that's true, or at least, true enough to be useful. If R-budgeting were implemented successfully for long-term control, then we'd be getting a relative trickle (not negligible, I grant) of new cases. Over a timescale of years (though fingers crossed for vaccinations to be available well before that point) this would make a substantial difference, but over a timescale of months, such an effect might well be "lost in the noise" - the precision within which we are able to manage the R-budget may simply not be capable of fine-tuning for an effect this size.
You would also need to offset this against any immune-waning among the previously infected (a bit of an unknown at present) and the (very small on short timescales, but relevant over years) process of births and deaths gradually causing "replenishment of susceptibles" (this phenomenon whereby immune individuals die and are replaced by susceptible children drives the long-term periodicity of epidemics for several infectious diseases).
It's also likely that adherence to rules will decline over time (something the behavioural scientists warned about early on) and if this outpaced the rate it was becoming safe to loosen up, you could even have a situation in which greater immunity means the R-budget could theoretically afford more generosity, but reduced adherence to the rules means that they're getting tightened up.
Excellent discussion. It seems to me that coming out of lockdown was well graded, but we didn't complete the job of re-assessing at that point, and coming up with a graded set of restriction levels that could be articulated and that we could apply and deploy as needed. I'm not saying these gradations would never get tweaked as we discovered better what worked, but it would, I hope, have reduced the chopping and changing and the last minutism and confusion we have seen. Perhaps the various governments, by having multiple different types of restriction, have simply been experimenting to see what works. But, to me, the message should now be getting through that confusion doesn't work, so settle on some set levels of restriction and try and stick to them..
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
It's not a binary thing though, is it? At one extreme you have draconian restrictions resulting in loss of liberty and economic hardship but a low death rate (at least from the virus). At the other you have zero restrictions resulting in hospital overload and pensioners dying in droves.
I'd say the way forward is to implement and properly enforce restrictions that are the least detrimental to our freedom and economy while still keeping the death rate in check. This will obviously cause hardship to some, so the second priority is to determine how best to alleviate this hardship until we eventually reach herd immunity / develop a vaccine.
Your zero restriction end assumes that people are really stupid.
In reality zero restrictions would be mean people make their own arrangements and their own choices, based on the information we know about COVID. The elderly and infirm would self shelter or be sheltered by relatives and carers. And that would mean the hospitals would be able to survive.
And the well could go on powering the economy forward to pay for it all.
The worst way to protect the NHS is the shut down the engine that pays for it.
Next year isn't 'ages'. All and sundry seem to have had their timescale expectations set way too short. Approval back end of this year, manufacture and roll out next for the first vaccines. Failure of a trial would be a disappointment but it's actually all gone a little quicker than I expected.
"Scientists at the University of Oxford say they should have at least a million doses of a coronavirus vaccine by September this year."
Sarah Gilbert/Adrian Hill, 17 April 2020
So, expectations explicitly set by those best placed to set them. Some sort of vaccine will come along eventually, but we can't go further than that.
I wonder how much of the Oxford vaccine has actually been produced. It'd have to be over 60,000 for the 3 (USA paused) trials ongoing.
I wish I knew what the FDA was up to but its a rabbit hole of conspiracy theory, trumpfuckery and protectionism. report yesterday they are "widening enquiries" cos they don't like AZ using chimp adenovirus vectors
What I took from it was that our current policies are scientifically illiterate and foolish. As I put it this morning before reading the piece we are using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. Instead of grinding us all down with the policies Alastair descibes so well in his header we should be focused on what works. And what works is backtracing cases of infection to find their super spreader source and isolating that. The fact that most people who get the virus don't manage to infect more than 1 other person and many don't even manage that, means that these superspreader outbreaks are the key to controlling the virus. SK, Japan and others have policies directed at the actual risk. We continue to pretend that every carrier is such a risk and plan accordingly. It's nonsense and its damaging both economically and socially.
An endless death by attrition of our businesses is, to coin a phrase, simply an unviable strategy. Italy has, after an appalling start - and, perhaps, because of it - done well at balancing safety and the economy. Why can’t we learn from them?
Because the Italians are not world-beating. The UK is.
(Cue the National Anthem and pictures of crowds waving Union Flags)
Or it could be that we just have a bunch of talentless jerks in charge who listen to few and fail to understand those that they do listen to.
Or maybe they just do not give a f***? With all the unaccountability going on, I wonder how many are feathering their nests and packing their bank accounts?
Whatever the reason, it is not good for UK plc and the average person in the street.
You just like their food.
Actually, I do not. I loathe cheese and I am fairly ambivalent on pasta.
Asian food, OTOH .....
Wow - I doubt you'll starve in Italy nonetheless. Assuming a supply of pineapple is available then pizzas can be made!
Having been too pessimistic for Biden I'd say that was approximately correct.
538 had more uncertainty built into their forecasting than the others did. Silver and co stated they expected Biden's odds to come in the closer they got to the election if he held the lead he did at the launch of the model. Lo and behold, it has done and 538 is converging with the Economist and other models. I spent far too much time rubbernecking the "model wars" earlier in the cycle.
I don't know about other PBers, but my friends and to a lesser extent myself, took drugs, had lots of unprotected sex, got drunk, etc etc etc all the time when we were young, despite those things being frowned upon/illegal/dangerous for our health. Some of my mates still do!
Why would today's youngsters take any notice of politicians telling them to be home by 10pm and not to mix in groups of 7 or more? Anyone under 25 who does is a geek who wouldnt have had anyone to knock about with anyway
In everyday life, we're used to a sliding scaling of risk, and corresponding sliding scale of precautions to manage those risks (though there's evidence people actually make many mistakes e.g. consistently overrate small risks and expend disproportionate efforts to mitigate them; Spiegelhalter published a lot of interesting stuff on this years ago, for those interested). I think this explains the attractiveness of a "Covid Alert Level" or similar, where in the red-zone we apply one code of social conduct, in the amber-zone a less strenuous one and so on. In principle, we should be able to apply measures proportional to the situation. In practice, because Exponential Growth Is Bad and uncertainty is high, I doubt application will ever be very granular - foot lightly on brake versus slamming the pedal down seem likely to be the two main choices.
Something Graham Medley has talked about is a kind of "R budgeting", whereby we find a set of restrictions we can live under that keep R at or below 1. Theoretically this sounds like a good way of producing a comprehensible code we can live by, and sounds like it should be sustainable in the long-run. But actually it would mean a bit of juggling in and out, his most famous suggestion being when schools returned after summer, some additional restriction like closing the pubs might be needed to balance things out. Winter means people spend more time indoors, so something else would have to change. Even if we had perfect knowledge of how social risks should balance, we shouldn't expect required regulations or social codes of conduct to be reassuringly stable. The darker cloud hanging over this is can we find a way of life that keeps R around or below 1 that is genuinely liveable, and psychologically and economically sustainable?
Restrictions may not need to be so onerous with other interventions like better contact-tracing, control of potential super-spreading events, maybe technological improvements like fast tests for contagiousness ... but at present, at least based on the UK and to some extent wider European experience, we should at least admit the possibility that we're not going to be able to stay on top of this thing without a bout or two more of some nasty socio-economic medicine. We can't just copy-and-paste the rules and regs from Sweden, or whoever is poster boy du jour, because of differences in everything from commuting patterns to household sizes to frequency of hugs and kisses, so what's sustainable in one country might not work in another. (Will also be interesting to see what happens in the Swedish winter when people mix indoors more.) I'm not saying we can't learn anything from other countries' experience, but I wonder if we'd ever have enough information to be able to successfully "fine-tune" an R budget - which would likely be an experimental, incremental process with further confusing rule changes and U-turns required - and we certainly can't borrow another country's wholesale.
It's worth noting that the R budget would gradually become more generous as the number of people who have had Covid slowly increased. This would at least give hope that there was light at the end of the tunnel.
Actually it's not obvious that that's true, or at least, true enough to be useful. If R-budgeting were implemented successfully for long-term control, then we'd be getting a relative trickle (not negligible, I grant) of new cases. Over a timescale of years (though fingers crossed for vaccinations to be available well before that point) this would make a substantial difference, but over a timescale of months, such an effect might well be "lost in the noise" - the precision within which we are able to manage the R-budget may simply not be capable of fine-tuning for an effect this size.
You would also need to offset this against any immune-waning among the previously infected (a bit of an unknown at present) and the (very small on short timescales, but relevant over years) process of births and deaths gradually causing "replenishment of susceptibles" (this phenomenon whereby immune individuals die and are replaced by susceptible children drives the long-term periodicity of epidemics for several infectious diseases).
It's also likely that adherence to rules will decline over time (something the behavioural scientists warned about early on) and if this outpaced the rate it was becoming safe to loosen up, you could even have a situation in which greater immunity means the R-budget could theoretically afford more generosity, but reduced adherence to the rules means that they're getting tightened up.
Excellent discussion. It seems to me that coming out of lockdown was well graded, but we didn't complete the job of re-assessing at that point, and coming up with a graded set of restriction levels that could be articulated and that we could apply and deploy as needed. I'm not saying these gradations would never get tweaked as we discovered better what worked, but it would, I hope, have reduced the chopping and changing and the last minutism and confusion we have seen. Perhaps the various governments, by having multiple different types of restriction, have simply been experimenting to see what works. But, to me, the message should now be getting through that confusion doesn't work, so settle on some set levels of restriction and try and stick to them..
The ONS data show that we had substantially reduced the prevalence of the virus by the end of lockdown. Regrading the restrictions "correctly" at that point - i.e. the Goldilocks moment where they're as economically non-destructive as possible, while still sufficient to keep the virus down - is an incredibly tough job, because it's very hard to measure R or the growth rate at this point. Things work exactly as your intuition might suggest: it's hard to see whether you've got exponential growth, and how severe it is, if you're on the flat section at the start of the curve. In fact the ONS household survey is one of our best guides to how prevalence changes over time - doesn't have many of the problems with changes in testing scale, who tests are targeted at etc that raw case numbers do - but due to the uncertainty intervals around its point estimates, it's essentially impossible to see the beginnings of resurgence.
This is one of the reasons I'm sceptical about the ability of scientific advisers to fine-tine an R-budget.
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
It's not a binary thing though, is it? At one extreme you have draconian restrictions resulting in loss of liberty and economic hardship but a low death rate (at least from the virus). At the other you have zero restrictions resulting in hospital overload and pensioners dying in droves.
I'd say the way forward is to implement and properly enforce restrictions that are the least detrimental to our freedom and economy while still keeping the death rate in check. This will obviously cause hardship to some, so the second priority is to determine how best to alleviate this hardship until we eventually reach herd immunity / develop a vaccine.
Yes. Some form of risk segmentation is the only plausible way forward. I have said this repeatedly since April!
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
It's not a binary thing though, is it? At one extreme you have draconian restrictions resulting in loss of liberty and economic hardship but a low death rate (at least from the virus). At the other you have zero restrictions resulting in hospital overload and pensioners dying in droves.
I'd say the way forward is to implement and properly enforce restrictions that are the least detrimental to our freedom and economy while still keeping the death rate in check. This will obviously cause hardship to some, so the second priority is to determine how best to alleviate this hardship until we eventually reach herd immunity / develop a vaccine.
Your zero restriction end assumes that people are really stupid.
In reality zero restrictions would be mean people make their own arrangements and their own choices, based on the information we know about COVID. The elderly and infirm would self shelter or be sheltered by relatives and carers. And that would mean the hospitals would be able to survive.
And the well could go on powering the economy forward to pay for it all.
The worst way to protect the NHS is the shut down the engine that pays for it.
No, it doesn't assume that people are stupid. Rather, it acknowledges the reality that it is practically impossible to shield one segment of the population from the rest of the population on a long-term basis.
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
Umm, selection bias? Those who didn't die of disease had a full life...
Given the length of time it can seemingly take to get over Covid I'm prepared to wait a while yet.
When Sanders dropped out in the middle of April, and it became certain Biden would be the nominee, Biden was 4.7% ahead of Trump in the 538 national polling average. If you'd told me then that with a month to go, he would be 7.6% ahead (as he is now) I would have been pretty happy (and quite relieved). In the last 4 months Biden's lowest lead (in the 538 average) was 5.7%, the highest was 9.6%, so currently bang in the middle of a pretty stable range, with relatively few undecideds compared to last time.
So it's not over yet, but it's going pretty well so far for those who really want Trump to lose. And Biden is in a way better position than Clinton was four years ago.
An endless death by attrition of our businesses is, to coin a phrase, simply an unviable strategy. Italy has, after an appalling start - and, perhaps, because of it - done well at balancing safety and the economy. Why can’t we learn from them?
Because the Italians are not world-beating. The UK is.
(Cue the National Anthem and pictures of crowds waving Union Flags)
Or it could be that we just have a bunch of talentless jerks in charge who listen to few and fail to understand those that they do listen to.
Or maybe they just do not give a f***? With all the unaccountability going on, I wonder how many are feathering their nests and packing their bank accounts?
Whatever the reason, it is not good for UK plc and the average person in the street.
Italy just happens to have the yellow jersey today. Do this: get an alphabetical list of EU countries and google news search it systematically. Lockdowns, states of emergency, protests, riots, useless govts and furious opps. We are mediocre, not even exceptionally useless. Also, politician nest-feathering is a brave battle ground to pick in an Italy vs ROW comparison.
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
Those of our grandparents who dodged polio, diphtheria, TB and blood poisoning long enough to become grandparents, that is.
Of course, but think of all the people now who are dying or suffering from entirely treatable diseases because all the focus is on Covid.
We are not, for the foreseeable future, going to eliminate it. So we need to find a way to live with it and we would be wise to learn from our forefathers how they coped with risk.
What I took from it was that our current policies are scientifically illiterate and foolish. As I put it this morning before reading the piece we are using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. Instead of grinding us all down with the policies Alastair descibes so well in his header we should be focused on what works. And what works is backtracing cases of infection to find their super spreader source and isolating that. The fact that most people who get the virus don't manage to infect more than 1 other person and many don't even manage that, means that these superspreader outbreaks are the key to controlling the virus. SK, Japan and others have policies directed at the actual risk. We continue to pretend that every carrier is such a risk and plan accordingly. It's nonsense and its damaging both economically and socially.
I'd agree with that. The only way a society like ours can become a Japan or South Korea, though, is to get our testing right (as the article suggests). We have committed significant resources to that, but our obsession with diagnosing individuals with 100% accuracy has been very costly - in absolute terms, and much more so in opportunity cost.
I don't know about other PBers, but my friends and to a lesser extent myself, took drugs, had lots of unprotected sex, got drunk, etc etc etc all the time when we were young, despite those things being frowned upon/illegal/dangerous for our health. Some of my mates still do!
Why would today's youngsters take any notice of politicians telling them to be home by 10pm and not to mix in groups of 7 or more? Anyone under 25 who does is a geek who wouldnt have had anyone to knock about with anyway
This is exactly why I expect governments to target universities (who may have greater leverage than the government does as rule-enforcers, though this only covers a minority of young'uns), venues that young people congregate, and so on. There's a cat-herding aspect to this pandemic. Perhaps not the greatest metaphor, but sometimes the best you can do is manipulate the cat-flaps rather than attempt mind-control over the kittens.
Shouldn't we be trying to identify the superspreaders*? If they could be identified, then asking them to self-quarantine would enable the rest to revert to the way things used to be. Of course the superspreaders shouldn't be treated like lepers, just taken out of circulation in the nicest possible way - perhaps in The Savoy on public subsidy so that they might feel they have won a prize.
* as per the Tufekci article in The Atlantic referred to earlier.
What I took from it was that our current policies are scientifically illiterate and foolish. As I put it this morning before reading the piece we are using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. Instead of grinding us all down with the policies Alastair descibes so well in his header we should be focused on what works. And what works is backtracing cases of infection to find their super spreader source and isolating that. The fact that most people who get the virus don't manage to infect more than 1 other person and many don't even manage that, means that these superspreader outbreaks are the key to controlling the virus. SK, Japan and others have policies directed at the actual risk. We continue to pretend that every carrier is such a risk and plan accordingly. It's nonsense and its damaging both economically and socially.
Yes, it's an excellent article. I suspect there are two main reasons why we are not backtracing effectively. The most likely is just competence, or rather lack of it, if the track and trace system is anything to go by. The second, more sinister but less likely, is that the government may not like what it found. What if, for example, the superspreaders were traced back to Wetherspoons, MacDonalds and Nandos customers benefiting from the delights of the Chancellor's EOTHO scheme?
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
It's not a binary thing though, is it? At one extreme you have draconian restrictions resulting in loss of liberty and economic hardship but a low death rate (at least from the virus). At the other you have zero restrictions resulting in hospital overload and pensioners dying in droves.
I'd say the way forward is to implement and properly enforce restrictions that are the least detrimental to our freedom and economy while still keeping the death rate in check. This will obviously cause hardship to some, so the second priority is to determine how best to alleviate this hardship until we eventually reach herd immunity / develop a vaccine.
Your zero restriction end assumes that people are really stupid.
In reality zero restrictions would be mean people make their own arrangements and their own choices, based on the information we know about COVID. The elderly and infirm would self shelter or be sheltered by relatives and carers. And that would mean the hospitals would be able to survive.
And the well could go on powering the economy forward to pay for it all.
The worst way to protect the NHS is the shut down the engine that pays for it.
No, it doesn't assume that people are stupid. Rather, it acknowledges the reality that it is practically impossible to shield one segment of the population from the rest of the population on a long-term basis.
If its impossible then why are we trying so hard?
Why not let the economy run hot and use the wealth generated to set up as many medical facilities as we can?
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
An endless death by attrition of our businesses is, to coin a phrase, simply an unviable strategy. Italy has, after an appalling start - and, perhaps, because of it - done well at balancing safety and the economy. Why can’t we learn from them?
Because the Italians are not world-beating. The UK is.
(Cue the National Anthem and pictures of crowds waving Union Flags)
Or it could be that we just have a bunch of talentless jerks in charge who listen to few and fail to understand those that they do listen to.
Or maybe they just do not give a f***? With all the unaccountability going on, I wonder how many are feathering their nests and packing their bank accounts?
Whatever the reason, it is not good for UK plc and the average person in the street.
Italy just happens to have the yellow jersey today. Do this: get an alphabetical list of EU countries and google news search it systematically. Lockdowns, states of emergency, protests, riots, useless govts and furious opps. We are mediocre, not even exceptionally useless. Also, politician nest-feathering is a brave battle ground to pick in an Italy vs ROW comparison.
In truth how 'well' a country has done is a multi-factorial affair. Italy experienced a very focussed initial outbreak, with much of the country not really affected. This is oddly similar now to the UK situation - where I sit in Wiltshire the pandemic, at the moment, is happening to other people. In the UK we seeded many outbreaks at the start, and experienced a widespread outbreak. Some love to blame the government as they hate the Tories, or Boris, but its unlikely that any government would have done much better at the start.
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Because she's only been an MP for about 20 minutes, and no-one knows who she is.
That said...
I get the feeling Ed Davey only stood against Layla because he realised that Layla would be, what's the phrase I'm looking for... ah yes..., a total fucking disaster.
Daisy is by a mile the most talented LD MP. If she has ambition, and if she is hard working, then the LDs are quite unsentimental about throwing leaders under the bus.
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
Those of our grandparents who dodged polio, diphtheria, TB and blood poisoning long enough to become grandparents, that is.
Of course, but think of all the people now who are dying or suffering from entirely treatable diseases because all the focus is on Covid.
We are not, for the foreseeable future, going to eliminate it. So we need to find a way to live with it and we would be wise to learn from our forefathers how they coped with risk.
Brutally, living with it means in some cases dying with it. Actually I probably agree with you - we shield the hell out of care homes and the independent living but demented elderly, give the rational elderly the option, and ease off elsewhere. The limiting factor is, in shorthand, mass graves. Society won't tolerate and no government will survive those, or Italy-style corpse-convoys, or footage of ill people in hospital corridors. You or I might think it should, a bit, but it just won't. I just don't know how far we can ease off without hitting that point, but bear in mind that "NHS at breaking point" is standard news every winter anyway.
Shouldn't we be trying to identify the superspreaders*? If they could be identified, then asking them to self-quarantine would enable the rest to revert to the way things used to be. Of course the superspreaders shouldn't be treated like lepers, just taken out of circulation in the nicest possible way - perhaps in The Savoy on public subsidy so that they might feel they have won a prize.
* as per the Tufekci article in The Atlantic referred to earlier.
It seems likely that people are very infectious for a day or two, but not much either side. As such it is not likely that there is a type of person who will be a super spreader, rather an unlucky combination of someone being very infectious on the same day as the choir outing on the minibus, or the naughty wedding with 200 people.
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Of course Lib Dem Daisy is good. But she has time on her side. We don´t want to get through our Lib Dem leaders too quickly. That was the problem with Jo Swinson. Far better for Ed Davey to take his turn now, and then we can see who comes next.
But I must say that I am very pleased to see that the PB Tories are now starting to have a closer look at the what the Lib Dems are saying. It may be that at some stage they want to abandon their sinking ship.
In passing, I saw that Stephen Dorrell, not so long ago a minister in the Conservative government, presided over a session at the recent Lib Dem Conference.
Shouldn't we be trying to identify the superspreaders*? If they could be identified, then asking them to self-quarantine would enable the rest to revert to the way things used to be. Of course the superspreaders shouldn't be treated like lepers, just taken out of circulation in the nicest possible way - perhaps in The Savoy on public subsidy so that they might feel they have won a prize.
* as per the Tufekci article in The Atlantic referred to earlier.
It's not so much that, as looking back to identify super-spreaders in order to find and isolate all their contacts - and to identify and do something about the particular environments in which the super-spreading took place.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are voting each day, with more key states opening up early or by-mail voting shortly.
Some are voting for him of course.
Th notion of Trump ever 'turning this around' with certain pollsters is pretty fanciful, judging by what happened in 2016.
In the sense that they rightly showed him losing the popular vote?
Look you go your way and I'll go mine.
You don;t think the US media's visceral and total hatred of Trump and his supporters is affecting the pollsters they sponsor. You clearly think it would be perfectly possible for these pollsters to serve up a Trump doing well poll to their client and the client not have a brain freeze.
I don;t. I think CNN, NBC, ABC, the Atlantic and even Fox represent a shrinking part of American life. A part that's even smaller than in 2016, when Hillary was a shoo-in. And I have a feeling the pollsters in the US are feeding these news organisation in their comfort zone, because of how unacceptable a dose of reality is.
That could be emotion on my part. And I am not recommending anybody follow my ideas. But we shall see.
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
It's not a binary thing though, is it? At one extreme you have draconian restrictions resulting in loss of liberty and economic hardship but a low death rate (at least from the virus). At the other you have zero restrictions resulting in hospital overload and pensioners dying in droves.
I'd say the way forward is to implement and properly enforce restrictions that are the least detrimental to our freedom and economy while still keeping the death rate in check. This will obviously cause hardship to some, so the second priority is to determine how best to alleviate this hardship until we eventually reach herd immunity / develop a vaccine.
Your zero restriction end assumes that people are really stupid.
In reality zero restrictions would be mean people make their own arrangements and their own choices, based on the information we know about COVID. The elderly and infirm would self shelter or be sheltered by relatives and carers. And that would mean the hospitals would be able to survive.
And the well could go on powering the economy forward to pay for it all.
The worst way to protect the NHS is the shut down the engine that pays for it.
No, it doesn't assume that people are stupid. Rather, it acknowledges the reality that it is practically impossible to shield one segment of the population from the rest of the population on a long-term basis.
If its impossible then why are we trying so hard?
Why not let the economy run hot and use the wealth generated to set up as many medical facilities as we can?
I've no idea what you're talking about. The whole point of having general restrictions that slow the spread of the virus in the general population is to mitigate transmission to the vulnerable. We're doing this precisely because it is not possible to isolate this segment of the population from the rest.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are voting each day, with more key states opening up early or by-mail voting shortly.
Some are voting for him of course.
Th notion of Trump ever 'turning this around' with certain pollsters is pretty fanciful, judging by what happened in 2016.
if you insist on making comparisons with 2016, it was the betting market that was way, way off rather than the pollsters. The pollsters will certainly have made rational adjustments in a self-interested effort to do better this time round, it's yet to be seen how successful they'll be. What ability do you think the betting market has to make 'rational' adjustments?
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
Umm, selection bias? Those who didn't die of disease had a full life...
Given the length of time it can seemingly take to get over Covid I'm prepared to wait a while yet.
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
The rolls used in Subway's hot sandwiches contain too much sugar to be considered bread, according to Ireland's Supreme Court. Ireland's highest court made the ruling in a case about how the bread is taxed.
An Irish franchisee of the US company had claimed it should not pay VAT on the rolls it uses in heated sandwiches. But the court ruled that because of the level of sugar in the rolls they cannot be taxed as bread, which is classed as a "staple product" with zero VAT.
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
Those of our grandparents who dodged polio, diphtheria, TB and blood poisoning long enough to become grandparents, that is.
I think I spot another example of our new friend from yesterday - 'survivorship bias'.
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
Not amendments, Labour had the chance to vote the whole package down and force the government to come up with something completely new which has parliamentary oversight baked in rather than at the gift of the executive. Brady and 80 Tory MPs were ready to force defeat on the government but Starmer hasn't got the bottle.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are voting each day, with more key states opening up early or by-mail voting shortly.
Some are voting for him of course.
Th notion of Trump ever 'turning this around' with certain pollsters is pretty fanciful, judging by what happened in 2016.
if you insist on making comparisons with 2016, it was the betting market that was way, way off rather than the pollsters. The pollsters will certainly have made rational adjustments in a self-interested effort to do better this time round, it's yet to be seen how successful they'll be. What ability do you think the betting market has to make 'rational' adjustments?
Look,. if I am wrong its me losing money not you.
And right on cue a poll to back up my views.
Gallup's latest shows 60% of Americans either trust the mainstream media little or not at all.
9% have a great deal of faith in the mass media. That's who CNN think America is, and who they are talking to.
What I took from it was that our current policies are scientifically illiterate and foolish. As I put it this morning before reading the piece we are using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. Instead of grinding us all down with the policies Alastair descibes so well in his header we should be focused on what works. And what works is backtracing cases of infection to find their super spreader source and isolating that. The fact that most people who get the virus don't manage to infect more than 1 other person and many don't even manage that, means that these superspreader outbreaks are the key to controlling the virus. SK, Japan and others have policies directed at the actual risk. We continue to pretend that every carrier is such a risk and plan accordingly. It's nonsense and its damaging both economically and socially.
Yes, it's an excellent article. I suspect there are two main reasons why we are not backtracing effectively. The most likely is just competence, or rather lack of it, if the track and trace system is anything to go by. The second, more sinister but less likely, is that the government may not like what it found. What if, for example, the superspreaders were traced back to Wetherspoons, MacDonalds and Nandos customers benefiting from the delights of the Chancellor's EOTHO scheme?
Then we learn from that mistake. But according to that article this is relatively unlikely. What we have seen are that superspreader events occur when largish groups are indoors with poor ventilation and some activity such as singing, dancing or working that means people are exhaling reasonably vigorously. I suppose this could come back to Alastair's thread header but personally the groups involved in these activities are very small, typically 2.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are voting each day, with more key states opening up early or by-mail voting shortly.
Some are voting for him of course.
Th notion of Trump ever 'turning this around' with certain pollsters is pretty fanciful, judging by what happened in 2016.
if you insist on making comparisons with 2016, it was the betting market that was way, way off rather than the pollsters. The pollsters will certainly have made rational adjustments in a self-interested effort to do better this time round, it's yet to be seen how successful they'll be. What ability do you think the betting market has to make 'rational' adjustments?
Look,. if I am wrong its me losing money not you.
And right on cue a poll to back up my views.
Gallup's latest shows 60% of Americans either trust the mainstream media little or not at all.
9% have a great deal of faith in the mass media. That's who CNN think America is, and who they are talking to.
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
Not amendments, Labour had the chance to vote the whole package down and force the government to come up with something completely new which has parliamentary oversight baked in rather than at the gift of the executive. Brady and 80 Tory MPs were ready to force defeat on the government but Starmer hasn't got the bottle.
Plus I believe if they'd voted it down then the Government would have had 21 days to come back with an alternative proposal rather than simply having no powers immediately. So they could vote it down cleanly with Brady and the 80 Tories and then the Government would have had to come back with an amended proposal within 21 days.
Absolutely shocking lack of leadership by Starmer. He clearly would rather snipe from the sidelines and be able to be Captain Hindsight having a go at things that go wrong afterwards rather than have the ability to have a say up front on these issues.
The Government have made mistakes but they're trying. Very trying sometimes. The opposition aren't even doing that.
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Because she's only been an MP for about 20 minutes, and no-one knows who she is.
That said...
I get the feeling Ed Davey only stood against Layla because he realised that Layla would be, what's the phrase I'm looking for... ah yes..., a total fucking disaster.
Daisy is by a mile the most talented LD MP. If she has ambition, and if she is hard working, then the LDs are quite unsentimental about throwing leaders under the bus.
The half life of a Lib Dem MP is very short, there probably won't be time for any of the hard work or ambition to take any effect.
An endless death by attrition of our businesses is, to coin a phrase, simply an unviable strategy. Italy has, after an appalling start - and, perhaps, because of it - done well at balancing safety and the economy. Why can’t we learn from them?
Because the Italians are not world-beating. The UK is.
(Cue the National Anthem and pictures of crowds waving Union Flags)
Or it could be that we just have a bunch of talentless jerks in charge who listen to few and fail to understand those that they do listen to.
Or maybe they just do not give a f***? With all the unaccountability going on, I wonder how many are feathering their nests and packing their bank accounts?
Whatever the reason, it is not good for UK plc and the average person in the street.
Italy just happens to have the yellow jersey today. Do this: get an alphabetical list of EU countries and google news search it systematically. Lockdowns, states of emergency, protests, riots, useless govts and furious opps. We are mediocre, not even exceptionally useless. Also, politician nest-feathering is a brave battle ground to pick in an Italy vs ROW comparison.
In truth how 'well' a country has done is a multi-factorial affair. Italy experienced a very focussed initial outbreak, with much of the country not really affected. This is oddly similar now to the UK situation - where I sit in Wiltshire the pandemic, at the moment, is happening to other people. In the UK we seeded many outbreaks at the start, and experienced a widespread outbreak. Some love to blame the government as they hate the Tories, or Boris, but its unlikely that any government would have done much better at the start.
Total rubbish. The incompetence of this government has exacerbated the pandemic, and one very much can, and should, compare our lamentable performance with other countries. That incompetence starts like a rotting fish head at the top, and spreads through the government, largely through Johnson's preference for only appointing lackies and lightweights that don't question his scant regard for detail and total lack of leadership skills. I don't "hate" Boris, as you cringingly refer to him, but I do believe he is hopelessly out of his depth, and he is not PM material, even in normal times.
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Well.. quite obviously she's not that bright (given what she said), but I mostly agree she's better than Davey. The LDs just need Clegg back and at any price.
Kind of you to say so, Mr Omnium, but perhaps you Tories might have given Nck Clegg a bit more support when he was there.
But the problem that you Conservatives have is that the brightest people in government now are Cummings, Gove and Johnson (in that order) and the government is a shambolic disaster. Time for normal people to take over, I would have thought.
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Because she's only been an MP for about 20 minutes, and no-one knows who she is.
That said...
I get the feeling Ed Davey only stood against Layla because he realised that Layla would be, what's the phrase I'm looking for... ah yes..., a total fucking disaster.
Daisy is by a mile the most talented LD MP. If she has ambition, and if she is hard working, then the LDs are quite unsentimental about throwing leaders under the bus.
Very good. And a genuinely Liberal position. Whatever next?
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Because she's only been an MP for about 20 minutes, and no-one knows who she is.
That said...
I get the feeling Ed Davey only stood against Layla because he realised that Layla would be, what's the phrase I'm looking for... ah yes..., a total fucking disaster.
Daisy is by a mile the most talented LD MP. If she has ambition, and if she is hard working, then the LDs are quite unsentimental about throwing leaders under the bus.
The half life of a Lib Dem MP is very short, there probably won't be time for any of the hard work or ambition to take any effect.
I am not a friend of LDs but I think she should be OK in St Albans for next time - so will be in a position to run for LD leadership after the next GE once Davey ends up with 10 MPs!
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Because she's only been an MP for about 20 minutes, and no-one knows who she is.
That said...
I get the feeling Ed Davey only stood against Layla because he realised that Layla would be, what's the phrase I'm looking for... ah yes..., a total fucking disaster.
Daisy is by a mile the most talented LD MP. If she has ambition, and if she is hard working, then the LDs are quite unsentimental about throwing leaders under the bus.
Very good. And a genuinely Liberal position. Whatever next?
The Liberal Democrats being liberal was I believe mentioned in the Book of Revelations as the sign of end times.
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
Not amendments, Labour had the chance to vote the whole package down and force the government to come up with something completely new which has parliamentary oversight baked in rather than at the gift of the executive. Brady and 80 Tory MPs were ready to force defeat on the government but Starmer hasn't got the bottle.
Plus I believe if they'd voted it down then the Government would have had 21 days to come back with an alternative proposal rather than simply having no powers immediately. So they could vote it down cleanly with Brady and the 80 Tories and then the Government would have had to come back with an amended proposal within 21 days.
Absolutely shocking lack of leadership by Starmer. He clearly would rather snipe from the sidelines and be able to be Captain Hindsight having a go at things that go wrong afterwards rather than have the ability to have a say up front on these issues.
The Government have made mistakes but they're trying. Very trying sometimes. The opposition aren't even doing that.
Do you and @MaxPB know more about what's going on at Westminster than Keir Starmer or something?
Perhaps the "80 rebels" didn't actually exist and Labour had nothing to gain by impotently voting against the motion?
But no, blame the opposition for the government's, which you support, failings - you just look like fools.
Another year of restrictions is simply not viable. We have to learn to live with this just as our grand-parents managed to have a full life without the benefit of vaccines or antibiotics.
Those of our grandparents who dodged polio, diphtheria, TB and blood poisoning long enough to become grandparents, that is.
Of course, but think of all the people now who are dying or suffering from entirely treatable diseases because all the focus is on Covid.
We are not, for the foreseeable future, going to eliminate it. So we need to find a way to live with it and we would be wise to learn from our forefathers how they coped with risk.
Brutally, living with it means in some cases dying with it. Actually I probably agree with you - we shield the hell out of care homes and the independent living but demented elderly, give the rational elderly the option, and ease off elsewhere. The limiting factor is, in shorthand, mass graves. Society won't tolerate and no government will survive those, or Italy-style corpse-convoys, or footage of ill people in hospital corridors. You or I might think it should, a bit, but it just won't. I just don't know how far we can ease off without hitting that point, but bear in mind that "NHS at breaking point" is standard news every winter anyway.
Of course there is survivorship bias and of course it means there will be deaths.
But there will be deaths anyway, whether of this or from other causes.
If there is no vaccine then we are going to have live with it. There is no other option. Because shutting down our economy is simply not viable or realistic. So we need to find sensible ways to live with this as Mr Meeks suggests. And we need to learn how our parents, grand-parents etc learned to live with similar risks.
This may sound brutal but IMO it is more realistic than having years of shutting down the economy with all its baleful consequences.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are voting each day, with more key states opening up early or by-mail voting shortly.
Some are voting for him of course.
Th notion of Trump ever 'turning this around' with certain pollsters is pretty fanciful, judging by what happened in 2016.
if you insist on making comparisons with 2016, it was the betting market that was way, way off rather than the pollsters. The pollsters will certainly have made rational adjustments in a self-interested effort to do better this time round, it's yet to be seen how successful they'll be. What ability do you think the betting market has to make 'rational' adjustments?
Look,. if I am wrong its me losing money not you.
And right on cue a poll to back up my views.
Gallup's latest shows 60% of Americans either trust the mainstream media little or not at all.
9% have a great deal of faith in the mass media. That's who CNN think America is, and who they are talking to.
How do you know that 60% of Americans aren't thinking about Fox News?
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are voting each day, with more key states opening up early or by-mail voting shortly.
Some are voting for him of course.
Th notion of Trump ever 'turning this around' with certain pollsters is pretty fanciful, judging by what happened in 2016.
if you insist on making comparisons with 2016, it was the betting market that was way, way off rather than the pollsters. The pollsters will certainly have made rational adjustments in a self-interested effort to do better this time round, it's yet to be seen how successful they'll be. What ability do you think the betting market has to make 'rational' adjustments?
Look,. if I am wrong its me losing money not you.
And right on cue a poll to back up my views.
Gallup's latest shows 60% of Americans either trust the mainstream media little or not at all.
9% have a great deal of faith in the mass media. That's who CNN think America is, and who they are talking to.
You started off on pollsters, not the media...
Look I get it, you guys only want one view on here, and that's the size of Biden's win. Fair enough.
Shouldn't we be trying to identify the superspreaders*? If they could be identified, then asking them to self-quarantine would enable the rest to revert to the way things used to be. Of course the superspreaders shouldn't be treated like lepers, just taken out of circulation in the nicest possible way - perhaps in The Savoy on public subsidy so that they might feel they have won a prize.
* as per the Tufekci article in The Atlantic referred to earlier.
It seems likely that people are very infectious for a day or two, but not much either side. As such it is not likely that there is a type of person who will be a super spreader, rather an unlucky combination of someone being very infectious on the same day as the choir outing on the minibus, or the naughty wedding with 200 people.
This is spot on: it's the combination of person at their most infectious and activity where lots of people are crammed together (public transport, nightclubs, choirs, karaoke bars).
And 15 minute antigen tests (that require no laboratory or specialist staff) are exceptionally good at identifying *exactly* those people.
If we combine rapid antigen testing, with some moderate restrictions over the most high risk activities, we can get on top of this, with very few restrictions on everyday life.
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
Not amendments, Labour had the chance to vote the whole package down and force the government to come up with something completely new which has parliamentary oversight baked in rather than at the gift of the executive. Brady and 80 Tory MPs were ready to force defeat on the government but Starmer hasn't got the bottle.
Plus I believe if they'd voted it down then the Government would have had 21 days to come back with an alternative proposal rather than simply having no powers immediately. So they could vote it down cleanly with Brady and the 80 Tories and then the Government would have had to come back with an amended proposal within 21 days.
Absolutely shocking lack of leadership by Starmer. He clearly would rather snipe from the sidelines and be able to be Captain Hindsight having a go at things that go wrong afterwards rather than have the ability to have a say up front on these issues.
The Government have made mistakes but they're trying. Very trying sometimes. The opposition aren't even doing that.
Do you and @MaxPB know more about what's going on at Westminster than Keir Starmer or something?
Perhaps the "80 rebels" didn't actually exist and Labour had nothing to gain by impotently voting against the motion?
But no, blame the opposition for the government's, which you support, failings - you just look like fools.
Hey I opposed the Government and backed the rebels on this. That's more than you and Starmer did. I'm not a partisan Tory who backs the Tories all the time, I hoped the Government would be defeated on this and its shocking Starmer spurned the opportunity to defeat the Government and stand up for Parliament.
It doesn't matter if Labour loses the motion, they had a chance to stand up and be counted and tempt Brady etc to vote with them - and they chucked it away.
6,914 new cases (for what it is worth)....waits for the scipters to start posting their charts with the data.
255,915 tests!
My wife occasionally works on the drive through testing station for Winchester Hospital. The maximum they can do a day is 96. That demonstrates what a logistical effort it is to do this many tests nationwide.
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Because she's only been an MP for about 20 minutes, and no-one knows who she is.
That said...
I get the feeling Ed Davey only stood against Layla because he realised that Layla would be, what's the phrase I'm looking for... ah yes..., a total fucking disaster.
Daisy is by a mile the most talented LD MP. If she has ambition, and if she is hard working, then the LDs are quite unsentimental about throwing leaders under the bus.
Very good. And a genuinely Liberal position. Whatever next?
The Liberal Democrats being liberal was I believe mentioned in the Book of Revelations as the sign of end times.
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
Not amendments, Labour had the chance to vote the whole package down and force the government to come up with something completely new which has parliamentary oversight baked in rather than at the gift of the executive. Brady and 80 Tory MPs were ready to force defeat on the government but Starmer hasn't got the bottle.
Plus I believe if they'd voted it down then the Government would have had 21 days to come back with an alternative proposal rather than simply having no powers immediately. So they could vote it down cleanly with Brady and the 80 Tories and then the Government would have had to come back with an amended proposal within 21 days.
Absolutely shocking lack of leadership by Starmer. He clearly would rather snipe from the sidelines and be able to be Captain Hindsight having a go at things that go wrong afterwards rather than have the ability to have a say up front on these issues.
The Government have made mistakes but they're trying. Very trying sometimes. The opposition aren't even doing that.
I don't think you are in any position to judge leadership.You blindly and obsequiously support Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson; a man that is big on personality (in a rather clownish and childlike way), but in spite of his overwhelming ego has clearly had a complete leadership capability by-pass
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
Not amendments, Labour had the chance to vote the whole package down and force the government to come up with something completely new which has parliamentary oversight baked in rather than at the gift of the executive. Brady and 80 Tory MPs were ready to force defeat on the government but Starmer hasn't got the bottle.
Plus I believe if they'd voted it down then the Government would have had 21 days to come back with an alternative proposal rather than simply having no powers immediately. So they could vote it down cleanly with Brady and the 80 Tories and then the Government would have had to come back with an amended proposal within 21 days.
Absolutely shocking lack of leadership by Starmer. He clearly would rather snipe from the sidelines and be able to be Captain Hindsight having a go at things that go wrong afterwards rather than have the ability to have a say up front on these issues.
The Government have made mistakes but they're trying. Very trying sometimes. The opposition aren't even doing that.
Do you and @MaxPB know more about what's going on at Westminster than Keir Starmer or something?
Perhaps the "80 rebels" didn't actually exist and Labour had nothing to gain by impotently voting against the motion?
But no, blame the opposition for the government's, which you support, failings - you just look like fools.
Hey I opposed the Government and backed the rebels on this. That's more than you and Starmer did. I'm not a partisan Tory who backs the Tories all the time, I hoped the Government would be defeated on this and its shocking Starmer spurned the opportunity to defeat the Government and stand up for Parliament.
It doesn't matter if Labour loses the motion, they had a chance to stand up and be counted and tempt Brady etc to vote with them - and they chucked it away.
I have not given a single opinion on this issue, so do not lump me in with "Starmer".
Starmer did not spurn any opportunity to defeat the Government. You have no idea if Labour realised there was not enough rebels, so decided to go down this route instead. But no, it's Labour's fault the Government is a joke, apparently. Listen to yourself.
Genoa's Serie A match against Torino on Saturday has been postponed after 14 of the hosts' players and staff members tested positive for Covid-19, the league has confirmed.
Will the last footballer who hasn't had COVID please report to the front desk...
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Because she's only been an MP for about 20 minutes, and no-one knows who she is.
That said...
I get the feeling Ed Davey only stood against Layla because he realised that Layla would be, what's the phrase I'm looking for... ah yes..., a total fucking disaster.
Daisy is by a mile the most talented LD MP. If she has ambition, and if she is hard working, then the LDs are quite unsentimental about throwing leaders under the bus.
Very good. And a genuinely Liberal position. Whatever next?
The Liberal Democrats being liberal was I believe mentioned in the Book of Revelations as the sign of end times.
I haven´t read the Book of Revelations recently, but from memory it said that towards the end of times the Liberals would have to take over the running of the government because the Conservatives had made such a mess of the world. And then everything would be made better again, and everybody would be happy.
Shouldn't we be trying to identify the superspreaders*? If they could be identified, then asking them to self-quarantine would enable the rest to revert to the way things used to be. Of course the superspreaders shouldn't be treated like lepers, just taken out of circulation in the nicest possible way - perhaps in The Savoy on public subsidy so that they might feel they have won a prize.
* as per the Tufekci article in The Atlantic referred to earlier.
That sounds very difficult to me - identifying superspreaders before the damage has already been done.
6,914 new cases (for what it is worth)....waits for the scipters to start posting their charts with the data.
255,915 tests!
My wife occasionally works on the drive through testing station for Winchester Hospital. The maximum they can do a day is 96. That demonstrates what a logistical effort it is to do this many tests nationwide.
The Gov't has taken loads of flack over testing. But if that flack leads to ultimately more testing and better outcomes that's a tradeoff Hancock should be happy with.
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
Not amendments, Labour had the chance to vote the whole package down and force the government to come up with something completely new which has parliamentary oversight baked in rather than at the gift of the executive. Brady and 80 Tory MPs were ready to force defeat on the government but Starmer hasn't got the bottle.
Plus I believe if they'd voted it down then the Government would have had 21 days to come back with an alternative proposal rather than simply having no powers immediately. So they could vote it down cleanly with Brady and the 80 Tories and then the Government would have had to come back with an amended proposal within 21 days.
Absolutely shocking lack of leadership by Starmer. He clearly would rather snipe from the sidelines and be able to be Captain Hindsight having a go at things that go wrong afterwards rather than have the ability to have a say up front on these issues.
The Government have made mistakes but they're trying. Very trying sometimes. The opposition aren't even doing that.
Do you and @MaxPB know more about what's going on at Westminster than Keir Starmer or something?
Perhaps the "80 rebels" didn't actually exist and Labour had nothing to gain by impotently voting against the motion?
But no, blame the opposition for the government's, which you support, failings - you just look like fools.
Hey I opposed the Government and backed the rebels on this. That's more than you and Starmer did. I'm not a partisan Tory who backs the Tories all the time, I hoped the Government would be defeated on this and its shocking Starmer spurned the opportunity to defeat the Government and stand up for Parliament.
It doesn't matter if Labour loses the motion, they had a chance to stand up and be counted and tempt Brady etc to vote with them - and they chucked it away.
You are not a Tory. You are (assuming you are just one person) a Johnson worshipping contrarian populist. It is not the same thing.
Excellent thread, Alastair. Very much agree that the strategy and communication about the virus has been complete rubbish. Unfortunately it doesn't seem as though that's going to change, Labour wimped out yesterday and abstained on continuing resolution for the virus measures which means parliamentary oversight is still at the gift of the executive which has made so many poor decisions in all of this.
I thought the Speaker ruled that there could not be any votes on the proposed amendments.
Not amendments, Labour had the chance to vote the whole package down and force the government to come up with something completely new which has parliamentary oversight baked in rather than at the gift of the executive. Brady and 80 Tory MPs were ready to force defeat on the government but Starmer hasn't got the bottle.
Plus I believe if they'd voted it down then the Government would have had 21 days to come back with an alternative proposal rather than simply having no powers immediately. So they could vote it down cleanly with Brady and the 80 Tories and then the Government would have had to come back with an amended proposal within 21 days.
Absolutely shocking lack of leadership by Starmer. He clearly would rather snipe from the sidelines and be able to be Captain Hindsight having a go at things that go wrong afterwards rather than have the ability to have a say up front on these issues.
The Government have made mistakes but they're trying. Very trying sometimes. The opposition aren't even doing that.
I don't think you are in any position to judge leadership.You blindly and obsequiously support Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson; a man that is big on personality (in a rather clownish and childlike way), but in spite of his overwhelming ego has clearly had a complete leadership capability by-pass
So I opposed Johnson on this, backed the Brady bunch in advance and wanted to see the Government defeated . . . and your response is to robotically say that I blindly and obsequiously support Johnson?
I think you might have a flaw in your logic circuit.
Why the hell isn't she leader? Much better than Davey.
Well.. quite obviously she's not that bright (given what she said), but I mostly agree she's better than Davey. The LDs just need Clegg back and at any price.
Kind of you to say so, Mr Omnium, but perhaps you Tories might have given Nck Clegg a bit more support when he was there.
But the problem that you Conservatives have is that the brightest people in government now are Cummings, Gove and Johnson (in that order) and the government is a shambolic disaster. Time for normal people to take over, I would have thought.
At the time of the 2015 election I certainly said that I'd vote 'coalition' rather than Tory. I thought it was a rather good government. The Tory element could happily be quite hard-headed, and the LDs could help with the human element - far better than 'wet' Toryism, and far far better than socialists in sheep-in-a-suit's clothing.
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In reality zero restrictions would be mean people make their own arrangements and their own choices, based on the information we know about COVID. The elderly and infirm would self shelter or be sheltered by relatives and carers. And that would mean the hospitals would be able to survive.
And the well could go on powering the economy forward to pay for it all.
The worst way to protect the NHS is the shut down the engine that pays for it.
https://twitter.com/robfordmancs/status/1311672316020043776
Hundreds of thousands of Americans are voting each day, with more key states opening up early or by-mail voting shortly.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-vaccine-astrazenec/exclusive-fda-widens-u-s-safety-inquiry-into-astrazeneca-coronavirus-vaccine-sources-idUKKBN26L3T8
What I took from it was that our current policies are scientifically illiterate and foolish. As I put it this morning before reading the piece we are using a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel. Instead of grinding us all down with the policies Alastair descibes so well in his header we should be focused on what works. And what works is backtracing cases of infection to find their super spreader source and isolating that. The fact that most people who get the virus don't manage to infect more than 1 other person and many don't even manage that, means that these superspreader outbreaks are the key to controlling the virus. SK, Japan and others have policies directed at the actual risk. We continue to pretend that every carrier is such a risk and plan accordingly. It's nonsense and its damaging both economically and socially.
Why would today's youngsters take any notice of politicians telling them to be home by 10pm and not to mix in groups of 7 or more? Anyone under 25 who does is a geek who wouldnt have had anyone to knock about with anyway
This is one of the reasons I'm sceptical about the ability of scientific advisers to fine-tine an R-budget.
https://twitter.com/darrengrimes_/status/1311623897960374272?s=20
Trump's troops won;t show their hand until polling day. Not really.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8793195/Kate-Garraway-issues-stark-warning-lockdown-rulebreakers-amid-husband-Dereks-six-month-battle.html
So it's not over yet, but it's going pretty well so far for those who really want Trump to lose. And Biden is in a way better position than Clinton was four years ago.
We are not, for the foreseeable future, going to eliminate it. So we need to find a way to live with it and we would be wise to learn from our forefathers how they coped with risk.
The only way a society like ours can become a Japan or South Korea, though, is to get our testing right (as the article suggests).
We have committed significant resources to that, but our obsession with diagnosing individuals with 100% accuracy has been very costly - in absolute terms, and much more so in opportunity cost.
Something to bear in mind for comparison purposes.
* as per the Tufekci article in The Atlantic referred to earlier.
The most likely is just competence, or rather lack of it, if the track and trace system is anything to go by.
The second, more sinister but less likely, is that the government may not like what it found. What if, for example, the superspreaders were traced back to Wetherspoons, MacDonalds and Nandos customers benefiting from the delights of the Chancellor's EOTHO scheme?
Why not let the economy run hot and use the wealth generated to set up as many medical facilities as we can?
That said...
I get the feeling Ed Davey only stood against Layla because he realised that Layla would be, what's the phrase I'm looking for... ah yes..., a total fucking disaster.
Daisy is by a mile the most talented LD MP. If she has ambition, and if she is hard working, then the LDs are quite unsentimental about throwing leaders under the bus.
But I must say that I am very pleased to see that the PB Tories are now starting to have a closer look at the what the Lib Dems are saying. It may be that at some stage they want to abandon their sinking ship.
In passing, I saw that Stephen Dorrell, not so long ago a minister in the Conservative government, presided over a session at the recent Lib Dem Conference.
The LDs just need Clegg back and at any price.
You don;t think the US media's visceral and total hatred of Trump and his supporters is affecting the pollsters they sponsor. You clearly think it would be perfectly possible for these pollsters to serve up a Trump doing well poll to their client and the client not have a brain freeze.
I don;t. I think CNN, NBC, ABC, the Atlantic and even Fox represent a shrinking part of American life. A part that's even smaller than in 2016, when Hillary was a shoo-in. And I have a feeling the pollsters in the US are feeding these news organisation in their comfort zone, because of how unacceptable a dose of reality is.
That could be emotion on my part. And I am not recommending anybody follow my ideas. But we shall see.
But he needs to listen to his own party and LAB and LD and get rid of the 10pm England curfew now!
Even a change to 11pm plus 30 min drinking up time would make a real difference.
The rolls used in Subway's hot sandwiches contain too much sugar to be considered bread, according to Ireland's Supreme Court. Ireland's highest court made the ruling in a case about how the bread is taxed.
An Irish franchisee of the US company had claimed it should not pay VAT on the rolls it uses in heated sandwiches. But the court ruled that because of the level of sugar in the rolls they cannot be taxed as bread, which is classed as a "staple product" with zero VAT.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54370056
Trump requires food aid boxes to come with a letter from him
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/01/trump-letter-food-aid-boxes-424230
And right on cue a poll to back up my views.
Gallup's latest shows 60% of Americans either trust the mainstream media little or not at all.
9% have a great deal of faith in the mass media. That's who CNN think America is, and who they are talking to.
Absolutely shocking lack of leadership by Starmer. He clearly would rather snipe from the sidelines and be able to be Captain Hindsight having a go at things that go wrong afterwards rather than have the ability to have a say up front on these issues.
The Government have made mistakes but they're trying. Very trying sometimes. The opposition aren't even doing that.
But Wisconsin is at 11% already. And there's still four and a half weeks to go.
It wouldn't be surprising to see Wisconsin reach 40% by polling day.
But the problem that you Conservatives have is that the brightest people in government now are Cummings, Gove and Johnson (in that order) and the government is a shambolic disaster. Time for normal people to take over, I would have thought.
Perhaps the "80 rebels" didn't actually exist and Labour had nothing to gain by impotently voting against the motion?
But no, blame the opposition for the government's, which you support, failings - you just look like fools.
But there will be deaths anyway, whether of this or from other causes.
If there is no vaccine then we are going to have live with it. There is no other option. Because shutting down our economy is simply not viable or realistic. So we need to find sensible ways to live with this as Mr Meeks suggests. And we need to learn how our parents, grand-parents etc learned to live with similar risks.
This may sound brutal but IMO it is more realistic than having years of shutting down the economy with all its baleful consequences.
If its the former then it should reach over 100% given we expect turnout to be up.
https://twitter.com/RP131/status/1311686868627578883?s=20
And 15 minute antigen tests (that require no laboratory or specialist staff) are exceptionally good at identifying *exactly* those people.
If we combine rapid antigen testing, with some moderate restrictions over the most high risk activities, we can get on top of this, with very few restrictions on everyday life.
It doesn't matter if Labour loses the motion, they had a chance to stand up and be counted and tempt Brady etc to vote with them - and they chucked it away.
My wife occasionally works on the drive through testing station for Winchester Hospital. The maximum they can do a day is 96. That demonstrates what a logistical effort it is to do this many tests nationwide.
https://twitter.com/SpectatorEvents/status/1311685679257190400?s=20
Starmer did not spurn any opportunity to defeat the Government. You have no idea if Labour realised there was not enough rebels, so decided to go down this route instead. But no, it's Labour's fault the Government is a joke, apparently. Listen to yourself.
Will the last footballer who hasn't had COVID please report to the front desk...
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1311685923097260034?s=20
I think you might have a flaw in your logic circuit.
Its also possible that after an initial surge by adamant anti-Trump-ites the numbers drop as we get close to the vote.
Maybe Trump loses Wisconsin anyhoo.