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.
Look I get it, you only want to post inconsistent, unverifiable guff with a pro Trump slant, then play the martyred voice in the wilderness when asked (perfectly reasonably) to defend your assertions. Fair enough, whatever floats your boat.
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.
I wanted to see Johnson defeated on this because I worship Johnson?
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.
Look I get it, you only want to post inconsistent, unverifiable guff with a pro Trump slant, then play the martyred voice in the wilderness when asked (perfectly reasonably) to defend your assertions. Fair enough, whatever floats your boat.
Contrarian defends the racists downtrodden folk who cannot defend themselves like Jake Hepple and Donald Trump.
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.
AFAICT that's what the government are trying to do. I expect that high risk occupations and locations will get large scale antigen screening as soon as it is feasible. In the meantime it's ramping up PCR lab capacity and local small-scale testing (but still quite substantial because we are buying loads of kit). I don't think we are going to be out of the woods anytime soon, but I do believe that in principle that if we all do what we are told we can hold the virus back without a full-scale lockdown again.
It's going to be expensive and difficult, and it won't be perfect, but we aren't in the almost hopeless situation of the spring when the only tool was lockdown.
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.
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.
Will you shut up man.
This isn't the place to be if you want people to shut up.
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.
Look I get it, you only want to post inconsistent, unverifiable guff with a pro Trump slant, then play the martyred voice in the wilderness when asked (perfectly reasonably) to defend your assertions. Fair enough, whatever floats your boat.
I wonder what consistent verifiable pro-Trump non-guff would look like in your world
I'm betting it doesn;t exist. It cannot exist. Any pro-trump argument would get the same treatment from you no matter how it was framed.
Its just like how every pro-trump argument in 2016 was dismissed, and every pro-leave argument was dismissed. How did you put it? inconsistent unverifiable guff.
Hmm. 67,000,000 people. Around 45,000,000 needed to have had it to reach herd immunity. c. 5,000,000 have had it so far.
We therefore need 40,000,000 more people to have it.
If we have no restrictions (either imposed externally or self-imposed), it climbs exponentially and we get those 40,000,000 through faster.
If we have restrictions, we can keep a rate more or less constant (R=1) at a high-ish level and feed people through the maw of the virus in controlled manner.
As a rough rule of thumb, with current treatments and a youngish cohort exposed (ie the way it is now), about 10,000 infections equates to 250 people per day coming in to hospital and 40 people per day dying.
Once the level of covid hospitalisations goes much above 1,000 per day, you get high pressure on the NHS leading to other medical treatments being curtailed or suspended. Once it goes much above 3,000 per day, you've swamped the NHS and a lot of people who would survive with hospital support will not survive (including a rather surprising number of younger people)
So, 40,000 infections per day (and 1,000 hospitalisations and 160 direct deaths per day) is probably sustainable without serious impact elsewhere in the NHS (all this is assuming that we shield the older and more vulnerable and feed the young and healthy through the maw; if it leaks across, hospitalisations and deaths increase further).
Once it gets above that, we start incurring deaths from other medical issues, and once it gets above 120,000 infections per day, the death rate (especially in the young) shoots up as we turn desperately ill patients away from the hospitals.
No restrictions, 3-day doubling, from here, we get past the 40,000 per day in under a week and the 120,000 per day in a week and a half. Cue up the mass graves. If we can't learn to live with it, we'll learn to die with it; one or the other.
Or we could try one of the lower constant levels with restrictions (but knowing these are for a fixed time). The 40,000 per day, getting 40 million through takes - well, that's easy: 1,000 days. Start tomorrow, and we're done by the end of June, 2023. By which time acquired immunity has probably dropped off from the first lot and we go around the houses again...
The 120,000 per day number; they could be done in just 300 days. Just before the start of August in 2021. Hopefully acquired immunity will last a few more months before we have to do it all again.
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.
She has been elected Deputy Leader by the other LD MPs.
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.
That is just a feeble attempt to give yourself a bit of credibility. Maybe you have got worried by being seen as Boris Johnson's last "useful". Even HYUFD has secretly woken up to the fact he is crap.
Incidentally, did you notice that bit in Alastair's article "....and if your hobbies are reading or arguing with strangers online." Did it resonate at all? I really can't believe you are just one person to be on here so much. You are Boris Johnson's (diminishing) fan club in CCO and I claim my £5.
Hmm. 67,000,000 people. Around 45,000,000 needed to have had it to reach herd immunity. c. 5,000,000 have had it so far.
We therefore need 40,000,000 more people to have it.
If we have no restrictions (either imposed externally or self-imposed), it climbs exponentially and we get those 40,000,000 through faster.
If we have restrictions, we can keep a rate more or less constant (R=1) at a high-ish level and feed people through the maw of the virus in controlled manner.
As a rough rule of thumb, with current treatments and a youngish cohort exposed (ie the way it is now), about 10,000 infections equates to 250 people per day coming in to hospital and 40 people per day dying.
Once the level of covid hospitalisations goes much above 1,000 per day, you get high pressure on the NHS leading to other medical treatments being curtailed or suspended. Once it goes much above 3,000 per day, you've swamped the NHS and a lot of people who would survive with hospital support will not survive (including a rather surprising number of younger people)
So, 40,000 infections per day (and 1,000 hospitalisations and 160 direct deaths per day) is probably sustainable without serious impact elsewhere in the NHS (all this is assuming that we shield the older and more vulnerable and feed the young and healthy through the maw; if it leaks across, hospitalisations and deaths increase further).
Once it gets above that, we start incurring deaths from other medical issues, and once it gets above 120,000 infections per day, the death rate (especially in the young) shoots up as we turn desperately ill patients away from the hospitals.
No restrictions, 3-day doubling, from here, we get past the 40,000 per day in under a week and the 120,000 per day in a week and a half. Cue up the mass graves. If we can't learn to live with it, we'll learn to die with it; one or the other.
Or we could try one of the lower constant levels with restrictions (but knowing these are for a fixed time). The 40,000 per day, getting 40 million through takes - well, that's easy: 1,000 days. Start tomorrow, and we're done by the end of June, 2023. By which time acquired immunity has probably dropped off from the first lot and we go around the houses again...
The 120,000 per day number; they could be done in just 300 days. Just before the start of August in 2021. Hopefully acquired immunity will last a few more months before we have to do it all again.
And, of course, as @rcs1000 has said time and again, people won't accept the mass graves and doubling scenario, so we'd probably level out somewhere a bit above the 120,000 per day infections (bobbling up and down), incurring all the economic damage, more deaths than necessary, and having it still last for months and months on end as we bury them.
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.
The idea of local lockdowns were kicked around for several weeks before Leicester came in - a toolkit of what various levels looked like is what I think was missing (legislation did cover what features could be included in a local lockdown but did not elaborate on combinations, indeed, that was not the place), but I think the government needed, back in May, more clarity on what restrictions would be applied in what combination and in what order. It was already clear, given the desire to get schools back, that that would not simply be unlockdown in reverse.
Simply having and communicating that toolkit (and using some A, B, C system to represent it), would have meant that when lockdowns were applied, things could have been wrapped up in SIs and things would have been clearer sooner.
Broadly, R budgeting does seem to be what we are attempting and, in terms of when and where restrictions are being applied, government aren't doing a bad job (though there have been some missteps in terms of releasing local lockdowns). It's made possible by the fact that we were still restricted, so a few cycles of 1.3-1.4 can be borne while you tighten (the right things) or adjust tracing or whatever. But it is homeostatic - whilst there is doubt and we are tightening, as now, we are reasonably likely to bring in measures that take things to 0.8 for a time, until cold/geographic spread/a few big superspreads/lockdown fatigue edge it up again, and we get another period where it overshoots to 1.3/1.4 before the bimetallic strip makes contact in government once more.
A preview of him claiming to have won the election bigly in the face of results that say the opposite.
I was thinking that.
I think the vote itself is barely relevant, it's what happens afterwards that will decide who is President. At the moment the chances of Trump conceding look to be almost nil, I expect him to claim victory immediately and to accuse the Democrats of fraud on a clearly impossible scale. The question then is who will side with Trump, and what will they do. I expect it to make the hanging chads look like small beer.
These are the 26 MPs who voted against the renewal of restrictions yesterday.
"Bone, Mr Peter Butler, Dawn Cooper, Daisy Davey, rh Ed Davies, Philip Farron, Tim Farry, Stephen Hobhouse, Wera Hollobone, Mr Philip Jardine, Christine Jones, rh Mr Kevan Long Bailey, Rebecca Lucas, Caroline McVey, rh Esther Moran, Layla Olney, Sarah Spellar, rh John Stone, Jamie Stringer, Graham Swayne, rh Sir Desmond Twigg, Derek Walker, Sir Charles Wilson, Munira Wragg, Mr William
These are the 26 MPs who voted against the renewal of restrictions yesterday.
"Bone, Mr Peter Butler, Dawn Cooper, Daisy Davey, rh Ed Davies, Philip Farron, Tim Farry, Stephen Hobhouse, Wera Hollobone, Mr Philip Jardine, Christine Jones, rh Mr Kevan Long Bailey, Rebecca Lucas, Caroline McVey, rh Esther Moran, Layla Olney, Sarah Spellar, rh John Stone, Jamie Stringer, Graham Swayne, rh Sir Desmond Twigg, Derek Walker, Sir Charles Wilson, Munira Wragg, Mr William
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!
Pizzas are edible bin-lids, nothing more. Pineapple can go in dhansak or Sweet'n'sour chicken/pork.
When I have been in the better type of Italian, I tend to go for the meats, vegs and breads sort of dishes. I have no recollection of what they are as I speak no Italian and so the names of the dishes do not "stick" with me
These are the 26 MPs who voted against the renewal of restrictions yesterday.
"Bone, Mr Peter Butler, Dawn Cooper, Daisy Davey, rh Ed Davies, Philip Farron, Tim Farry, Stephen Hobhouse, Wera Hollobone, Mr Philip Jardine, Christine Jones, rh Mr Kevan Long Bailey, Rebecca Lucas, Caroline McVey, rh Esther Moran, Layla Olney, Sarah Spellar, rh John Stone, Jamie Stringer, Graham Swayne, rh Sir Desmond Twigg, Derek Walker, Sir Charles Wilson, Munira Wragg, Mr William
These are the 26 MPs who voted against the renewal of restrictions yesterday.
"Bone, Mr Peter Butler, Dawn Cooper, Daisy Davey, rh Ed Davies, Philip Farron, Tim Farry, Stephen Hobhouse, Wera Hollobone, Mr Philip Jardine, Christine Jones, rh Mr Kevan Long Bailey, Rebecca Lucas, Caroline McVey, rh Esther Moran, Layla Olney, Sarah Spellar, rh John Stone, Jamie Stringer, Graham Swayne, rh Sir Desmond Twigg, Derek Walker, Sir Charles Wilson, Munira Wragg, Mr William
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.
Will you shut up man.
This isn't the place to be if you want people to shut up.
Point of order - not people.
But no, c'mon, just a little joke. It's my new favourite phrase. Joe speaking for billions.
And I think it might become iconic. Like "There you go again" or "I knew Jack Kennedy and you're no ..." etc.
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
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.
The thing is they are not "exceptionally good" at identifying those people - which is one reason why our government hasn't already spent a lot of money on deploying them.
What they are is good enough to pick up a large proportion of those people - which in cluster events is all that you need - in the same way that a positive result from a pooled test already tells you most of what you need to know before you retest to identify which particular individuals are infected.
The failure of our administration to grasp this simple idea is the biggest reason we don't already have the testing system we need. That, and the failure to acknowledge the the least useful test is the one you don't conduct at all.
Remember the Chinese antigen tests which we ridiculed massively (and quite reasonably) at the beginning of the year for their dismal lack of accuracy ? Even they could have had some utility in the right circumstances - and playing around with that might have taught us a lot more about how to deal with testing uncertainties.
Hmm. 67,000,000 people. Around 45,000,000 needed to have had it to reach herd immunity. c. 5,000,000 have had it so far.
We therefore need 40,000,000 more people to have it.
If we have no restrictions (either imposed externally or self-imposed), it climbs exponentially and we get those 40,000,000 through faster.
If we have restrictions, we can keep a rate more or less constant (R=1) at a high-ish level and feed people through the maw of the virus in controlled manner.
As a rough rule of thumb, with current treatments and a youngish cohort exposed (ie the way it is now), about 10,000 infections equates to 250 people per day coming in to hospital and 40 people per day dying.
Once the level of covid hospitalisations goes much above 1,000 per day, you get high pressure on the NHS leading to other medical treatments being curtailed or suspended. Once it goes much above 3,000 per day, you've swamped the NHS and a lot of people who would survive with hospital support will not survive (including a rather surprising number of younger people)
So, 40,000 infections per day (and 1,000 hospitalisations and 160 direct deaths per day) is probably sustainable without serious impact elsewhere in the NHS (all this is assuming that we shield the older and more vulnerable and feed the young and healthy through the maw; if it leaks across, hospitalisations and deaths increase further).
Once it gets above that, we start incurring deaths from other medical issues, and once it gets above 120,000 infections per day, the death rate (especially in the young) shoots up as we turn desperately ill patients away from the hospitals.
No restrictions, 3-day doubling, from here, we get past the 40,000 per day in under a week and the 120,000 per day in a week and a half. Cue up the mass graves. If we can't learn to live with it, we'll learn to die with it; one or the other.
Or we could try one of the lower constant levels with restrictions (but knowing these are for a fixed time). The 40,000 per day, getting 40 million through takes - well, that's easy: 1,000 days. Start tomorrow, and we're done by the end of June, 2023. By which time acquired immunity has probably dropped off from the first lot and we go around the houses again...
The 120,000 per day number; they could be done in just 300 days. Just before the start of August in 2021. Hopefully acquired immunity will last a few more months before we have to do it all again.
I can judge my own risk, he was careless and ended up in hospital, they were reckless and died.
Most people think they are an above average competence driver. Most people will think that their exception to the Covid rules is not much of a risk. Most people would think that they were acting responsibly.
The people who died would be blamed for their individual recklessness.
We shouldn't have given up on elimination without trying.
A preview of him claiming to have won the election bigly in the face of results that say the opposite.
I was thinking that.
I think the vote itself is barely relevant, it's what happens afterwards that will decide who is President. At the moment the chances of Trump conceding look to be almost nil, I expect him to claim victory immediately and to accuse the Democrats of fraud on a clearly impossible scale. The question then is who will side with Trump, and what will they do. I expect it to make the hanging chads look like small beer.
I suspect the Republican state legislatures where they can will ignore the results where they can and award their electoral college votes to Trump no matter what.
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
How do you have super spreading while people are only in groups of six?
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!
Pizzas are edible bin-lids, nothing more. Pineapple can go in dhansak or Sweet'n'sour chicken/pork.
When I have been in the better type of Italian, I tend to go for the meats, vegs and breads sort of dishes. I have no recollection of what they are as I speak no Italian and so the names of the dishes do not "stick" with me
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
How do you have super spreading while people are only in groups of six?
Because people are not only in groups of six, especially in pubs and bars.
A preview of him claiming to have won the election bigly in the face of results that say the opposite.
Trump finds himself very very friendless when Fox calls Michigan half an hour in.
Indeed. Trump will find himself very alone if/when he loses.
Just like his British counterpart Jeremy Corbyn, he will end up a laughing stock that even his own former allies said they had nothing to do with and the party would be under new leadership rapidly. There will be a dying band of hardcore loyalists claiming to have won the argument, but they'll be laughed at even by his parties own side.
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
How do you have super spreading while people are only in groups of six?
Because people are not only in groups of six, especially in pubs and bars.
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
In fairness to the government they are following the scientific advice. Its just that that advice is crap. We still see pictures in Scotland (no doubt England does too) showing each person with the virus spreading it to 2 or 3 others who then multiply in turn explaining that if one of these only isolated the chain is broken. The problem with this approach is that it seems to bear no relation to reality. Many of those infected infect no one. A few can infect dozens or even hundreds. It is a completely different risk model and it requires a different response.
It's a basketball term meaning a slam dunk/easy task.
Pedant alert. A slam dunk and a layup are distinctly different basketball moves.
You can tell I don't watch much basketball.
I mean it's the sport based on the game of rounders?
A slam dunk is undefendable. Like a 20 yard shot top bins. Hence a slam dunk argument. Impossible to refute. A layup is like a one yard tap in to an open goal. Easy for anyone. Even Donny.
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
In fairness to the government they are following the scientific advice. Its just that that advice is crap. We still see pictures in Scotland (no doubt England does too) showing each person with the virus spreading it to 2 or 3 others who then multiply in turn explaining that if one of these only isolated the chain is broken. The problem with this approach is that it seems to bear no relation to reality. Many of those infected infect no one. A few can infect dozens or even hundreds. It is a completely different risk model and it requires a different response.
Practically what difference does it actually make, since we don't know who each of those are?
And restricting super spreaders to being able to infect five others not dozens at any one time seems like progress if that is the issue?
I sense much challenging of the stultifying left liberal consensus that somehow and rather magically dominates despite a Tory landslide govt and a heavily right wing press coming our way here.
It's a basketball term meaning a slam dunk/easy task.
Pedant alert. A slam dunk and a layup are distinctly different basketball moves.
You can tell I don't watch much basketball.
I mean it's the sport based on the game of rounders?
A slam dunk is undefendable. Like a 20 yard shot top bins. Hence a slam dunk argument. Impossible to refute. A layup is like a one yard tap in to an open goal. Easy for anyone. Even Donny.
I sense much challenging of the stultifying left liberal consensus that somehow and rather magically dominates despite a Tory landslide govt and a heavily right wing press coming our way here.
Right wing press?
With Channel 4, Sky and the BBC all on the left (C4 extremely so, the rest more marginally).
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
How do you have super spreading while people are only in groups of six?
One of the groups was 8 people, but that wasn't the crucial difference in how one case lead to 30. Note the spread to the adjacent table in particular.
It's a golfing term meaning avoiding taking on a very difficult shot in order to avoid the risk of a disasterous outcome that could destroy your round. i.e. instead of attempting to hit a 200 yard shot over water you are more likely than not to end up in, you lay up with a shot short of the water and hit an easy second shot onto the green. Accepting a bogey rather than going for an unlikely par by risking a triple bogey.
In this case, Trump just couldn't avoid the lure of following his true instincts rather than his head, ended up in the water and has quite possibly done a fair bit of damage to his campaign.
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.
Actually those numbers aren't really that large. 2m. how many voted last time, 130m? so one seventieth of the total?
Trump's troops won;t show their hand until polling day. Not really.
In aggregate, they're not that large.
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.
I don;t see how you can work out what 40% is until you know what 100% is.
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.
The numbers are in comparison to 2016 turnout.
And, if you look at state level approval ratings, Wisconsin was the weakest state for Trump (of the ones he won in 2016). That makes it a prime candidate to flip in my book.
The way I look at this is:
- which states have approval-disapproval out of line with the national average, and were either narrow Clinton wins, or narrow Trump wins - which party has had more success in driving voter registration
This puts Virginia in the dicey column for the Democrats (surprisingly good numbers for the Republicans in both), and suggests Trump holds Florida. (Although the current flare up of CV19 among the elderly has to be concerning to him.)
This puts Wisconsin and Michigan in the Dem gain column, and suggests that Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire are safe for them.
The problem President Trump has, though, is that there are a bunch of states (like Arizona and Pennsylvania) where he's in with a shot. But he really has to win almost all of these to hold onto the Presidency.
Possible? For sure. But looking increasingly unlikely.
It's a basketball term meaning a slam dunk/easy task.
Pedant alert. A slam dunk and a layup are distinctly different basketball moves.
They mean different things as idioms too.
A "slam dunk" is an emphatic score, where you give at least some credit to the scorer. When you think about it, a basketball slam dunk isn't necessarily easy to execute - but you're jumping high and ramming it in the basket for emphasis. It's like an emphatic penalty kick in football terms - yes, any penalty taker should probably score 75% of the time, but they point is this one has done it very confidently and convincingly.
A "layup" is just a ridiculously easy shot from short range off the back-board. If you miss a layup, the implication is you just shouldn't be playing. It's an open goal in football terms.
Put more simply, a slam dunk LOOKS easy, whereas a layup IS easy.
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.
She has been elected Deputy Leader by the other LD MPs.
Ahead of Layla Moran. I believe it was unanimous. Even Layla voted for her.
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
How do you have super spreading while people are only in groups of six?
Because people are not only in groups of six, especially in pubs and bars.
I sense much challenging of the stultifying left liberal consensus that somehow and rather magically dominates despite a Tory landslide govt and a heavily right wing press coming our way here.
Right wing press?
With Channel 4, Sky and the BBC all on the left (C4 extremely so, the rest more marginally).
Press. They are skewed heavily to the right. You are talking TV stations. Ch4 is left, no question. Sky and the Beeb are only left if one is viewing from the extreme right. So, ok, assuming it's you doing the viewing (and I hope you have a licence) your comment is sincere and subjectively truthful. Albeit objectively speaking, bollocks.
A preview of him claiming to have won the election bigly in the face of results that say the opposite.
I was thinking that.
I think the vote itself is barely relevant, it's what happens afterwards that will decide who is President. At the moment the chances of Trump conceding look to be almost nil, I expect him to claim victory immediately and to accuse the Democrats of fraud on a clearly impossible scale. The question then is who will side with Trump, and what will they do. I expect it to make the hanging chads look like small beer.
The media will be important. Also leading Republicans who hopefully will say - Donald your time is up.
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.
"World beating"
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
In fairness to the government they are following the scientific advice. Its just that that advice is crap. We still see pictures in Scotland (no doubt England does too) showing each person with the virus spreading it to 2 or 3 others who then multiply in turn explaining that if one of these only isolated the chain is broken. The problem with this approach is that it seems to bear no relation to reality. Many of those infected infect no one. A few can infect dozens or even hundreds. It is a completely different risk model and it requires a different response.
Practically what difference does it actually make, since we don't know who each of those are?
And restricting super spreaders to being able to infect five others not dozens at any one time seems like progress if that is the issue?
It means rather than working on very accurate but very slow testing as we have to date we need to use much faster, less reliable testing and then work back so that the superspreader can be identified and stopped, ideally within hours. Our testing regime is like trench warfare in the age of the panzer or the drone. It really doesn't work.
It is not correct that people are restricted to 6. There are important exemptions, notably for work. So many superspreader incidents around this country have been in food processing plants with controlled ventilation. Organised sport is another potentially important exemption. And, until recently 30 for weddings, now 15.
It means that, for example, restricting pubs to a 10pm cut off is pretty pointless. The vast majority of us are no risk even if we have the virus. If there is a superspreader in the pub the people at his table and indeed the surrounding tables will be infected before 10.
Hmm. 67,000,000 people. Around 45,000,000 needed to have had it to reach herd immunity. c. 5,000,000 have had it so far.
We therefore need 40,000,000 more people to have it.
If we have no restrictions (either imposed externally or self-imposed), it climbs exponentially and we get those 40,000,000 through faster.
If we have restrictions, we can keep a rate more or less constant (R=1) at a high-ish level and feed people through the maw of the virus in controlled manner.
As a rough rule of thumb, with current treatments and a youngish cohort exposed (ie the way it is now), about 10,000 infections equates to 250 people per day coming in to hospital and 40 people per day dying.
Once the level of covid hospitalisations goes much above 1,000 per day, you get high pressure on the NHS leading to other medical treatments being curtailed or suspended. Once it goes much above 3,000 per day, you've swamped the NHS and a lot of people who would survive with hospital support will not survive (including a rather surprising number of younger people)
So, 40,000 infections per day (and 1,000 hospitalisations and 160 direct deaths per day) is probably sustainable without serious impact elsewhere in the NHS (all this is assuming that we shield the older and more vulnerable and feed the young and healthy through the maw; if it leaks across, hospitalisations and deaths increase further).
Once it gets above that, we start incurring deaths from other medical issues, and once it gets above 120,000 infections per day, the death rate (especially in the young) shoots up as we turn desperately ill patients away from the hospitals.
No restrictions, 3-day doubling, from here, we get past the 40,000 per day in under a week and the 120,000 per day in a week and a half. Cue up the mass graves. If we can't learn to live with it, we'll learn to die with it; one or the other.
Or we could try one of the lower constant levels with restrictions (but knowing these are for a fixed time). The 40,000 per day, getting 40 million through takes - well, that's easy: 1,000 days. Start tomorrow, and we're done by the end of June, 2023. By which time acquired immunity has probably dropped off from the first lot and we go around the houses again...
The 120,000 per day number; they could be done in just 300 days. Just before the start of August in 2021. Hopefully acquired immunity will last a few more months before we have to do it all again.
It’s not either or. We have sensible restrictions and compensation for those adversely affected by them and we try to keep the economy going as far as possible. But we cannot assume that there will be a vaccine or not one soon and so we have to find an m.o. that strikes the right balance between health and the economy. Just as other societies have done - including ours, in the not so distant past.
Whereas now we are all over the place with restrictions, we are killing businesses through a process of attrition without any sort of compensation, we are too late in getting an effective testing system and in consequence we are getting the worst of all worlds.
Anyway am off for a bit. I can’t really take any more of this.
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.
Actually those numbers aren't really that large. 2m. how many voted last time, 130m? so one seventieth of the total?
Trump's troops won;t show their hand until polling day. Not really.
In aggregate, they're not that large.
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.
I don;t see how you can work out what 40% is until you know what 100% is.
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.
The numbers are in comparison to 2016 turnout.
And, if you look at state level approval ratings, Wisconsin was the weakest state for Trump (of the ones he won in 2016). That makes it a prime candidate to flip in my book.
The way I look at this is:
- which states have approval-disapproval out of line with the national average, and were either narrow Clinton wins, or narrow Trump wins - which party has had more success in driving voter registration
This puts Virginia in the dicey column for the Democrats (surprisingly good numbers for the Republicans in both), and suggests Trump holds Florida. (Although the current flare up of CV19 among the elderly has to be concerning to him.)
This puts Wisconsin and Michigan in the Dem gain column, and suggests that Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire are safe for them.
The problem President Trump has, though, is that there are a bunch of states (like Arizona and Pennsylvania) where he's in with a shot. But he really has to win almost all of these to hold onto the Presidency.
Possible? For sure. But looking increasingly unlikely.
Yes If I were Trump the big worries would be Wisconsin/Michigan/Pennsylvania. That's where it will be won or lost.
One of the US pundits I listen to says it would be historically unprecedented for a president to underperform his approval rating. Not sure if that's true though.
A preview of him claiming to have won the election bigly in the face of results that say the opposite.
I was thinking that.
I think the vote itself is barely relevant, it's what happens afterwards that will decide who is President. At the moment the chances of Trump conceding look to be almost nil, I expect him to claim victory immediately and to accuse the Democrats of fraud on a clearly impossible scale. The question then is who will side with Trump, and what will they do. I expect it to make the hanging chads look like small beer.
I suspect the Republican state legislatures where they can will ignore the results where they can and award their electoral college votes to Trump no matter what.
Does anyone have a list of the state legislatures for the swing states ? Which are Republican?
A preview of him claiming to have won the election bigly in the face of results that say the opposite.
Trump finds himself very very friendless when Fox calls Michigan half an hour in.
Indeed. Trump will find himself very alone if/when he loses.
Just like his British counterpart Jeremy Corbyn, he will end up a laughing stock that even his own former allies said they had nothing to do with and the party would be under new leadership rapidly. There will be a dying band of hardcore loyalists claiming to have won the argument, but they'll be laughed at even by his parties own side.
The Republicans could find themselves in more of a pickle than Labour did.
Even in the 2019 election, there were plenty of Labour people running on a "nothing to do with Jez" ticket. Even someone like Starmer was clearly doing some of his campaign with his fingers crossed. As a result, the "Under new management" messaging has been broadly accepted, and Conservative attempts to make "you supported Corbyn" an attack line haven't really worked.
For various reasons (being in power, the role of right wing shouty media), the Republicans have been much more Trumpified. It's much harder to point to a resistance, or a party in exile, who can take over after a Trump defeat. One might say the same of a post-Johnson Conservative party, as well.
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.
The thing is they are not "exceptionally good" at identifying those people - which is one reason why our government hasn't already spent a lot of money on deploying them.
What they are is good enough to pick up a large proportion of those people - which in cluster events is all that you need - in the same way that a positive result from a pooled test already tells you most of what you need to know before you retest to identify which particular individuals are infected.
The failure of our administration to grasp this simple idea is the biggest reason we don't already have the testing system we need. That, and the failure to acknowledge the the least useful test is the one you don't conduct at all.
Remember the Chinese antigen tests which we ridiculed massively (and quite reasonably) at the beginning of the year for their dismal lack of accuracy ? Even they could have had some utility in the right circumstances - and playing around with that might have taught us a lot more about how to deal with testing uncertainties.
I think some of this attitude comes from SAGE. I've seen reports from it, or its subcommittees, that seem to approach it from the point of view of a medic: if it isn't reliable, we can't use it at all. I think public health experts are so used to thinking in these terms (which are quite sensible when you're doing screening for some kind of cancer where unnecessary treatment is a tangible harm) that they aren't thinking like a statistician and reducing risk.
As it happens my expertise is precisely on what you can and cannot detect and how to pool weak detectors to reduce risk (in certain settings) but the various calls for participation that went from government to academics did not seek input from my community. I think that was a loss.
Can someone explain to me why these Northern leaders are telling their electorate to ignore the new measures
I really do not understand it
Which northern leaders?
Middlesborough mayor has declared he will ignore them as they are recommended live on Sky
I understand Hartlepool as well plus Liverpool not happy
BBC article says:
In Middlesbrough, the mayor Andy Preston said: "We defy the government and we do not accept these measures." But he later said he would obey the law and urged others to do so.
I sense much challenging of the stultifying left liberal consensus that somehow and rather magically dominates despite a Tory landslide govt and a heavily right wing press coming our way here.
Right wing press?
With Channel 4, Sky and the BBC all on the left (C4 extremely so, the rest more marginally).
Press. They are skewed heavily to the right. You are talking TV stations. Ch4 is left, no question. Sky and the Beeb are only left if one is viewing from the extreme right. So, ok, assuming it's you doing the viewing (and I hope you have a licence) your comment is sincere and subjectively truthful. Albeit objectively speaking, bollocks.
How is the press right?
TV and radio objectively makes up an overwhelming majority of the press. Name one 'objectively speaking' right-wing TV station that compares to Channel 4, even if you (for some bizarre reason) think BBC and Sky are impartial (perhaps they are coming from your PoV but that should say it all).
And that's without dignifying ITV with Piers Morgan and Robert Peston as being part of the "press".
7 day increase in 7 day rolling average = 26% -> R = 1.14 (-0.06 on yesterday) Overlapping 4 day increase in 7 day rolling average = 8% -> R=1.08 (-0.04 on yesterday)
Curious from Malmesbury's data why Warrington has been chosen and not Manchester? I didn't think the epidemic was worse in Warrington than Manchester and Malmesbury's data seems to say that again.
A preview of him claiming to have won the election bigly in the face of results that say the opposite.
I was thinking that.
I think the vote itself is barely relevant, it's what happens afterwards that will decide who is President. At the moment the chances of Trump conceding look to be almost nil, I expect him to claim victory immediately and to accuse the Democrats of fraud on a clearly impossible scale. The question then is who will side with Trump, and what will they do. I expect it to make the hanging chads look like small beer.
I suspect the Republican state legislatures where they can will ignore the results where they can and award their electoral college votes to Trump no matter what.
Does anyone have a list of the state legislatures for the swing states ? Which are Republican?
I sense much challenging of the stultifying left liberal consensus that somehow and rather magically dominates despite a Tory landslide govt and a heavily right wing press coming our way here.
Right wing press?
With Channel 4, Sky and the BBC all on the left (C4 extremely so, the rest more marginally).
Press. They are skewed heavily to the right. You are talking TV stations. Ch4 is left, no question. Sky and the Beeb are only left if one is viewing from the extreme right. So, ok, assuming it's you doing the viewing (and I hope you have a licence) your comment is sincere and subjectively truthful. Albeit objectively speaking, bollocks.
How is the press right?
TV and radio objectively makes up an overwhelming majority of the press. Name one 'objectively speaking' right-wing TV station that compares to Channel 4, even if you (for some bizarre reason) think BBC and Sky are impartial (perhaps they are coming from your PoV but that should say it all).
And that's without dignifying ITV with Piers Morgan and Robert Peston as being part of the "press".
You're getting "GB News" so quit complaining. I'm sure it'll be great.
A preview of him claiming to have won the election bigly in the face of results that say the opposite.
Trump finds himself very very friendless when Fox calls Michigan half an hour in.
Indeed. Trump will find himself very alone if/when he loses.
Just like his British counterpart Jeremy Corbyn, he will end up a laughing stock that even his own former allies said they had nothing to do with and the party would be under new leadership rapidly. There will be a dying band of hardcore loyalists claiming to have won the argument, but they'll be laughed at even by his parties own side.
The Republicans could find themselves in more of a pickle than Labour did.
Even in the 2019 election, there were plenty of Labour people running on a "nothing to do with Jez" ticket. Even someone like Starmer was clearly doing some of his campaign with his fingers crossed. As a result, the "Under new management" messaging has been broadly accepted, and Conservative attempts to make "you supported Corbyn" an attack line haven't really worked.
For various reasons (being in power, the role of right wing shouty media), the Republicans have been much more Trumpified. It's much harder to point to a resistance, or a party in exile, who can take over after a Trump defeat. One might say the same of a post-Johnson Conservative party, as well.
That's true but the two major US parties are much more hard-wired into the US body politic than ours are so it probably won't matter.
Can someone explain to me why these Northern leaders are telling their electorate to ignore the new measures
I really do not understand it
Which northern leaders?
Middlesborough mayor has declared he will ignore them as they are recommended live on Sky
I understand Hartlepool as well plus Liverpool not happy
BBC article says:
In Middlesbrough, the mayor Andy Preston said: "We defy the government and we do not accept these measures." But he later said he would obey the law and urged others to do so.
Clearly had a talking to.
He said on Sky he would only do it if it became the law
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.
Look I get it, you only want to post inconsistent, unverifiable guff with a pro Trump slant, then play the martyred voice in the wilderness when asked (perfectly reasonably) to defend your assertions. Fair enough, whatever floats your boat.
I wonder what consistent verifiable pro-Trump non-guff would look like in your world
I'm betting it doesn;t exist. It cannot exist. Any pro-trump argument would get the same treatment from you no matter how it was framed.
Its just like how every pro-trump argument in 2016 was dismissed, and every pro-leave argument was dismissed. How did you put it? inconsistent unverifiable guff.
Trump still won, and Leave still won.
And your view got taken to the cleaners.
I'm flattered that you think you know my view. As it happens I didn't bet on the last US election but did win a few hundred on the night of the EU ref partly based on AndyJS's estimable spreadsheet.
Can you explain why you conflated 'certain pollsters' with 'mainstream media'? Do you think that they're interchangeable?
Curious from Malmesbury's data why Warrington has been chosen and not Manchester? I didn't think the epidemic was worse in Warrington than Manchester and Malmesbury's data seems to say that again.
Andy Burnham probably told the government to F off.
Comments
It's going to be expensive and difficult, and it won't be perfect, but we aren't in the almost hopeless situation of the spring when the only tool was lockdown.
I'm betting it doesn;t exist. It cannot exist. Any pro-trump argument would get the same treatment from you no matter how it was framed.
Its just like how every pro-trump argument in 2016 was dismissed, and every pro-leave argument was dismissed. How did you put it? inconsistent unverifiable guff.
Trump still won, and Leave still won.
And your view got taken to the cleaners.
And with one bound we would be free?
Hmm. 67,000,000 people.
Around 45,000,000 needed to have had it to reach herd immunity.
c. 5,000,000 have had it so far.
We therefore need 40,000,000 more people to have it.
If we have no restrictions (either imposed externally or self-imposed), it climbs exponentially and we get those 40,000,000 through faster.
If we have restrictions, we can keep a rate more or less constant (R=1) at a high-ish level and feed people through the maw of the virus in controlled manner.
As a rough rule of thumb, with current treatments and a youngish cohort exposed (ie the way it is now), about 10,000 infections equates to 250 people per day coming in to hospital and 40 people per day dying.
Once the level of covid hospitalisations goes much above 1,000 per day, you get high pressure on the NHS leading to other medical treatments being curtailed or suspended. Once it goes much above 3,000 per day, you've swamped the NHS and a lot of people who would survive with hospital support will not survive (including a rather surprising number of younger people)
So, 40,000 infections per day (and 1,000 hospitalisations and 160 direct deaths per day) is probably sustainable without serious impact elsewhere in the NHS (all this is assuming that we shield the older and more vulnerable and feed the young and healthy through the maw; if it leaks across, hospitalisations and deaths increase further).
Once it gets above that, we start incurring deaths from other medical issues, and once it gets above 120,000 infections per day, the death rate (especially in the young) shoots up as we turn desperately ill patients away from the hospitals.
No restrictions, 3-day doubling, from here, we get past the 40,000 per day in under a week and the 120,000 per day in a week and a half. Cue up the mass graves. If we can't learn to live with it, we'll learn to die with it; one or the other.
Or we could try one of the lower constant levels with restrictions (but knowing these are for a fixed time). The 40,000 per day, getting 40 million through takes - well, that's easy: 1,000 days. Start tomorrow, and we're done by the end of June, 2023. By which time acquired immunity has probably dropped off from the first lot and we go around the houses again...
The 120,000 per day number; they could be done in just 300 days. Just before the start of August in 2021. Hopefully acquired immunity will last a few more months before we have to do it all again.
Incidentally, did you notice that bit in Alastair's article "....and if your hobbies are reading or arguing with strangers online." Did it resonate at all? I really can't believe you are just one person to be on here so much. You are Boris Johnson's (diminishing) fan club in CCO and I claim my £5.
Simply having and communicating that toolkit (and using some A, B, C system to represent it), would have meant that when lockdowns were applied, things could have been wrapped up in SIs and things would have been clearer sooner.
Broadly, R budgeting does seem to be what we are attempting and, in terms of when and where restrictions are being applied, government aren't doing a bad job (though there have been some missteps in terms of releasing local lockdowns). It's made possible by the fact that we were still restricted, so a few cycles of 1.3-1.4 can be borne while you tighten (the right things) or adjust tracing or whatever. But it is homeostatic - whilst there is doubt and we are tightening, as now, we are reasonably likely to bring in measures that take things to 0.8 for a time, until cold/geographic spread/a few big superspreads/lockdown fatigue edge it up again, and we get another period where it overshoots to 1.3/1.4 before the bimetallic strip makes contact in government once more.
"Bone, Mr Peter
Butler, Dawn
Cooper, Daisy
Davey, rh Ed
Davies, Philip
Farron, Tim
Farry, Stephen
Hobhouse, Wera
Hollobone, Mr Philip
Jardine, Christine
Jones, rh Mr Kevan
Long Bailey, Rebecca
Lucas, Caroline
McVey, rh Esther
Moran, Layla
Olney, Sarah
Spellar, rh John
Stone, Jamie
Stringer, Graham
Swayne, rh Sir Desmond
Twigg, Derek
Walker, Sir Charles
Wilson, Munira
Wragg, Mr William
Tellers
Mr Alistair Carmichael
Wendy Chamberlain"
hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-09-30/division/8931D5BD-0F83-4E34-9F0F-24AFFB8ED09C/CoronavirusAct2020(ReviewOfTemporaryProvisions)?outputType=Names
A slam dunk and a layup are distinctly different basketball moves.
I mean it's the sport based on the game of rounders?
When I have been in the better type of Italian, I tend to go for the meats, vegs and breads sort of dishes. I have no recollection of what they are as I speak no Italian and so the names of the dishes do not "stick" with me
But no, c'mon, just a little joke. It's my new favourite phrase. Joe speaking for billions.
And I think it might become iconic. Like "There you go again" or "I knew Jack Kennedy and you're no ..." etc.
Countries that have ignored super-spreading have risked getting the worst of both worlds: burdensome restrictions that fail to achieve substantial mitigation. The U.K.’s recent decision to limit outdoor gatherings to six people while allowing pubs and bars to remain open is just one of many such examples.”
What they are is good enough to pick up a large proportion of those people - which in cluster events is all that you need - in the same way that a positive result from a pooled test already tells you most of what you need to know before you retest to identify which particular individuals are infected.
The failure of our administration to grasp this simple idea is the biggest reason we don't already have the testing system we need.
That, and the failure to acknowledge the the least useful test is the one you don't conduct at all.
Remember the Chinese antigen tests which we ridiculed massively (and quite reasonably) at the beginning of the year for their dismal lack of accuracy ?
Even they could have had some utility in the right circumstances - and playing around with that might have taught us a lot more about how to deal with testing uncertainties.
Most people think they are an above average competence driver. Most people will think that their exception to the Covid rules is not much of a risk. Most people would think that they were acting responsibly.
The people who died would be blamed for their individual recklessness.
We shouldn't have given up on elimination without trying.
Also in offices and factories.
Just like his British counterpart Jeremy Corbyn, he will end up a laughing stock that even his own former allies said they had nothing to do with and the party would be under new leadership rapidly. There will be a dying band of hardcore loyalists claiming to have won the argument, but they'll be laughed at even by his parties own side.
https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1311646345447575557
I really do not understand it
A layup is like a one yard tap in to an open goal.
Easy for anyone. Even Donny.
And restricting super spreaders to being able to infect five others not dozens at any one time seems like progress if that is the issue?
With Channel 4, Sky and the BBC all on the left (C4 extremely so, the rest more marginally).
https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0930/1168539-coronavirus-cases/
In this case, Trump just couldn't avoid the lure of following his true instincts rather than his head, ended up in the water and has quite possibly done a fair bit of damage to his campaign.
And, if you look at state level approval ratings, Wisconsin was the weakest state for Trump (of the ones he won in 2016). That makes it a prime candidate to flip in my book.
The way I look at this is:
- which states have approval-disapproval out of line with the national average, and were either narrow Clinton wins, or narrow Trump wins
- which party has had more success in driving voter registration
This puts Virginia in the dicey column for the Democrats (surprisingly good numbers for the Republicans in both), and suggests Trump holds Florida. (Although the current flare up of CV19 among the elderly has to be concerning to him.)
This puts Wisconsin and Michigan in the Dem gain column, and suggests that Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire are safe for them.
The problem President Trump has, though, is that there are a bunch of states (like Arizona and Pennsylvania) where he's in with a shot. But he really has to win almost all of these to hold onto the Presidency.
Possible? For sure. But looking increasingly unlikely.
A "slam dunk" is an emphatic score, where you give at least some credit to the scorer. When you think about it, a basketball slam dunk isn't necessarily easy to execute - but you're jumping high and ramming it in the basket for emphasis. It's like an emphatic penalty kick in football terms - yes, any penalty taker should probably score 75% of the time, but they point is this one has done it very confidently and convincingly.
A "layup" is just a ridiculously easy shot from short range off the back-board. If you miss a layup, the implication is you just shouldn't be playing. It's an open goal in football terms.
Put more simply, a slam dunk LOOKS easy, whereas a layup IS easy.
--AS
Good to see a Liberal taking on the government over the mess.
It is not correct that people are restricted to 6. There are important exemptions, notably for work. So many superspreader incidents around this country have been in food processing plants with controlled ventilation. Organised sport is another potentially important exemption. And, until recently 30 for weddings, now 15.
It means that, for example, restricting pubs to a 10pm cut off is pretty pointless. The vast majority of us are no risk even if we have the virus. If there is a superspreader in the pub the people at his table and indeed the surrounding tables will be infected before 10.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/academics-face-flying-restrictions-as-cambridge-heads-for-carbon-neutral-future-nwvfxsr6d
Whereas now we are all over the place with restrictions, we are killing businesses through a process of attrition without any sort of compensation, we are too late in getting an effective testing system and in consequence we are getting the worst of all worlds.
Anyway am off for a bit. I can’t really take any more of this.
I understand Hartlepool as well plus Liverpool not happy
One of the US pundits I listen to says it would be historically unprecedented for a president to underperform his
approval rating. Not sure if that's true though.
Even in the 2019 election, there were plenty of Labour people running on a "nothing to do with Jez" ticket. Even someone like Starmer was clearly doing some of his campaign with his fingers crossed. As a result, the "Under new management" messaging has been broadly accepted, and Conservative attempts to make "you supported Corbyn" an attack line haven't really worked.
For various reasons (being in power, the role of right wing shouty media), the Republicans have been much more Trumpified. It's much harder to point to a resistance, or a party in exile, who can take over after a Trump defeat. One might say the same of a post-Johnson Conservative party, as well.
As it happens my expertise is precisely on what you can and cannot detect and how to pool weak detectors to reduce risk (in certain settings) but the various calls for participation that went from government to academics did not seek input from my community. I think that was a loss.
--AS
TV and radio objectively makes up an overwhelming majority of the press. Name one 'objectively speaking' right-wing TV station that compares to Channel 4, even if you (for some bizarre reason) think BBC and Sky are impartial (perhaps they are coming from your PoV but that should say it all).
And that's without dignifying ITV with Piers Morgan and Robert Peston as being part of the "press".
7 day increase in 7 day rolling average = 26% -> R = 1.14 (-0.06 on yesterday)
Overlapping 4 day increase in 7 day rolling average = 8% -> R=1.08 (-0.04 on yesterday)
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12820547/lockdown-three-tiers-coronavirus-rules/
--AS
He said on Sky he would only do it if it became the law
Can you explain why you conflated 'certain pollsters' with 'mainstream media'? Do you think that they're interchangeable?