Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You think that we're going to be decimated, that is 1 in 10 lose their jobs? Such foolish optimism is worthy of the SNP itself.
Here I employ my LadyG rule of Reasonable Worst Case Scenario generally panning out. To me that says 10% unemployment is likely.
But yes, it could be worse, maybe much worse. We are in an unprecedented crisis, which will have all kinds of spiralling effects that are so complex as to be incalculable; nearly all of these consequences will be negative. What for instance, would be the impact of a major western country defaulting on its debts? It is not impossible.
It is pretty much impossible for those who can still print their own currency. Just as well there are not any highly indebted European countries without that option, eh?
What we may have to accept is that August is pretty much as good as it gets for the foreseeable, that we will have to operate on about 90% of our pre Covid GDP. This has massive implications for our standard of living, the level of public services, the level of wages in the public sector, the level of benefits. One way to look at it is that is that GDP will be roughly what it was about 2010, which doesn't seem so bad. But there is a lot of adjustments to be made for that to be sustainable.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I hope the SNP wins a majority next year and I hope it isn't even close.
Scotland and England simply are fundamentally different now. The UK has as much future as John Cleese's Norwegian Blue.
Given that literally everyone I know with children at university has a tale of their children, their childrens' flatmates/housemates, or bubble mates testing positive I am not at all surprised at the stats.
But again, of all those dozens and dozens of people (because I'm hearing of bubbles, flats, housemates, yeargroups), none has been hospitalised although I appreciate it is more nuanced than that.
The great fear, of course, is that it starts to spread more rapidly from the student incubators into the general population and the death rate starts to rocket. All efforts need to be devoted into stopping this from happening.
This the only reason I think a circuit break might actually do anything productive.
A circuit break is in itself probably absolutely bloody useless. The only thing I can think of though is so long as the students remain where they are that this circuit break might potentially allow time for the virus to burn out amongst students without transferring from students to the wider community as much.
I doubt it though. I'm not optimistic that a circuit break will do anything other than put in restrictions that will end up being extended before the end of the fortnight.
We are still almost ten per cent short of where the economy was in February,
Now Sunak wants to put the patient back into a coma with borrowed money.
FFS wake up. We are oing to end up with an economy permanently 10/15 per cent smaller than it was, with far, far larger debt mountain to try to sustain.
It is not going to effing work. We are looking at a bloody catastrophe the like of which we have never seen. For a disease that prays on 82 year olds.
I have a lot of sympathy with those who point out that the economic cost of trying (unsuccessfully at that) to stop this virus is worse than the cure; that our young will have serious damage to their economic prospects; to their education and will be paying higher taxes throughout their lives to repay the debt taken on to protect our elderly.
My reservation is essentially Long Covid. A statistically significant number of younger people are suffering long term consequences from this virus including damaged lungs, organ failures and general exhaustion. I fear that the sequelae of this virus are going to be significant ongoing health costs. What I have not seen is an indication of how common this is but death is not the only consequence.
Im sure its a thing, but do not underestimate the psychological factors here. If relentless propaganda tells a person a disease is serious, they are surely much more likely to see it as such.
What do you think we should be doing?
All our resources should surely be devoted at those with serious symptoms or who are genuinely vulnerable.
We could have almost built a moat around every person 75 or over and still spent a couple of 100 billion less, and had an economy that shrank less.
Why are we spending billions trying to track down people who have no symptoms giving COVID to other people who aren't in any danger either?
Why not go the full Manaus?, probably the first city to reach herd immunity, with 1 in 500 dead in a youthful city of 2 million people, where only 6% are over the age of 65.
Good call from Starmer. It's important during this national crisis that Starmer doesn't create additional noise around the government's already confused messaging. But he'd be failing in his duty to hold them to account if he didn't point out their serial incompetence and try to help them correct their errors. The only real question is whether Labour would even want to inherit the smoking ruins of the economy in 2024.
Being in power is always better than not being in power. People said the same about winning in 2010, that maybe leaving Labour to clear up their mess was better than winning. It wasn't true then and it won't be in 2024.
And yet people still haven't forgiven the LDs for going into power when they had the chance.
Not quite. People haven't forgiven the LDs for picking a side, then going back on that, so nobody trusts them.
If you're in opposition you can get away with spendng decades saying to soft lefties "vote for us, we're not the Tories" and saying soft righties "vote for us, we're not Labour".
But in office they said to soft lefties "vote for us and we may align with the Tories" - and then by turning their back on what they'd done in office they said to soft righties "vote for us and we may align with Labour".
Ambiguity was a strength for them, now it is a weakness.
As I said, people haven't forgiven them for choosing to be in power. Nor have people understood the compromises required of a junior member of a coalition government.
I don't think it has much to do with 2010-2015. The LibDems were polling in the 20s less than 18 months ago. Instead, we are back to 2017: there are two entrenched blocks of voters in England and Wales right now, and they feed off each other. If you want to stop the Tories you choose Labour; and if you want to stop Labour you choose the Tories. I suspect that is the way it will remain for quite a while. And that spells big trouble for the LibDems.
I think it's difficult to set out your stall clearly on where you stand governing the country-wise if you are going through an 18-month leadership selection process. We have yet to hear how Sir Ed will position the LDs but I can forgive the electorate for thinking that the LDs haven't really cared about the world beyond the LDs for the past seeming age.
For understandable reasons, it's incredibly tough for anyone outside the government to get a hearing right now, Even Labour is struggling for regualr coverage beyond Starmer at PMQs. At some point that will change, so it could be that the LDs picked a good time to look internally. However, those two blocks look very entrenched to me. I think they will have to pick a side. They won't be able to play off both.
Starmer has had plenty of opportunity to get Labour's plan out there. Where is the Labour plan on rapid testing, the plan on increasing self isolation rates from 1 in 5 to something close to total, the plan on anything at all?
Blindly following government policy that has been proved to be a load of crap isn't good policy and Labour are still behind in the polls because of that. Starmer has a completely clear way to lay out what Labour would be doing differently and had a captive audience of the vast majority of people who think the country is heading in the wrong direction.
I disagree. Given where Labour were when he took over I think he has played it pretty well. I also think that Labour would have been getting a lot more airtime if we had not had the pandemic. By its nature it has been all consuming and because of that the government and its response is getting almost blanket coverage.
Not really, labour were 11 points behind at the election, now they are 3 points behind. That's against the most abject government we've had for many years. Labour have developed no alternative vision and keep sticking to siding with the government even though only 18% of people think the country is going in the right direction. The government is taking the nation down the wrong path and Labour are saying nothing about it.
Labour were as much as 26 points behind at the start of April. Again, I disagree that Labour is providing the government with unconditional support. But the fact that you have not noticed what it's been saying about issues like the furlough, cover for those not helped by the furlough, localised decision making on lockdowns, track and trace, etc - let alone issues beyond covid, such as selling UK farmers down the river, etc - makes my point for me.
No, the issue is that Labour have been saying nothing. The comparison to the 26 point lead is complete rubbish, it was never a real benchmark, just a rally round the flag effect of heading into a crisis. You're a Labour member, please outline Labour's alternative policy base vs what the government have been offering.
Far better control and oversight of track and trace - the key to getting the pandemic under some kind of control.
Much closer coordination with local authorities on local lockdowns.
Financial support for businesses and employees affected by local lockdowns.
No end to the furlough and its extension to cover other areas where it has not been applied.
Labour will not support an opening up of the country as things stand. I think that is the right position to take.
It is just a matter of fact that Labour was well over 20 poionts behind when Starmer took over. It was close to 20 points behind before lockdown. But even if you want to go by the December result, there has been significant progress in the last six months. It's a long journey with much damage to undo. The strat has been a positive one.
How do you run an economy permanently 10/15 per cent smaller than it was, with a hugely larger debt mountain to service? seriously, how do you do it? without collapse? to save all the 82 year olds out there?
You don't run it permanently in the way that it is being run now. No-one is advocating that. But an economy in which 50% of the population is too scared to leave the home is not one that is going to function in any meaningful way. A targeted approach to lockdowns, more financial support for those affected by them and a functioning track and trace system are the requirements for where we are now. The government is offering none of these things currently.
We are being told this is the new normal. We are being conditioned by some to accept things as they are. People who are unemployed are being told to retrain as windfarm engineers.
That's where we are. And that is where we are staying. Do you see a time when we are 'out' of this. Because I really can't.
Yes I do. There should be a vaccine, or better testing, or better treatments soon.
I don't see a return to normal without any of that. Even if the Government said "we give up, all restrictions are lifted, do what you want" the economic crisis would still be there.
I support people taking responsibility for their own actions but don't pretend it would be a return to normal. It won't. Normal isn't an option now.
Surely normal for you is just sitting behind a keyboard typing uninformed nonsense on PB 24/7? With a vaccine or without, very little will change for you. You are indeed blessed in your rather strange self imposed bubble! Or perhaps not!
You seem very, very obsessed with me for some bizarre reason.
And my number of posts which is little different to many other users and well below some others.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
I am wondering how the Tories have impressed so much as to add two points to their tally. Perhaps I haven't been paying attention enough.
There does not seem to be a reason but how on earth Starmer has not achieved a substantial crossover is a mystery
And who is Ed Davey
A very successful former energy an climate Change minister, probably with more intelligence than the Entire Tory front bench.
A very low bar indeed , and I suspect he only just scrapes over it, Lib Dumbs is a far better and more accurate description , they are not Liberal and are not democratic for sure.
Another inarticulate and childish post Malcolm. We can say that without doubt the LDs are rather more liberal than an average hate filled nationalist eh ? Love the way you call others half wits and morons when your own posts are so devoid of any intelligence, but moreover you blindly follow one of the most backward and philosophically bankrupt belief sets in the history of human kind. I await the inevitable torrent of poorly phrased childish abuse!
Your usual bilge, you show yourself for the moron you are by your pathetic statement that the LD'd are in any way Liberal or democratic. Do you come out of your coffin during the day at all. Use your job seekers allowance to get some education.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Thats the lack of foreign tourists. Its not just sun-starved Brits deprived of their ability to go to Magaluf thats the problem, its absurdly expensive jumper-starved fat Americans
I am amazed they have 24K workers, I thought all the mills were closed and they cannot have that many shops. Where do they all work.
Under EWM, Peacocks and Ponden brands they must have at least 800 stores.
Add in all their EWM-in-disguuse shops and they must be going close to 1000 shops around the country.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
Not necessarily, it could be that both the official and unofficial lockdowns are suppressing further rise. People are behaving differently. Waves typically last 12-16 weeks even without herd immunity, due to behavioural change.
Labour now also ahead 42% to 40% with middle class ABC1s but the Tories lead 43% to 33% with working class C2DES, so we can safely say Starmer no longer leads the party of the working class as founded by Keir Hardie
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Not necessarily, it could be that both the official and unofficial lockdowns are suppressing further rise. People are behaving differently. Waves typically last 12-16 weeks even without herd immunity, due to behavioural change.
This is true, I mistook the Ipsos MORI/Imperial figures for the ONS figures.
Cardiff based Peacocks stores are shutting. Potential loss of 24,000 jobs, nationally.
Paging Boris supporters, any retraining ideas?
Covid Marshall’s?
"The decision to knock away the props before the job is done now risks a chain of events akin to the 1930s."
AEP in Telegraph.
Indeed.
I am not suggesting Red Wallers should return to the Labour fold, but listening to the vox pops over the last week or two extolling the virtues of Johnson and Sunak's handling of Covid, I am not sure they realise the depth of s*** we already find ourselves in.
6% of 2019 Tory voters are now voting Brexit Party and 6% of 2019 Labour voters are now voting Green too, more than the 4% of 2019 Tory voters now voting Labour and the 3% of 2019 Labour voters now voting Tory
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You think that we're going to be decimated, that is 1 in 10 lose their jobs? Such foolish optimism is worthy of the SNP itself.
Here I employ my LadyG rule of Reasonable Worst Case Scenario generally panning out. To me that says 10% unemployment is likely.
But yes, it could be worse, maybe much worse. We are in an unprecedented crisis, which will have all kinds of spiralling effects that are so complex as to be incalculable; nearly all of these consequences will be negative. What for instance, would be the impact of a major western country defaulting on its debts? It is not impossible.
It is pretty much impossible for those who can still print their own currency. Just as well there are not any highly indebted European countries without that option, eh?
What we may have to accept is that August is pretty much as good as it gets for the foreseeable, that we will have to operate on about 90% of our pre Covid GDP. This has massive implications for our standard of living, the level of public services, the level of wages in the public sector, the level of benefits. One way to look at it is that is that GDP will be roughly what it was about 2010, which doesn't seem so bad. But there is a lot of adjustments to be made for that to be sustainable.
I agree with that scenario, IF we get a decent, useful vaccine - or vaccines - in the next 18 months. The shrinkage will be semi-permanent, but we will all begin a slow recovery. Yet it WILL be a recovery.
If there is no vaccine, and no significant new treatments, and the virus remains lethal, with long Covid a constant menace, then, well, God help us. Who knows what that implies. An endless parade of lockdowns until, what, one nation erupts in civil war?
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
So its like the letter that demanded lockdown absolutism in March....where the likes of Bob who cleans the test tubes was included as a world leading voice of the scientific community. Strangely Sky and alike didn't look very closely at that one though.
What it seems to be is bad science reporting. Unless the intervals quoted have a pretty unusual definition, the numbers say that there's no significant* evidence that anything has changed. The true number could have been 1.3 last week and 1.5 this week (or, of course, outside those ranges).
Staying the same(ish) is better than getting worse, but of course the on the ground situation continues to get worse if R stays above 1.
For whatever 'sigificance' threshold is being used.
Cardiff based Peacocks stores are shutting. Potential loss of 24,000 jobs, nationally.
Paging Boris supporters, any retraining ideas?
That's the Edinburgh Woolen Mill, the EWM is parent of a lot of different brands.
A lot of shops on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh seem to be either them or virtually identikit tourist tat retail that all seem to stock the same stuff - are those them too?
Probably. It used to be that in Pitlochry there was an EWM and 2 doors dow to it is an "independent" shop that was also EWM owned.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
I think those of us on the losing side of the Brexit referendum have an awareness that facts and reality are not the fundamental deciding factors of political debate.
Sturgeon is doing a good job of persuading voters that she is doing a better job than Johnson. Perception trumps reality.
Dr. Negin Hajizadeh, a pulmonary/critical care physician at Northwell Health, noted that the majority of Covid patients receiving dexamethasone are on mechanical ventilation and in a state of induced coma, so they do not exhibit any behavioral side effects.
So last week when the number was rising the Government couldn't find the data, but now the number is falling, they found the stats down the back of the sofa. Handy.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
Oh look, the "chaos" was caused by taking up your suggesting to exempt some types of premises from the closures.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
The political significance of the virus crisis is that, for the first time, people in Scotland and Wales are hanging ontheir devolved administrations to a greater extent than Westminster for the decisions governing how they live their lives
Given that literally everyone I know with children at university has a tale of their children, their childrens' flatmates/housemates, or bubble mates testing positive I am not at all surprised at the stats.
But again, of all those dozens and dozens of people (because I'm hearing of bubbles, flats, housemates, yeargroups), none has been hospitalised although I appreciate it is more nuanced than that.
The great fear, of course, is that it starts to spread more rapidly from the student incubators into the general population and the death rate starts to rocket. All efforts need to be devoted into stopping this from happening.
This the only reason I think a circuit break might actually do anything productive.
A circuit break is in itself probably absolutely bloody useless. The only thing I can think of though is so long as the students remain where they are that this circuit break might potentially allow time for the virus to burn out amongst students without transferring from students to the wider community as much.
I doubt it though. I'm not optimistic that a circuit break will do anything other than put in restrictions that will end up being extended before the end of the fortnight.
We are still almost ten per cent short of where the economy was in February,
Now Sunak wants to put the patient back into a coma with borrowed money.
FFS wake up. We are oing to end up with an economy permanently 10/15 per cent smaller than it was, with far, far larger debt mountain to try to sustain.
It is not going to effing work. We are looking at a bloody catastrophe the like of which we have never seen. For a disease that prays on 82 year olds.
The economy is going to be smaller either way. There is a major health crisis and people are not going out whether there is a formal lockdown or not.
People talk about shielding the vulnerable but having hospitality get back to normal but not only do the vulnerable rely upon the healthy . . . but hospitality relies upon the vulnerable. A great many pounds spent in pubs, restaurants etc normally are spent by people who now need to shield and will shield regardless of what the government says because they are afraid and don't want to die.
The only way to get the economy back to normal is to put the health crisis behind us. That means either a vaccine, herd immunity (which would be hundreds of thousands more deaths) or suppressing the virus.
The average age of covid deaths is 82. The media are having a giant canary over Trump recovering because it blasts a gargantuan hole in their and your narrative of collapse.
Which is what we are going to get.
But OK. People will see that poverty, unemployment and destitution kill. Kill far worse that corona.
"[Research] shows that the average age of people dying in England and Wales from Covid-19 is 82.4.
This is slightly higher than deaths caused by other illnesses, which has a median age of 81.5."
Sun
So it is virtually indistinguishable from any other disease as far as median age at death is concerned. So your point is what?
Seriously you can't see the point? really? we are destroying countless young lives for this for decades, young people between the ages of 16 and 35 face the worst outlook since our boys went over the top at the Somme. and you can't see the point?
We expect these people to have a rotten terrible youth and still pay for our retirements? what are they, children or bloody slaves?
Sure, but what does the information that this is not a disease which disproportionately kills the elderly to a significant extent add to the argument?
Pretty much every disease out there disproportionately kills the elderly. Up til no we have not allowed this fact to affect the futures of our young people. Or expected them to change their behaviour.
Now we are.
No - we are asking eveyone to change their behaviour in mostly minor ways - masks, a bit of social distancing and a bit less night life - this is not the Spanish Inquisition!
So last week when the number was rising the Government couldn't find the data, but now the number is falling, they found the stats down the back of the sofa. Handy.
Same with Cases, some argue.
They were at 8,000. Vallance looked like a total tw@t. And then there was a spreadsheet gate!
You only have to watch a few hours of Fox or CNN these days to see why. Neither report news. CNN has got nearly as bat shit crazy as Fox, its the 24/7 (Anti) Trump news network, hours banging on about why Trump didn't stop to talk to the press when getting on the helicopter, then hours why did he stop coming back, and why have all these medics signed an NDA on treating Trump.....Literally nothing else going on in the world gets a look in if Trump has tweeted something.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
I think those of us on the losing side of the Brexit referendum have an awareness that facts and reality are not the fundamental deciding factors of political debate.
Sturgeon is doing a good job of persuading voters that she is doing a better job than Johnson. Perception trumps reality.
But reality is now back, to bite us on the arse, big time. Reality is now more ferociously real than it has been for decades. This is not 2016 any more.
For proof, see America. Trump is going to lose because Americans have wised up to the reality of Trump being a gibbering idiot in a time of severe national crisis.
Imagine if the Brexit vote was held now. Remain would win, handily. The extra risk would make people recoil. Polls show this:
"Wrong" to leave the EU is now ahead by a distance, and I imagine that distance has only grown as we are hurled further into the chaos of the 2nd wave. Also note that the Wrong lead began with the onset of the virus in the Spring (when it crossed over Right, which was briefly ahead)
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
Oh look, the "chaos" was caused by taking up your suggesting to exempt some types of premises from the closures.
Yes, Nicola Sturgeon called me on Tuesday to ask me what to do about licensed cafes in Scotland. Sorry, my bad.
Not necessarily, it could be that both the official and unofficial lockdowns are suppressing further rise. People are behaving differently. Waves typically last 12-16 weeks even without herd immunity, due to behavioural change.
This is true, I mistook the Ipsos MORI/Imperial figures for the ONS figures.
I shall exile myself to ConHome at some point.
They’ve been quietly banning lots of accounts who post critical comments about our clown PM recently; you might find yourself mysteriously unable to login to your account there.
Labour now also ahead 42% to 40% with middle class ABC1s but the Tories lead 43% to 33% with working class C2DES, so we can safely say Starmer no longer leads the party of the working class as founded by Keir Hardie
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
The alternative is people choose the media that suits them.
A bit like how lefty liberals are more likely to read the Guardian than the Daily Mail. Are they lefty liberals because they read the Guardian or do they read the Guardian because they are lefty liberals?
That's why this site is great. We get all sorts of opinions not just an echo chamber.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
Re homeopaths, shouldn't this all be over by now? Afterall, we know from surveillance studies that SARS-CoV-2 has reached the sewage system, which is reprocessed into drinking water either somewhat directly or through being discharged into oceans, becoming clouds, raining etc, required dilution built in. So we should all have had a good dose of anti-Covid-19 homeopathic medicine by now.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
I think those of us on the losing side of the Brexit referendum have an awareness that facts and reality are not the fundamental deciding factors of political debate.
Sturgeon is doing a good job of persuading voters that she is doing a better job than Johnson. Perception trumps reality.
But reality is now back, to bite us on the arse, big time. Reality is now more ferociously real than it has been for decades. This is not 2016 any more.
For proof, see America. Trump is going to lose because Americans have wised up to the reality of Trump being a gibbering idiot in a time of severe national crisis.
Imagine if the Brexit vote was held now. Remain would win, handily. The extra risk would make people recoil. Polls show this:
"Wrong" to leave the EU is now ahead by a distance, and I imagine that distance has only grown as we are hurled further into the chaos of the 2nd wave. Also note that the Wrong lead began with the onset of the virus in the Spring (when it crossed over Right, which was briefly ahead)
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
They may yet endure a torrid second wave, having skilfully avoided the worst of the first
Germany still has had fewer cases overall than countries of comparable size like France, Italy, ourselves, Mexico and Iran and also significantly fewer deaths per head than the likes of Brazil, the USA , Canada and Spain
Indeed. In western Europe, Germany and Sweden have done the best (in very different ways). That may change in the 2nd wave, is my point.
Germany may see more cases again but I expect their excellent track and trace system will still leave them near the top of the Western league table (and they still have had fewer deaths per head than Sweden as well while doing slightly better in terms of lost economic growth than the OECD average too)
"fewer deaths per head" is correct but is a massive understatement. Germany has had a fifth of the number of deaths per head than sweden. The UK should not be trying to aspire to Sweden's handling of the disease.
Given that literally everyone I know with children at university has a tale of their children, their childrens' flatmates/housemates, or bubble mates testing positive I am not at all surprised at the stats.
But again, of all those dozens and dozens of people (because I'm hearing of bubbles, flats, housemates, yeargroups), none has been hospitalised although I appreciate it is more nuanced than that.
The great fear, of course, is that it starts to spread more rapidly from the student incubators into the general population and the death rate starts to rocket. All efforts need to be devoted into stopping this from happening.
This the only reason I think a circuit break might actually do anything productive.
A circuit break is in itself probably absolutely bloody useless. The only thing I can think of though is so long as the students remain where they are that this circuit break might potentially allow time for the virus to burn out amongst students without transferring from students to the wider community as much.
I doubt it though. I'm not optimistic that a circuit break will do anything other than put in restrictions that will end up being extended before the end of the fortnight.
We are still almost ten per cent short of where the economy was in February,
Now Sunak wants to put the patient back into a coma with borrowed money.
FFS wake up. We are oing to end up with an economy permanently 10/15 per cent smaller than it was, with far, far larger debt mountain to try to sustain.
It is not going to effing work. We are looking at a bloody catastrophe the like of which we have never seen. For a disease that prays on 82 year olds.
The economy is going to be smaller either way. There is a major health crisis and people are not going out whether there is a formal lockdown or not.
People talk about shielding the vulnerable but having hospitality get back to normal but not only do the vulnerable rely upon the healthy . . . but hospitality relies upon the vulnerable. A great many pounds spent in pubs, restaurants etc normally are spent by people who now need to shield and will shield regardless of what the government says because they are afraid and don't want to die.
The only way to get the economy back to normal is to put the health crisis behind us. That means either a vaccine, herd immunity (which would be hundreds of thousands more deaths) or suppressing the virus.
The average age of covid deaths is 82. The media are having a giant canary over Trump recovering because it blasts a gargantuan hole in their and your narrative of collapse.
Which is what we are going to get.
But OK. People will see that poverty, unemployment and destitution kill. Kill far worse that corona.
"[Research] shows that the average age of people dying in England and Wales from Covid-19 is 82.4.
This is slightly higher than deaths caused by other illnesses, which has a median age of 81.5."
Sun
So it is virtually indistinguishable from any other disease as far as median age at death is concerned. So your point is what?
Seriously you can't see the point? really? we are destroying countless young lives for this for decades, young people between the ages of 16 and 35 face the worst outlook since our boys went over the top at the Somme. and you can't see the point?
We expect these people to have a rotten terrible youth and still pay for our retirements? what are they, children or bloody slaves?
Sure, but what does the information that this is not a disease which disproportionately kills the elderly to a significant extent add to the argument?
Pretty much every disease out there disproportionately kills the elderly. Up til no we have not allowed this fact to affect the futures of our young people. Or expected them to change their behaviour.
Now we are.
No - we are asking eveyone to change their behaviour in mostly minor ways - masks, a bit of social distancing and a bit less night life - this is not the Spanish Inquisition!
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
Re homeopaths, shouldn't this all be over by now? Afterall, we know from surveillance studies that SARS-CoV-2 has reached the sewage system, which is reprocessed into drinking water either somewhat directly or through being discharged into oceans, becoming clouds, raining etc, required dilution built in. So we should all have had a good dose of anti-Covid-19 homeopathic medicine by now.
I have a feeling attempts to discredit Great Barrington will backfire.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
I think those of us on the losing side of the Brexit referendum have an awareness that facts and reality are not the fundamental deciding factors of political debate.
Sturgeon is doing a good job of persuading voters that she is doing a better job than Johnson. Perception trumps reality.
But reality is now back, to bite us on the arse, big time. Reality is now more ferociously real than it has been for decades. This is not 2016 any more.
For proof, see America. Trump is going to lose because Americans have wised up to the reality of Trump being a gibbering idiot in a time of severe national crisis.
Imagine if the Brexit vote was held now. Remain would win, handily. The extra risk would make people recoil. Polls show this:
"Wrong" to leave the EU is now ahead by a distance, and I imagine that distance has only grown as we are hurled further into the chaos of the 2nd wave. Also note that the Wrong lead began with the onset of the virus in the Spring (when it crossed over Right, which was briefly ahead)
That’s a lot of words to say that you made a mistake.
Given that literally everyone I know with children at university has a tale of their children, their childrens' flatmates/housemates, or bubble mates testing positive I am not at all surprised at the stats.
But again, of all those dozens and dozens of people (because I'm hearing of bubbles, flats, housemates, yeargroups), none has been hospitalised although I appreciate it is more nuanced than that.
The great fear, of course, is that it starts to spread more rapidly from the student incubators into the general population and the death rate starts to rocket. All efforts need to be devoted into stopping this from happening.
This the only reason I think a circuit break might actually do anything productive.
A circuit break is in itself probably absolutely bloody useless. The only thing I can think of though is so long as the students remain where they are that this circuit break might potentially allow time for the virus to burn out amongst students without transferring from students to the wider community as much.
I doubt it though. I'm not optimistic that a circuit break will do anything other than put in restrictions that will end up being extended before the end of the fortnight.
We are still almost ten per cent short of where the economy was in February,
Now Sunak wants to put the patient back into a coma with borrowed money.
FFS wake up. We are oing to end up with an economy permanently 10/15 per cent smaller than it was, with far, far larger debt mountain to try to sustain.
It is not going to effing work. We are looking at a bloody catastrophe the like of which we have never seen. For a disease that prays on 82 year olds.
The economy is going to be smaller either way. There is a major health crisis and people are not going out whether there is a formal lockdown or not.
People talk about shielding the vulnerable but having hospitality get back to normal but not only do the vulnerable rely upon the healthy . . . but hospitality relies upon the vulnerable. A great many pounds spent in pubs, restaurants etc normally are spent by people who now need to shield and will shield regardless of what the government says because they are afraid and don't want to die.
The only way to get the economy back to normal is to put the health crisis behind us. That means either a vaccine, herd immunity (which would be hundreds of thousands more deaths) or suppressing the virus.
The average age of covid deaths is 82. The media are having a giant canary over Trump recovering because it blasts a gargantuan hole in their and your narrative of collapse.
Which is what we are going to get.
But OK. People will see that poverty, unemployment and destitution kill. Kill far worse that corona.
"[Research] shows that the average age of people dying in England and Wales from Covid-19 is 82.4.
This is slightly higher than deaths caused by other illnesses, which has a median age of 81.5."
Sun
So it is virtually indistinguishable from any other disease as far as median age at death is concerned. So your point is what?
Seriously you can't see the point? really? we are destroying countless young lives for this for decades, young people between the ages of 16 and 35 face the worst outlook since our boys went over the top at the Somme. and you can't see the point?
We expect these people to have a rotten terrible youth and still pay for our retirements? what are they, children or bloody slaves?
Sure, but what does the information that this is not a disease which disproportionately kills the elderly to a significant extent add to the argument?
Pretty much every disease out there disproportionately kills the elderly. Up til no we have not allowed this fact to affect the futures of our young people. Or expected them to change their behaviour.
Now we are.
No - we are asking eveyone to change their behaviour in mostly minor ways - masks, a bit of social distancing and a bit less night life - this is not the Spanish Inquisition!
Umm no. We are banned from seeing our friends and family outside our household, at least in the North East, and have been for the past few weeks.
Labour now also ahead 42% to 40% with middle class ABC1s but the Tories lead 43% to 33% with working class C2DES, so we can safely say Starmer no longer leads the party of the working class as founded by Keir Hardie
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
Cardiff based Peacocks stores are shutting. Potential loss of 24,000 jobs, nationally.
Paging Boris supporters, any retraining ideas?
That's the Edinburgh Woolen Mill, the EWM is parent of a lot of different brands.
A lot of shops on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh seem to be either them or virtually identikit tourist tat retail that all seem to stock the same stuff - are those them too?
Probably. It used to be that in Pitlochry there was an EWM and 2 doors dow to it is an "independent" shop that was also EWM owned.
But oddly enough there is a very similarly named shop which is apparently unrelated (on Princes St, and Dobbies Garden Centre in Lasswade, as oposed to the Other Kind on the Royal Mile). I wish I could remember which one it is as only one of them sells the Pringles jumpers I routinely wear!
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
I think it was due to posting in concert with betting markets which made it not only misleading but potentially financially ruinous.
You're allowed to post subsamples, so long as you clearly post 'This is a subsample'
Good call from Starmer. It's important during this national crisis that Starmer doesn't create additional noise around the government's already confused messaging. But he'd be failing in his duty to hold them to account if he didn't point out their serial incompetence and try to help them correct their errors. The only real question is whether Labour would even want to inherit the smoking ruins of the economy in 2024.
Being in power is always better than not being in power. People said the same about winning in 2010, that maybe leaving Labour to clear up their mess was better than winning. It wasn't true then and it won't be in 2024.
And yet people still haven't forgiven the LDs for going into power when they had the chance.
Not quite. People haven't forgiven the LDs for picking a side, then going back on that, so nobody trusts them.
If you're in opposition you can get away with spendng decades saying to soft lefties "vote for us, we're not the Tories" and saying soft righties "vote for us, we're not Labour".
But in office they said to soft lefties "vote for us and we may align with the Tories" - and then by turning their back on what they'd done in office they said to soft righties "vote for us and we may align with Labour".
Ambiguity was a strength for them, now it is a weakness.
As I said, people haven't forgiven them for choosing to be in power. Nor have people understood the compromises required of a junior member of a coalition government.
I disagree with this. It was not because the LDs formed a government with the Conservatives that led to their collapse. It was that they caputilated to the Tories and signed on the dotted line in under a week.
They ended up being light blues and the Ministers and MPs were actively supporting the Conservative policies. Once they started acting like Tories, they lost most of their support from the centre and centre left.
That one week undid thirty years of steady progress. Thirty years to finally get a shot at negotiating a proper coalition agreement, and they roll over in a few days.
What policies should the Lib Dems have not agreed to which they did agree to?
The Coalition LDs problem is that they spent their political capital on an AV referendum that they then lost anyway rather than on stopping tuition fees.
..and the NHS re-organisation, and the austerity agenda.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
The alternative is people choose the media that suits them.
A bit like how lefty liberals are more likely to read the Guardian than the Daily Mail. Are they lefty liberals because they read the Guardian or do they read the Guardian because they are lefty liberals?
That's why this site is great. We get all sorts of opinions not just an echo chamber.
Yes, that’s why this site is great. We get all sorts of opinions not just an echo chamber.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
I think those of us on the losing side of the Brexit referendum have an awareness that facts and reality are not the fundamental deciding factors of political debate.
Sturgeon is doing a good job of persuading voters that she is doing a better job than Johnson. Perception trumps reality.
But reality is now back, to bite us on the arse, big time. Reality is now more ferociously real than it has been for decades. This is not 2016 any more.
For proof, see America. Trump is going to lose because Americans have wised up to the reality of Trump being a gibbering idiot in a time of severe national crisis.
Imagine if the Brexit vote was held now. Remain would win, handily. The extra risk would make people recoil. Polls show this:
"Wrong" to leave the EU is now ahead by a distance, and I imagine that distance has only grown as we are hurled further into the chaos of the 2nd wave. Also note that the Wrong lead began with the onset of the virus in the Spring (when it crossed over Right, which was briefly ahead)
If you're using polls for evidence then they also show the highest ever levels of support for Scottish Independence.
Trump is the most powerful politician in the US. The responsibility for the failure is all his.
Every day Sturgeon is explaining to the Scottish people how she is doing her best, but is being held back by failures in London.
When things go well - proof that Scotland can run itself! When things go badly - proof that London fails again!
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
I think those of us on the losing side of the Brexit referendum have an awareness that facts and reality are not the fundamental deciding factors of political debate.
Sturgeon is doing a good job of persuading voters that she is doing a better job than Johnson. Perception trumps reality.
But reality is now back, to bite us on the arse, big time. Reality is now more ferociously real than it has been for decades. This is not 2016 any more.
For proof, see America. Trump is going to lose because Americans have wised up to the reality of Trump being a gibbering idiot in a time of severe national crisis.
Imagine if the Brexit vote was held now. Remain would win, handily. The extra risk would make people recoil. Polls show this:
"Wrong" to leave the EU is now ahead by a distance, and I imagine that distance has only grown as we are hurled further into the chaos of the 2nd wave. Also note that the Wrong lead began with the onset of the virus in the Spring (when it crossed over Right, which was briefly ahead)
If you're using polls for evidence then they also show the highest ever levels of support for Scottish Independence.
Trump is the most powerful politician in the US. The responsibility for the failure is all his.
Every day Sturgeon is explaining to the Scottish people how she is doing her best, but is being held back by failures in London.
When things go well - proof that Scotland can run itself! When things go badly - proof that London fails again!
Yes, I get all that. Yawn. My point is that when it comes to it, voters do actually recoil from horrible risk, when they can see it in front of their faces. The desire for indy now may be high, but when faced with bitter reality? I doubt it.
But I'm not going to persuade you. And I have work to do. A fresh and inspiring newt to portray!
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Don't post sub samples as properly weighted polls.
The margin of error on that is huge.
How come HYUFD is allowed to post Scottish subsamples but the Scottish psephologist who must not be named was drummed out? (I was not here at the latter time, so don't know the logic involved.)
I think it was due to posting in concert with betting markets which made it not only misleading but potentially financially ruinous.
You're allowed to post subsamples, so long as you clearly post 'This is a subsample'
That is an indictment of a system of having partisan news channels.
Far better to have news channels that slag off the government from a variety of different standpoints, as they do here. Opinion polls show most people think the government is wrong, one way or another. If only they could agree on what is right, rather than what is wrong...
Cardiff based Peacocks stores are shutting. Potential loss of 24,000 jobs, nationally.
Paging Boris supporters, any retraining ideas?
That's the Edinburgh Woolen Mill, the EWM is parent of a lot of different brands.
A lot of shops on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh seem to be either them or virtually identikit tourist tat retail that all seem to stock the same stuff - are those them too?
Probably. It used to be that in Pitlochry there was an EWM and 2 doors dow to it is an "independent" shop that was also EWM owned.
But oddly enough there is a very similarly named shop which is apparently unrelated (on Princes St, and Dobbies Garden Centre in Lasswade, as oposed to the Other Kind on the Royal Mile). I wish I could remember which one it is as only one of them sells the Pringles jumpers I routinely wear!
I remember a joke from my youth along the lines of "what have a Pringles jumper and a clitoris got in common". I will leave others to deduce the punchline. (No offence intended - at the time the Pringles jumper was the garment of choice of local Neds).
Who's on board for this exciting new financial services offer? I might sell all my cars and get on board with some magic bean futures.
Sometimes I really start looking for the universe's on/off switch.
Some scientists believe that we are all really living in some kind of computer simulated universe; perhaps the coronavirus is simply a sign that whoever is running it got a bit bored?
Is that bad? Or is that good? I genuinely don't know. What proportion of sexual contacts does an STD clinic manage to trace? What is the comparator here?
It seems to me that if 2/3 of those who have been in contact with someone found to be infected are being traced this should be more than sufficient to reduce R below 1. As that is not happening I wonder how they are defining "contacts" and how quickly those 2/3 are being traced.
Not really, as we’re in the main testing only those who are symptomatic. So even if we were testing all of those, which we aren’t, around half of infected cases wouldn’t be tested at all.
Add in the days of delay between testing and tracing contacts, and you can see why that’s not the case.
Again this is the consequence of making test accuracy the single most important metric. Number of tests (which must include testing those who are not symptomatic) and speed of results are every bit as important, and have simply not been given equivalent priority from the start.
I do recall in March or April listening to Vallance and Whitty and being told that a test that was not sufficiently accurate was "worse than useless". Even at the time my eyebrows shot up but, in a crowded field, I think it is now clear that that was the worst single piece of advice the government received. Its cost thousands of lives and had horrific economic consequences.
It depends where you set the bar for 'sufficiently'. @Nigelb is right though, speed and volume are very important, along with decent sensitivity, specificity less important - you can test again.
Its a numbers game and it always was. If you are finding 80%+ of the cases you get a result, even if there are false positives and false negatives scattered through the results.
It’s all part of thinking of the world as you would like it to be and not as it is. The effect of false positives can be mitigated by doing multiple tests (easy if they involve rapid turnaround). The effect of false negatives, likewise, whilst noting that in a world where many people (unless clearly symptomatic) will not stick to rules unless strongly convinced that have the virus
Those services numbers are horrific given August was Eat Out to Help Out month. And Services are going to be very badly affected by whatever Brexit deal we do or don’t end up with. Thankfully, services are only a small part of the UK economy ...
Mixed bag. The growth figures are disappointing (though I'm extremely sceptical about the construction figures, they don't pass the sniff test).
On the other hand having a trade surplus is an excellent position to be in - and also surprising given how many people have been still continuing to order stuff from Amazon etc online it seems interesting that there is a trade surplus.
Alternatively doesn't it suggest that that anecdotal evidence (which possibly sometimes focuses on some things at the expense of others) is a bad judge of the overall state of the economy. Big backlogs on construction projects could be indicative of a shortage of workers, or retrenchment from some firms leading to general supply shortages or whatever? Also maybe construction didn't as fall as far in the first place.
There doesn't seem any intuitive or logical explanation why the crash in Construction would be worse than the crash in Services. It doesn't make any sense to me at least.
It may be right, but it doesn't seem logical. Especially since the 2 metre restrictions etc seem to be more vigorously enforced in Services than in Construction.
Construction was allowed to remain open through the summer when many Services weren't too, so why would Construction have had such a heavier decline? It seems very odd to me.
I guess it depends in how construction is actually defined. A lot of regular maintenance work will have been mothballed, for example. My nephew is an electrician in London and is struggling to find work currently.
I agree. Many, many projects have been mothballed until it can be determined whether they are still viable. Its one of the reasons that Boris was going on about offshore windfarms the other day. He is anxious to get as many projects as possible back on track.
He's not anxious to get the repair of Hammersmith Bridge back on track.
The bridge is now closed to all pedestrians as well as traffic. Literally thousands of school children are having to make 1+ hour detours at the start and end of the school day. The only thing holding up repairs is the government holding up funding for this key shovel ready infrastructure project. The government is the only body with the funds (£0.14b out of the £100b infrastructure spend promised in the Tory manifesto).
I can only think this is retribution on the local citizens for throwing out Boris's pal Zac at the last election. But it is the kids who are suffering most.
As someone who lives in the area - the problem in that the two councils involved are both trying to avoid responsibility. Their attempt to dump it on central government was a farce. The first demand for money under the infrastructure spending boost left out a few items.
Cost Estimated time. What their solution was
Yes, they asked the government for money on the basis of "Give us a pile of cash to do bridgy things to, from, at, or near Hammersmith Bridge. Sorry, we don't know what we will do with the money, or how long it will take. But hey!"
A bit later they tried on the basis of maybe getting the bridge re-opened to pedestrians...
What! Not so. I live about 100 yards from the bridge so I am directly affected and am following events very closely. The two councils and Tfl do not have the funds (£0.14b) to repair this major link between north and south of the river.
There is an estimate of the cost (£0.14b), time (3 years) and solution (temp pedestrian bridge will major repairs to bridge are carried out). Both Councils are ready to rapidly progress planning permissions etc.
But I'm not going to get into a tit-for-tat political discussion with you on here. It really wouldn't be productive. My energies on this are directed elsewhere.
Apparently St Paul's kids have been sailing across the river in tin tubs and stuff. They've finally had to put in a ferry service. Could revive the wherryman profession!
Given that literally everyone I know with children at university has a tale of their children, their childrens' flatmates/housemates, or bubble mates testing positive I am not at all surprised at the stats.
But again, of all those dozens and dozens of people (because I'm hearing of bubbles, flats, housemates, yeargroups), none has been hospitalised although I appreciate it is more nuanced than that.
The great fear, of course, is that it starts to spread more rapidly from the student incubators into the general population and the death rate starts to rocket. All efforts need to be devoted into stopping this from happening.
This the only reason I think a circuit break might actually do anything productive.
A circuit break is in itself probably absolutely bloody useless. The only thing I can think of though is so long as the students remain where they are that this circuit break might potentially allow time for the virus to burn out amongst students without transferring from students to the wider community as much.
I doubt it though. I'm not optimistic that a circuit break will do anything other than put in restrictions that will end up being extended before the end of the fortnight.
We are still almost ten per cent short of where the economy was in February,
Now Sunak wants to put the patient back into a coma with borrowed money.
FFS wake up. We are oing to end up with an economy permanently 10/15 per cent smaller than it was, with far, far larger debt mountain to try to sustain.
It is not going to effing work. We are looking at a bloody catastrophe the like of which we have never seen. For a disease that prays on 82 year olds.
The economy is going to be smaller either way. There is a major health crisis and people are not going out whether there is a formal lockdown or not.
People talk about shielding the vulnerable but having hospitality get back to normal but not only do the vulnerable rely upon the healthy . . . but hospitality relies upon the vulnerable. A great many pounds spent in pubs, restaurants etc normally are spent by people who now need to shield and will shield regardless of what the government says because they are afraid and don't want to die.
The only way to get the economy back to normal is to put the health crisis behind us. That means either a vaccine, herd immunity (which would be hundreds of thousands more deaths) or suppressing the virus.
The average age of covid deaths is 82. The media are having a giant canary over Trump recovering because it blasts a gargantuan hole in their and your narrative of collapse.
Which is what we are going to get.
But OK. People will see that poverty, unemployment and destitution kill. Kill far worse that corona.
"[Research] shows that the average age of people dying in England and Wales from Covid-19 is 82.4.
This is slightly higher than deaths caused by other illnesses, which has a median age of 81.5."
Sun
So it is virtually indistinguishable from any other disease as far as median age at death is concerned. So your point is what?
Seriously you can't see the point? really? we are destroying countless young lives for this for decades, young people between the ages of 16 and 35 face the worst outlook since our boys went over the top at the Somme. and you can't see the point?
We expect these people to have a rotten terrible youth and still pay for our retirements? what are they, children or bloody slaves?
Sure, but what does the information that this is not a disease which disproportionately kills the elderly to a significant extent add to the argument?
Pretty much every disease out there disproportionately kills the elderly. Up til no we have not allowed this fact to affect the futures of our young people. Or expected them to change their behaviour.
Now we are.
No - we are asking eveyone to change their behaviour in mostly minor ways - masks, a bit of social distancing and a bit less night life - this is not the Spanish Inquisition!
Quite so. Libertarianism in the face of Covid = narcissism and denial of reality.
Labour now also ahead 42% to 40% with middle class ABC1s but the Tories lead 43% to 33% with working class C2DES, so we can safely say Starmer no longer leads the party of the working class as founded by Keir Hardie
It's a different working class now. Atomized, non-industrial, non-unionized.
This was the Thatcher project, wasn´t it?
With the apparently bizarre outcome that those she targeted for her economic and social experiments appear increasingly positive about her ideological successors, whilst those with education and intelligence increasingly shop elsewhere. Cf. the last thousand posts from our Hy Fud.
£20 for a days parking. I thought Yorkshire men were supposed to be tight. My grandad would have walked a 20 mile round trip into town than pay that sort of money.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
If people decide the Westminster government was responsible for making Covid worse than it could have been, they may decide to be rid of Westminster.
I'm old enough to remember the halcyon days when PB Nats were praising Sturgeon for "basically ridding Scotland of the disease", akin to New Zealand, and advising her to close the borders with England. It was about three months ago.
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
I think those of us on the losing side of the Brexit referendum have an awareness that facts and reality are not the fundamental deciding factors of political debate.
Sturgeon is doing a good job of persuading voters that she is doing a better job than Johnson. Perception trumps reality.
But reality is now back, to bite us on the arse, big time. Reality is now more ferociously real than it has been for decades. This is not 2016 any more.
For proof, see America. Trump is going to lose because Americans have wised up to the reality of Trump being a gibbering idiot in a time of severe national crisis.
Imagine if the Brexit vote was held now. Remain would win, handily. The extra risk would make people recoil. Polls show this:
"Wrong" to leave the EU is now ahead by a distance, and I imagine that distance has only grown as we are hurled further into the chaos of the 2nd wave. Also note that the Wrong lead began with the onset of the virus in the Spring (when it crossed over Right, which was briefly ahead)
The difference between Trump and Brexit - the mad twins of 2016 - is that with one tick Americans can make Trump go away forever. We are probably stuck with Brexit for the rest of my lifetime.
Ferfuxsake, homeopaths, I knew the Great Barrington declaration was a load of bollocks.
A widely-circulated open letter calling on governments to pursue herd immunity is counting homeopaths, therapists and fake names among its "medical" signatories, leading to accusations that it falsely represents scientific support for the controversial position.
The Great Barrington Declaration, a letter organised by prominent advocates of herd immunity, claims to have been signed by more than 15,000 scientists and medical practitioners, as well as more than 150,000 members of the general public.
Yet Sky News found dozens of fake names on the list of medical signatories, which anyone can add to if they tick a box and enter a name. These included Dr. I.P. Freely, Dr. Person Fakename and Dr. Johnny Bananas, who listed himself as a "Dr of Hard Sums".
One medical professional on the list gives his name as Dr Harold Shipman, a general practitioner in the United Kingdom.
Other famous names included Dominic Cummings, who is described as "PhD Durham Univercity".
Sky News also found 18 self-declared homeopaths listed on the open letter as medical practitioners, despite the fact that homeopathy has no scientific underpinning or clinical evidence to support its use.
In addition, the letter has been signed by well over 100 therapists, including massage therapists, hypnotherapists, psychotherapists and one Mongolian Khöömii Singer who describes himself as a "therapeutic sound practitioner".
Public health experts accused the letter, which has been used as evidence for the idea of a rift in the scientific community, of misrepresenting the level of support for the controversial concept of herd immunity.
Professor Martin McKee, Professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said it reminded him of "the messaging used to undermine public health policies on harmful substances, such as tobacco".
It couldn't work, anyway. And even if it did, it wouldn't work.
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
Step 2 - Build up herd immunity by infecting the less vulnerable. We have three routes here: "Let it rip", "De facto restrictions, "Legal restrictions." To be honest, we may well not have much choice between Route 1 and Route 2; the people themselves would make that choice. Let's explore all three.
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already. At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't. At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day. At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And the punchline? It looks as though acquired immunity could wear off, anyway, and by the time we've all had it, it'll be about time to go through it all again.
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
Great posts. Really.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
Another factor is that, say you hide away the vulnerable 1/3 of the population (and their carers, direct family members, etc) and achieve herd immunity in the rest of the population.
When you reintroduce the shielded 1/3 you no longer have herd immunity, because the proportion immune drops by expanding the size of the population.
Cardiff based Peacocks stores are shutting. Potential loss of 24,000 jobs, nationally.
Paging Boris supporters, any retraining ideas?
That's the Edinburgh Woolen Mill, the EWM is parent of a lot of different brands.
A lot of shops on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh seem to be either them or virtually identikit tourist tat retail that all seem to stock the same stuff - are those them too?
Probably. It used to be that in Pitlochry there was an EWM and 2 doors dow to it is an "independent" shop that was also EWM owned.
But oddly enough there is a very similarly named shop which is apparently unrelated (on Princes St, and Dobbies Garden Centre in Lasswade, as oposed to the Other Kind on the Royal Mile). I wish I could remember which one it is as only one of them sells the Pringles jumpers I routinely wear!
I remember a joke from my youth along the lines of "what have a Pringles jumper and a clitoris got in common". I will leave others to deduce the punchline. (No offence intended - at the time the Pringles jumper was the garment of choice of local Neds).
Not at all - it's always amused me when some such firm is horrified by its success amongst the ned/chav/yob element.
Re buying jumpers, I was getting confused - on checking back the High St shop must be some other of their companies, with (surprisingly) a similar but not same stock to what the pukka EWM sells. But it's not just for tourists, that's for sure.
Anybody else think Andy Burnham is having a good crisis? Sane and calm labour head.....
The mood music from family and friends in GM suggests so. He's a decent bloke who is similar IRL as the public image he projects. (He was my MP once).
Burnham seems to at least have worked out that you can't tell whole industries to shut down without supporting them. And if you cant afford to support them you cant tell them to shut down.
Until recently they were headquartered in my home town of Langholm. Their almost entirely reliant on tourist money.
What price indy now? Scotland's economy is going to be completely down the shitter in six months time (as will the rest of the UK). And I mean: totally decimated. Raging unemployment, huge deficit, terrible debt, dragons burning down Bute House.
Good luck selling the massive risk of a Yes to Indy vote in that situation. I suppose there will be some voters who might think Well we're doomed anyway so we might as well be doomed waving a Saltire, and sod the UK Treasury's bail-out money, but I have my doubts they will be a majority.
You half witted nutter, given England will be in the toilet why does it make a blind bit of difference. Instead of being robbed of our last shilling we will be able to spend it where we want. Will be a landslide next year.
Yougov today has SNP 48%, Tories 24%, Lab 18%, Greens 4%, LDs 4% in Scotland.
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
Comments
What we may have to accept is that August is pretty much as good as it gets for the foreseeable, that we will have to operate on about 90% of our pre Covid GDP. This has massive implications for our standard of living, the level of public services, the level of wages in the public sector, the level of benefits. One way to look at it is that is that GDP will be roughly what it was about 2010, which doesn't seem so bad. But there is a lot of adjustments to be made for that to be sustainable.
Scotland and England simply are fundamentally different now. The UK has as much future as John Cleese's Norwegian Blue.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/22/1008709/brazil-manaus-covid-coronavirus-herd-immunity-pandemic/
Such robust policies have enabled their economy to contract 5.9%, despite heavy government economic support.
https://www.focus-economics.com/countries/brazil
Ignoring the virus is not just medically stupid, it is economically stupid too.
https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1314546408771538947
I know Nats are capable of amazing double think but ordinary Scottish voters may wonder if the Nats were so brilliant after all, opening the universities, closing cafes one day then changing the rules the next, etc etc
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/08/covid-19-scotlands-drinking-ban-in-chaos-over-meaning-of-cafe
"Scotland’s nationwide crackdown on indoor drinking descended into chaos on Thursday evening, less than 24 hours before strict new regulations on hospitality are due to come into force."
So at the moment Sturgeon would still get a majority but it is close enough it only takes a small swing away from the SNP next year as the economic restrictions start to bite for a Unionist majority at Holyrood
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/do0j3t84jg/TheTimes_VI_Tracker_201006.pdf
Add in all their EWM-in-disguuse shops and they must be going close to 1000 shops around the country.
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/do0j3t84jg/TheTimes_VI_Tracker_201006.pdf
The margin of error on that is huge.
https://twitter.com/lpolgreen/status/1314395774785064960
I shall exile myself to ConHome at some point.
I am not suggesting Red Wallers should return to the Labour fold, but listening to the vox pops over the last week or two extolling the virtues of Johnson and Sunak's handling of Covid, I am not sure they realise the depth of s*** we already find ourselves in.
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/do0j3t84jg/TheTimes_VI_Tracker_201006.pdf
If there is no vaccine, and no significant new treatments, and the virus remains lethal, with long Covid a constant menace, then, well, God help us. Who knows what that implies. An endless parade of lockdowns until, what, one nation erupts in civil war?
Staying the same(ish) is better than getting worse, but of course the on the ground situation continues to get worse if R stays above 1.
For whatever 'sigificance' threshold is being used.
Sturgeon is doing a good job of persuading voters that she is doing a better job than Johnson. Perception trumps reality.
Trump’s COVID Case Could Be Entering a Crucial Stage
Doctors say the president could be heading for a bad stretch in prolonged illness—or an upward path to recovery
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trumps-covid-case-could-be-entering-a-crucial-stage/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ScientificAmerican-News+(Content:+News)
He shouldn't.
They were at 8,000. Vallance looked like a total tw@t. And then there was a spreadsheet gate!
For proof, see America. Trump is going to lose because Americans have wised up to the reality of Trump being a gibbering idiot in a time of severe national crisis.
Imagine if the Brexit vote was held now. Remain would win, handily. The extra risk would make people recoil. Polls show this:
https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/in-highsight-do-you-think-britain-was-right-or-wrong-to-vote-to-leave-the-eu/
"Wrong" to leave the EU is now ahead by a distance, and I imagine that distance has only grown as we are hurled further into the chaos of the 2nd wave. Also note that the Wrong lead began with the onset of the virus in the Spring (when it crossed over Right, which was briefly ahead)
https://twitter.com/benatipsosmori/status/1314136532903702528
Trump five over Biden in this from Texas
Let's step through it:
In order to get any process from As-Is to To-Be, we need to understand what's involved at each step.
Step 1 - Unscramble an egg and extract the milk, water, and coffee beans from a latte. Well, that would be easier than unscrambling the population and segregating them by age and vulnerability. Pop all support bubbles, remove all parents and grandparents older than 65 or with any medical vulnerability from their families, remove social care workers from their families, extract teachers with vulnerable members of their families from them, remove anyone from the working population who is older than 65 or with any medical conditions - and either remove them from their families or isolate their families as well. Are we extracting NHS staff from their families as well? (65 chosen because that's where the IFR goes up past 1%).
Let's assume the NHS and social care staff other than those actually working at care homes aren't extracted, because we're getting to ridiculous levels, otherwise.
This looks exceptionally challenging and infeasible, so let's look at how its been done elsewhere - always the best way to learn. Where in the world have they managed to shield the vulnerable while letting the virus run through elsewhere? Answer: nowhere. Everywhere that's protected the vulnerable also kept the virus under control. Nowhere has had significant spread in younger and less vulnerable demographics while protecting the older and more vulnerable. Societies are too intertwined.
We're looking to extract 14 million+ people (11 million if we decide to let those in the upper 60s take their chances) and need to find somewhere to put them under effective house arrest. We're removing support bubbles, the ability to go to the shops with social distancing, the ability to go to restaurants with social distancing, to be with their families and have visits, to go to church, possibly even to walk in parks with social distancing (as, if we get this right, the disease will be rife everywhere else outside). We were worrying about the mental health issues of people at the current levels of restrictions - we're looking to go up an entire league or three. But only for these particular people, and usually those promoting this coincidentally fall outside the category that would be locked up.
(How will they go to hospital if needed? Will we have separate "covid-dirty" and "covid-clean" hospitals, with the latter staffed by volunteers who will be also separated from all of society and their families?)
So - we're isolating somewhere between 16% and 22% of the population. For however long it takes.
Okay - let's not get too hung up on the plausibility of this. Say, for the sake of argument, that we've somehow pulled it off. We've achieved segregation. What then?
(1/3)
The alternative is people choose the media that suits them.
A bit like how lefty liberals are more likely to read the Guardian than the Daily Mail. Are they lefty liberals because they read the Guardian or do they read the Guardian because they are lefty liberals?
That's why this site is great. We get all sorts of opinions not just an echo chamber.
Davina McCall to present Changing Rooms reboot
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-54477804
https://twitter.com/Politics_Polls/status/1314310112413188098?s=20
https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1313963472506494977?s=20
"Let it rip".
Remove all restrictions and let it rip through the younger and less vulnerable. Say we're starting with about 16,000 infections per day. Realistically, people aren't going to go straight back to normal instantly - people tend to be cautious. Let's say we go back to an R-rate of about 2. Leading to a 5-day doubling time.
At D+5 we've got 32,000 infections per day. Even at lower vulnerability, we'll have about 800 hospitalisations per day and 100+ deaths per day associated (a week and 2-3 weeks lagged respectively). Some areas of the country will be overloading their hospital beds already.
At D+10 it's 64,000 infections per day. 1600 hospitalisations per day and 200+ deaths per day. Some NHS hospitals are now turning away covid patients. At this point, I would expect the "de facto restrictions" to be kicking in. Let's assume they don't.
At D+15, it's 128,000 infections per day. The fatality rate is jumping up, as many who need hospital help can now not get it. We'll be anywhere between 500 and 1000 deaths per day.
At D+20, it's quarter of a million infections per day. 1000-2000 deaths per day. And by now, the plausibility of people NOT doing effective de facto restrictions has gone. We're less than a month in and starting to dig mass graves.
Okay, Route 2 - "De facto restrictions." This segues into Route 3, "legal restrictions," but with less control. We're going to assume we level out at a constant rate of infections. We need to keep it under NHS saturation (so the death rate doesn't spike) while being as fast as possible (so we get through it as soon as possible). Maybe 100,000 infections per day should be sustainable with extra funding to the NHS (so it ceases crowding out other treatments and operations). Maybe 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day MAY be sustainable; that'd be about the level when focused on the less vulnerable.
Forty million people divided by 100,000 per day gives us 400 days. One year and one month and a couple of days. That's a hell of a long time to lock those 11-14 million up under house arrest, and to sustain those thousands of hospitalisations per day.
("But they're less vulnerable!" Yes, "less vulnerable" does not equal "invulnerable." We've also got 7.5 million or so "moderately vulnerable" people exposed. We're past 20 million shielded if we shield those and the over 65s, and getting towards the point where 100% exposure of the rest still wouldn't hit herd immunity - and WAY beyond the point of utter implausibility on the level of people segregated and shielded)
(2/3)
And, realistically, we ain't sustaining that level of infections and hospitalisations, anyway. If we can just do half of it, it's 800 days. If a quarter (still well above current levels), it's 1600 days. Four and a half years.
This is all, of course, overlooking the long-term effects that afflict a percentage of those affected (regardless of severity), focusing on the lungs and heart.
Yes, yes, I know "so negative." Well, I'm pretty negative about anything that wouldn't actually achieve any bloody good. "Living with the disease" doesn't look like that. It's as negative as a pilot checking the fuel and engine before take-off. It's as negative as an engineer checking that the bridge won't collapse when a busload of schoolkids is driven over it.
Because reality doesn't give a crap about if we want something to be true. If it wouldn't work, it wouldn't work, and it doesn't matter if I, or anyone else, gets convinced to say something in any particular language or phrase. Finding the solution involves managing to discard options that wouldn't work - not clinging to ones that would be actively harmful because we want to fantasise that they'd work.
(3/3)
But we shall see.
You're allowed to post subsamples, so long as you clearly post 'This is a subsample'
Thought you wanted the whole picture.
By the way, that's a bigger lead than Trump had over Clinton in that poll before 2016.
Again though, I guess, you only want facts favourable to Biden.
Trump is the most powerful politician in the US. The responsibility for the failure is all his.
Every day Sturgeon is explaining to the Scottish people how she is doing her best, but is being held back by failures in London.
When things go well - proof that Scotland can run itself!
When things go badly - proof that London fails again!
There's a few options, check to see which is closest to you.
I would recommend Wellington Street, which wasn't far from where I used to work when I worked in Leeds between 2005 and 2011.
https://www.ncp.co.uk/parking-solutions/5-for-24-hours-parking-offer/
But I'm not going to persuade you. And I have work to do. A fresh and inspiring newt to portray!
Later, PB, Later
Today's prices are a bargain in comparison.
(No offence intended - at the time the Pringles jumper was the garment of choice of local Neds).
The Tennessee Titans have confirmed a 23rd positive coronavirus test and their game against the Buffalo Bills is one of two moved by the NFL.
There's been like a single poll lead in the state for Biden in the last 3 months.
A good thing to bear in mind though was that the 2016 Texas polls understated Trump by 2 in 2016 but missed Clinton by 5 points.
But what about trusting people? Trusting students and inveterate boozers not to go to hug their grannies after a night on the lash or even two weeks on the lash; trusting carers to comply with sensible precautions if they look after someone else's granny; trusting the NHS worker to ensure their children sanitise and are sensible outside their school/uni bubbles; trusting people to self-regulate if they believe they are vulnerable but to make informed choices if they want to hug their grandchildren; realising that some edge cases will not be solved.
And that there will be an ongoing Covid death rate.
And the golden thread through all of this or we are all just flying blind: test, test, test.
As that fringe organisation said in March.
When you reintroduce the shielded 1/3 you no longer have herd immunity, because the proportion immune drops by expanding the size of the population.
So the virus kicks off again.
Re buying jumpers, I was getting confused - on checking back the High St shop must be some other of their companies, with (surprisingly) a similar but not same stock to what the pukka EWM sells. But it's not just for tourists, that's for sure.