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And the Answers Are ….? The circuit breaker proposal – politicalbetting.com
And the Answers Are ….? The circuit breaker proposal – politicalbetting.com
Quickie poll by @YouGov finds strong support for two week "circuit breaker" lockdown pic.twitter.com/TKv8pfBYVH
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It is, at best, a delay and, at worst, a complete waste of time.
As I said, if you polled people on whether people who test positive should isolate the result would be close to 100% in favour, the reality is that only 20% of people actually do it.
Polling on this subject is completely useless.
We appear not to have spent that time terrifically well.
As far as the proposed circuit breaker is concerned, other than give us a couple of weeks' pause, I don't have an answer to Cyclefree's questions.
That's a massive chunk of the population.
The impact of COVID is being felt extremely unevenly. One thing the government must do is spread the load. I wonder what that poll would look like if Sunak announced a 5% across the board cut in pension payments.
I reckon you could turn that poll on its head, effectively.
Anyone who endorses a "2 week circuit breaker" is lying to themselves or lying to us. 2 weeks will do nothing but inflict catastrophic economic damage on every business hit by it.
A 2 month circuit break might give health benefits. A 2 week circuit break is a farce. All pain no gain.
A soft easy option to claim to support but not a proposal anyone credible or serious could endorse.
Especially when that month coincided with the explosion in student infections?
This is why its farcical to suggest that 2 weeks would work. Even a month isn't long enough to tell if its working meaningfully yet or not, absolutely no way to tell within 2 weeks.
Answers? To paraphrase Mel Brooks, "We don't need no stinking answers"
The importance of this announcement at this point in time is to divert attention from the clusterf**k about to happen tomorrow and Friday.
Far, far better to have the country up in arms over Covid than Brexit. Quelle coincidence that the announcements happen a couple of days before we realise that a complete capitulation by Boris is on the cards...
How come Cornwall had an extremely busy tourist season, yet there is no Covid there?
I think part of the problem is the government have oversold so many things e.g. get an antibody test and you will have an immunity passport, track and trace will be able to hunt down all the outbreaks, we will have an app that will definitely tell you if you were near a positive person, etc.
Realistically, track and trace didn't even work that well when cases where just in the handfuls, because it is too slow a process to do it manually.
The reality from the start, which initially the likes of Witty stated, this will be with us for several years and we will have to live with it.
Then TTI can control the outbreak and we won't need further lockdowns.
We would have far fewer cases than otherwise and lots of lives are saved.
I think the realistic worst is that it is just a delay.
However vague unclear answers below:
1,2,3 - 2-3 weeks is a circuit breaker, longer is a lockdown. A circuit breaker moves the infected numbers back a few weeks in time allowing either slightly looser restrictions or fewer deaths over the following few months, possibly a combination. It does not give a long term solution and no-one is saying it will do.
4 - We will be in a similar place as we are today, but a better place than we would be in a months time without the breaker.
5 - This is the interesting and difficult question. The govt has so far eventually delivered a reasonable and fair support across the country. Business liquidations were actually down for the year to July for example which is remarkable. They only did so under media pressure and are trying to reduce the level of state support, so who knows? Realistically I would assume support is somewhere halfway between what is currently promised (not enough) and what we had over the summer (enough for most).
4) All but essential retail, schools and unis closed. Building sites and online continues to operate (as per March lockdown)
5) Schools and unis closed. Just essential retail left. Can't leave your county except for work etc.
Because it makes NO sense to go from a lOCAL tier 3, which is still quite a soft lockdown, to NATIONWIDE lockdown. It hurts Winchester to slowly help Wigan....
That 5% cut will have no impact on me, my colleagues have similar positives.
In a ship with an infinite ocean ahead of it, the captain would be better off getting the crew and passengers into the lifeboats.
I wonder how people would react to a draconian track & trace and then opening up the economy to a significant extent.
Would please both "sides" potentially. OK you can go and party but if you all catch the pox then you are indoors on your own for 14 days at peril of a £XX,000 fine.
The issue is that SAGE has a remit to look at the R and not a lot else, we need for the scientists to be forced to take into account the effects of their policy wider than just how it effects the R, maybe that's verging too far into rule by technocrat but it's very clear that none of the politicians have got the capability to investigate these issues themselves.
I wonder if PB had existed in WW2 what the daily Churchill posts would have been like?
The fall of Singapore? Would have been ugly!
(Not making parallels disclaimer off)
Boris is doing ok. Just ok though, and that's making allowance for the impossibility of the situation and some small allowance for him being ill.
The Government is doing much the same (a tad better perhaps).
The opposition is doing well too. I don't agree with their current policy flash, but they are being quite responsible.
The sums show it isn't.
See: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/10/14/no-good-evidence-circuit-breaker-lockdown/
On that day we had 3,099 new people hospitalized with COVID in England. Two weeks later, it was 1,608. Three weeks it was 1,310. So that's more than halving the number of new people going into hospital.
This circuit breaker might be less effective because schools will be partially open. But I would still expect a substantial health benefit.
That's not going to touch the sides for them, given I think it is now clear we aren't getting crowds back this season.
I’m reading ‘the Splendid and the Vile’ at the moment - the story of the Churchill family and Britain in 1940 written in novelistic style by an American. It’s a very good read.
One thing that strikes you about Churchill is that he was a workaholic and obsessive over details. He sat in bed firing off memos to all and sundry about every minutiae of Britain’s defences. A lot of this was of course unhelpful, but you can’t fault him for not being interested in knowing the detail, nor for not making sure that pretty much every idea that came his way was researched by someone, so that no loose end was left untied.
Nor did he spend the crisis chasing after every young musician who came his way.
His style of politics and governance was about as far from that of the lazy clown currently in No 10 as it is possible to imagine.
Track and trace in particular has proved a huge disappointment, and I don't believe the whole testing to isolation process need be anywhere near as slow.
And I'm not quite sure what the proposed fortnight is supposed to do.
Near Christmas, 12 months into dev, I was tasked with working out how the biz would actually use the new system tools whilst my boss, the stream lead, was away.
I had sat in at least 10 high level meetings with board members, dev director, IT teams etc in the previous weeks to get up to scratch with the background systems and biz users workflow. After about 2 hours studying the detail, I realised that all had failed to recognise the steps previous taken by the biz users were not inherent to the old tools, but inherent to the sector. And so the very way the new system was designed to be used had to be approached differently.
So after 2 weeks of head scratching and testing with large groups of biz users, I came up with a solution that just about worked but had flaws. All other options were too hard (technically), too costly, or too unpalatable (to the business users, or more specifically their managers) to contemplate.
In an ideal world, we'd use cc and mobile phone data, but it would be unpalatable to society. In a slightly less creepy ideal world, everyone would have a smartphone and would download the app, but we don't live in an ideal world.
So we've ended up with a TTI system that just about works, but has significant flaws. It costs a fortune and has too many lag times built in to be that effective. It will be having some effect, and no doubt lots of people are working very hard in it. But the design of the system just isn't going to cut it for the task at hand....
And I'm not thinking of Mr Leonard. I don't think he's that bad - I just can't think who could replace him without making it worse, in terms of civil wars within SLAB or a conflict between Mr Starmer and his branch office in Scotland (again, remember SLAB is a mere construct with no legal independence). I recall that it was Mr Leonard's Labour party opponents who complained about him being from Yorkshire, not his "official" opponents (and how many of his predecessors fell to hatchet jobs in their backs, e.g. Ms Alexander, Mr McLeish. And Labour has soon to face the dilemma of whether to ally themselves with the ScoTories, and we all know what happened last time.
Later peeps!
2 weeks just isn't long enough. It will do a lot of economic damage but not much epidemiological change.
The SNP paradox is going to be:
Can only get an indy referendum under a Labour Govt, or in coalition, but that their whinging leads enough English voters to vote to prevent the former, or the latter, happening, at a general election.
Yes, the current situation sucks. And we need to think how to share the pain well. But we need to avoid a mistake analogous to suing for peace in World War II in 1941.
Now that's something that really was expensive and harmed the life chances and mental health of the young.
Rasmussen have Biden by five over Trump nationally.
FWIW
Reality is nobody would, the public outcry would be deafening...you want me to go back to work when deaths are still rising.....
Rasmussen:
Biden: 50% (-2)
Trump: 45% (+5)
All owa the place.
It's a nasty condition and this is a horrible virus. But one still has weigh up the costs and benefits. Can we really shut down a whole society and economy because maybe 2-5% of properly infected people (i.e. not just + cases) get symptoms that last longer than a month and an even smaller % have symptoms after several months?