One of the major problems I have with the circuit break lockdown is that the research was conducted by a professor of mathematics in isolation using a mathematical model of viral replication. As many people have said before, these models don't ever seem to survive contact with the real world and don't seem to take real people into account when being written.
People are predictably unpredictable and all of the mathematical models that support the 10pm closing times and other curfew like measures never seem to take this into account. I saw a calculation from a Tory person I know that said the 10pm closing time reduces contact hours by x many million hours and should therefore reduce the chances of transmission, the mathematical model didn't take into account city centres being flooded with loads of drunk people who have fit their evening's drinking into a shorter space of time then realising that milling about in the street is an option for them, or that it would create a transport crunch in big cities of drunk people less likely to observe any kind of social distancing.
These ever so smart professors and their mathematical models are going to cause the death of many thousands of viable businesses and millions of jobs, but they won't feel or see any of the consequences of their inadequate models.
The country has had enough of modellers.
Quite.
The thing is I work on predictive ML modelling on a daily basis, for my line of work it has good predictive value because markets are fairly rational and eventually the model will come good.
I can't even pretend to understand how many variables a model that has to deal with real people and behavioural science would have. Individual people are just so fucking unpredictable, especially in a "freedom loving country" like the UK. I genuinely couldn't imagine what would go into it and how it could even be trained.
Scientists and academics, especially those in pure subjects like maths or theoretical physics never seem to take real people into account and in this scenario it is real people who will be subjected to their models.
He's so image conscious you have to assume he's making a statement with the glasses: "I'm ready to lead."
Those glasses scream Clark Kent to me. Nice to think that there might be a superhero hiding behind them, but I'm not sure what message that sends. I secretly do good and you'll never know it was me? I pretend to be a wimp so as not to upset my boss?
Without them, Rishi's perfect insta-image sometimes gives the impression of a very able sixth former on work experience.
Care homes have been told they will be expected to make room for coronavirus patients who have been discharged from hospital, despite the policy being blamed for spread of the virus earlier in the year.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has sent a letter to providers urging them to prepare "isolation" rooms as the number of deaths continues to rise.
However the plans, seen by The Telegraph, have sparked a backlash from care home managers, who have said the notion of having Covid-positive patients in the same building as vulnerable residents is "laughable".
Sam Monaghan, the chief executive of the Methodist Homes care provider, said he was "highly concerned" about the prospect of people who had tested positive for coronavirus being admitted to care homes.
He added: "We would be highly concerned, as we were at the outbreak of Covid, in terms of people who had tested positive coming into closed communities where the risk of spread is considerable."
More than 15,000 care home residents have died of the virus, according to the latest Office for National Statistics data.
Block book some hotels for the next 6 months that would otherwise be struggling. Use them as temporary care homes for patients leaving hospital before they get to the mainstream care homes once they have been tested.
Some might question the wisdom of a Trump attack ad that mocks OAPs but I am not a super election winning genius so I will remain silent.
it's all he has left.
He's a petulant troll not a thinking politician.
That worked in 2016 because his lashing out hit a nerve with enough others. History isn't repeating itself though as he's not some genius that figured out a brilliant message last time and can repeat the trick now . . . he's just literally is the way he came across last time and he can't adapt.
It didn't work in 2016 though. That's the big thing - Trump succeeded despite himself. Trump won due to Hilary being an astoundingly awful campaigner. In WI, PA and MI the Dem vote plummeted but the GOP vote rose by fractions of a percent. As I keep banging on Trump won less votes in WI than Romney.
Trump winning covered up how terrible his campaign was.
This is like how Cameron thought Better Together was the perfect model for the Remain campaign. Just because it won doesn't mean it was good.
Indeed, but its worth thinking that turnout was down dramatically in those states - possibly in part precisely because people didn't take Trump seriously. So yes he he won despite being shit, but he also possibly won because people were lulled into a false sense of security that he couldn't win.
There's no such thinking this time. I don't know what the spreads are saying about turnout this year but if I was to put my money on that it would be for it to be well up. That is not going to play in Trump's favour.
Husband has just cooked dinner consisting of braised cauliflower and quinoa. God help me.
2020 just keeps on getting worse......
Seems a fairly extreme way of getting out of having to cook in future.
I’ve won that particular battle. Husband is - generally - a good cook, as are all 3 children. I only cook for pleasure when I feel like it. No more duty cooking for me. I did my stint for 20 years. The garden - when I get one - is my priority now.
One of the major problems I have with the circuit break lockdown is that the research was conducted by a professor of mathematics in isolation using a mathematical model of viral replication. As many people have said before, these models don't ever seem to survive contact with the real world and don't seem to take real people into account when being written.
People are predictably unpredictable and all of the mathematical models that support the 10pm closing times and other curfew like measures never seem to take this into account. I saw a calculation from a Tory person I know that said the 10pm closing time reduces contact hours by x many million hours and should therefore reduce the chances of transmission, the mathematical model didn't take into account city centres being flooded with loads of drunk people who have fit their evening's drinking into a shorter space of time then realising that milling about in the street is an option for them, or that it would create a transport crunch in big cities of drunk people less likely to observe any kind of social distancing.
These ever so smart professors and their mathematical models are going to cause the death of many thousands of viable businesses and millions of jobs, but they won't feel or see any of the consequences of their inadequate models.
The country has had enough of modellers.
Quite.
The thing is I work on predictive ML modelling on a daily basis, for my line of work it has good predictive value because markets are fairly rational and eventually the model will come good.
I can't even pretend to understand how many variables a model that has to deal with real people and behavioural science would have. Individual people are just so fucking unpredictable, especially in a "freedom loving country" like the UK. I genuinely couldn't imagine what would go into it and how it could even be trained.
Scientists and academics, especially those in pure subjects like maths or theoretical physics never seem to take real people into account and in this scenario it is real people who will be subjected to their models.
Out of curiosity I downloaded the Ferguson model from github. Not got very far with looking through it and my C++ is well rusty, but this note in the comments section struck me:
One of the major problems I have with the circuit break lockdown is that the research was conducted by a professor of mathematics in isolation using a mathematical model of viral replication. As many people have said before, these models don't ever seem to survive contact with the real world and don't seem to take real people into account when being written.
People are predictably unpredictable and all of the mathematical models that support the 10pm closing times and other curfew like measures never seem to take this into account. I saw a calculation from a Tory person I know that said the 10pm closing time reduces contact hours by x many million hours and should therefore reduce the chances of transmission, the mathematical model didn't take into account city centres being flooded with loads of drunk people who have fit their evening's drinking into a shorter space of time then realising that milling about in the street is an option for them, or that it would create a transport crunch in big cities of drunk people less likely to observe any kind of social distancing.
These ever so smart professors and their mathematical models are going to cause the death of many thousands of viable businesses and millions of jobs, but they won't feel or see any of the consequences of their inadequate models.
The theoretical models are uncalibrated and unvalidated .... how could it be otherwise?
This has never happened before, so there are no data on e.g., how shutting all the pubs at 10.00 pm will actually affect the R number of the pandemic.
The models are not complete nonsense, they may get the rough size of the effect right, but they are useless for actual prediction.
When SAGE says "closing all schools could reduce R by 0.2-0.5" it is probably better than guesswork, but only a little better.
Care homes have been told they will be expected to make room for coronavirus patients who have been discharged from hospital, despite the policy being blamed for spread of the virus earlier in the year.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has sent a letter to providers urging them to prepare "isolation" rooms as the number of deaths continues to rise.
However the plans, seen by The Telegraph, have sparked a backlash from care home managers, who have said the notion of having Covid-positive patients in the same building as vulnerable residents is "laughable".
Sam Monaghan, the chief executive of the Methodist Homes care provider, said he was "highly concerned" about the prospect of people who had tested positive for coronavirus being admitted to care homes.
He added: "We would be highly concerned, as we were at the outbreak of Covid, in terms of people who had tested positive coming into closed communities where the risk of spread is considerable."
More than 15,000 care home residents have died of the virus, according to the latest Office for National Statistics data.
Block book some hotels for the next 6 months that would otherwise be struggling. Use them as temporary care homes for patients leaving hospital before they get to the mainstream care homes once they have been tested.
Sounds fairly straightforward to implement?
Not a bad idea but not so straightforward I'd imagine. Staffing and equipment will be the issue would be my guess.
People who are in a care home can't just be checked in to a hotel room and picked up the next day. There's a reason they're in a care home, they have needs.
Care homes have been told they will be expected to make room for coronavirus patients who have been discharged from hospital, despite the policy being blamed for spread of the virus earlier in the year.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has sent a letter to providers urging them to prepare "isolation" rooms as the number of deaths continues to rise.
However the plans, seen by The Telegraph, have sparked a backlash from care home managers, who have said the notion of having Covid-positive patients in the same building as vulnerable residents is "laughable".
Sam Monaghan, the chief executive of the Methodist Homes care provider, said he was "highly concerned" about the prospect of people who had tested positive for coronavirus being admitted to care homes.
He added: "We would be highly concerned, as we were at the outbreak of Covid, in terms of people who had tested positive coming into closed communities where the risk of spread is considerable."
More than 15,000 care home residents have died of the virus, according to the latest Office for National Statistics data.
Block book some hotels for the next 6 months that would otherwise be struggling. Use them as temporary care homes for patients leaving hospital before they get to the mainstream care homes once they have been tested.
Sounds fairly straightforward to implement?
Not a bad idea but not so straightforward I'd imagine. Staffing and equipment will be the issue would be my guess.
People who are in a care home can't just be checked in to a hotel room and picked up the next day. There's a reason they're in a care home, they have needs.
We have 750k registered volunteers, only a small fraction of whom have been asked to do anything, millions on furlough and 1.5m unemployed. The govt promised us we were mobilising on a war scale footing in March, but cant find the resource to look after however many people move from hospitals to care homes.
It is tragic to have squandered the gains of the first lockdown for a package holiday and a cheap meal out.
That's not what's happened to my nearest big town, Nottingham. Rates were low in mid-September as they had been all summer (and indeed relatively low in the peak of first wave).
Some might question the wisdom of a Trump attack ad that mocks OAPs but I am not a super election winning genius so I will remain silent.
it's all he has left.
He's a petulant troll not a thinking politician.
That worked in 2016 because his lashing out hit a nerve with enough others. History isn't repeating itself though as he's not some genius that figured out a brilliant message last time and can repeat the trick now . . . he's just literally is the way he came across last time and he can't adapt.
It didn't work in 2016 though. That's the big thing - Trump succeeded despite himself. Trump won due to Hilary being an astoundingly awful campaigner. In WI, PA and MI the Dem vote plummeted but the GOP vote rose by fractions of a percent. As I keep banging on Trump won less votes in WI than Romney.
Trump winning covered up how terrible his campaign was.
This is like how Cameron thought Better Together was the perfect model for the Remain campaign. Just because it won doesn't mean it was good.
Indeed, but its worth thinking that turnout was down dramatically in those states - possibly in part precisely because people didn't take Trump seriously. So yes he he won despite being shit, but he also possibly won because people were lulled into a false sense of security that he couldn't win.
There's no such thinking this time. I don't know what the spreads are saying about turnout this year but if I was to put my money on that it would be for it to be well up. That is not going to play in Trump's favour.
Turnout in 2016 was not that low, it was 55.7% which was actually higher than the 54.9% it was in 2012 even if slightly lower than the 58.2% in 2008 and the 56.7% in 2004.
The lowest turnout in recent decades in the US was 1996 when only 49% of Americans bothered to vote for Bill Clinton or Bob Dole
My fear is, looking at the stats - cases, deaths, ICU admits - we are AT BEST a week behind France. So that shite is coming across the Channel.
Last spring we had two weeks notice, we could have acted but didn’t. This autumn we appear to have not learned the lesson.
This time we had MONTHS notice. Copy the best of Germany and Sweden, consistent rules, proper test and trace, be ready for a marathon not a sprint.
It's a total government failure. The fact that many other European governments, from Holland to Czechia, from Belgium to Spain and France, have also lost control, is no excuse. HMG fucked up. Again. And this includes the scientists not just the politicians.
Guardian reporting government want pre-Christmas lockdown at unis. 2 weeks they have to remain on campus with no in person teaching.
What do they mean by “on campus”?
Interesting question. I suspect a huge amount of students do not live on, or anywhere near a campus
There is a significant difference between 1st Years (and possibly Final Years), who will be on campus (ie in University Halls of Residence) and other who will largely not be.
Local somewhat-better-than-anecdata.
Speaking to a letting agent in Nottingham who deals with housing for 500-1000 students, overwhelmingly not First Years, the COVID rates are significantly different by year.
Nottingham numbers are very significantly due to Freshers at the University of Nottingham going relatively beserk, and a lesser extent at the Nottingham Trent University.
One issue in Halls is that the groups living together are far larger. In student houses it is typically 4-6 per house. Halls are more like 10-30 per kitchen.
Newark and Sherwood is interesting. A majority of current cases are prison inmates.
Just how local should this be?
Should 50 million people be restricted because the Mayor of Manchester is jumping up and down?
It is driven by SAGE not Burnham.
Not so. Burnham was opposing days before that was released. I think he's politicking.
Hancock is useless - he doesn't understand hospitality although he likes a glass of wine in a subsidised Parliament bar - he's never been to a pub in his life.
My fear is, looking at the stats - cases, deaths, ICU admits - we are AT BEST a week behind France. So that shite is coming across the Channel.
Last spring we had two weeks notice, we could have acted but didn’t. This autumn we appear to have not learned the lesson.
This time we had MONTHS notice. Copy the best of Germany and Sweden, consistent rules, proper test and trace, be ready for a marathon not a sprint.
It's a total government failure. The fact that many other European governments, from Holland to Czechia, from Belgium to Spain and France, have also lost control, is no excuse. HMG fucked up. Again. And this includes the scientists not just the politicians.
Excellent post.
When are we going to seriously look at Sweden? I fear it is too much for the British State to accept that there are lessons to learn.
My fear is, looking at the stats - cases, deaths, ICU admits - we are AT BEST a week behind France. So that shite is coming across the Channel.
Last spring we had two weeks notice, we could have acted but didn’t. This autumn we appear to have not learned the lesson.
This time we had MONTHS notice. Copy the best of Germany and Sweden, consistent rules, proper test and trace, be ready for a marathon not a sprint.
It's a total government failure. The fact that many other European governments, from Holland to Czechia, from Belgium to Spain and France, have also lost control, is no excuse. HMG fucked up. Again. And this includes the scientists not just the politicians.
Agreed minimum 2 years of more lockdowns, 200,000 dead - but it would be worse under Starmer!
Guardian reporting government want pre-Christmas lockdown at unis. 2 weeks they have to remain on campus with no in person teaching.
What do they mean by “on campus”?
Interesting question. I suspect a huge amount of students do not live on, or anywhere near a campus
There is a significant difference between 1st Years (and possibly Final Years), who will be on campus (ie in University Halls of Residence) and other who will largely not be.
Local somewhat-better-than-anecdata.
Speaking to a letting agent in Nottingham who deals with housing for 500-1000 students, overwhelmingly not First Years, the COVID rates are significantly different by year.
Nottingham numbers are very significantly due to Freshers at the University of Nottingham going relatively beserk, and a lesser extent at the Nottingham Trent University.
One issue in Halls is that the groups living together are far larger. In student houses it is typically 4-6 per house. Halls are more like 10-30 per kitchen.
Newark and Sherwood is interesting. A majority of current cases are prison inmates.
Just how local should this be?
Should 50 million people be restricted because the Mayor of Manchester is jumping up and down?
It is driven by SAGE not Burnham.
Not so. Burnham was opposing days before that was released. I think he's politicking.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
My fear is, looking at the stats - cases, deaths, ICU admits - we are AT BEST a week behind France. So that shite is coming across the Channel.
Last spring we had two weeks notice, we could have acted but didn’t. This autumn we appear to have not learned the lesson.
This time we had MONTHS notice. Copy the best of Germany and Sweden, consistent rules, proper test and trace, be ready for a marathon not a sprint.
It's a total government failure. The fact that many other European governments, from Holland to Czechia, from Belgium to Spain and France, have also lost control, is no excuse. HMG fucked up. Again. And this includes the scientists not just the politicians.
Excellent post.
When are we going to seriously look at Sweden? I fear it is too much for the British State to accept that there are lessons to learn.
I think we are looking at Sweden. Though Sweden as it really is, not as some pretend it is.
We're not rushing in to the absurd "two weeks" lockdown that we all know would never last two weeks, instead the Government is seeking to find a balance that can be lasted in for months knowing this is a marathon not a sprint.
The marathon from here is finding a way to get R to 1 and stay there. The lockdown for a fortnight brigade are doing the opposite.
Tomorrows front page of the Mail is massively anti-lockdown, couple of days ago its was Boris is a fanny, why won't he do a proper lockdown....is seanT their editor these days?
Care homes have been told they will be expected to make room for coronavirus patients who have been discharged from hospital, despite the policy being blamed for spread of the virus earlier in the year.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has sent a letter to providers urging them to prepare "isolation" rooms as the number of deaths continues to rise.
However the plans, seen by The Telegraph, have sparked a backlash from care home managers, who have said the notion of having Covid-positive patients in the same building as vulnerable residents is "laughable".
Sam Monaghan, the chief executive of the Methodist Homes care provider, said he was "highly concerned" about the prospect of people who had tested positive for coronavirus being admitted to care homes.
He added: "We would be highly concerned, as we were at the outbreak of Covid, in terms of people who had tested positive coming into closed communities where the risk of spread is considerable."
More than 15,000 care home residents have died of the virus, according to the latest Office for National Statistics data.
FFS. It was an obvious blunder six months ago. Not to have worked out how to provide separate isolation facilities for those infected, even for a single vulnerable segment of the population, beggars belief.
As @MaxPB has pointed out, ad nauseam, rapidly isolating the infected is perhaps the single largest and most easily achievable improvement in getting on top of this thing.
Guardian reporting government want pre-Christmas lockdown at unis. 2 weeks they have to remain on campus with no in person teaching.
What do they mean by “on campus”?
Interesting question. I suspect a huge amount of students do not live on, or anywhere near a campus
There is a significant difference between 1st Years (and possibly Final Years), who will be on campus (ie in University Halls of Residence) and other who will largely not be.
Local somewhat-better-than-anecdata.
Speaking to a letting agent in Nottingham who deals with housing for 500-1000 students, overwhelmingly not First Years, the COVID rates are significantly different by year.
Nottingham numbers are very significantly due to Freshers at the University of Nottingham going relatively beserk, and a lesser extent at the Nottingham Trent University.
One issue in Halls is that the groups living together are far larger. In student houses it is typically 4-6 per house. Halls are more like 10-30 per kitchen.
Newark and Sherwood is interesting. A majority of current cases are prison inmates.
Just how local should this be?
Should 50 million people be restricted because the Mayor of Manchester is jumping up and down?
It is driven by SAGE not Burnham.
Not so. Burnham was opposing days before that was released. I think he's politicking.
As far as I can see Mr Starmer's about turn was even more abrupt.
SAGE recommended national circuit breaks on the 21 September. I presume that is what you are referring to with restricting 50m?
Of course Burnham is playing politics as are all politicians, Tory, Labour, LD, SNP, Green alike, it is their job. Some of it is counter productive but Burnham will see it as standing up for his constituents. He is not opposed to local lockdowns but wants cash for businesses impacted to protect jobs - not to lock up 50m.
A poster on here this evening has already made the fair point - when rates were high in London we got a national lockdown with very strong govt financial support, when rates are high in the north, its a local lockdown with minimal govt support. It is the job of northern mayors to stand up for their regions, and ultimately the govt can overrule them if they want anyway.
That Hunter Biden story may not be anything but if Twitter and Facebook censor discussion about it that plays into Trump's hands.
Number of voters who will decide their votes based on Hunter Freaking Biden is somewhere south of 0.01%.
IF in the final weeks before EDay, the sexting scandal re: NC US Senate Democratic nominee is NOT denting his lead over the GOP incumbent, then what grounds are there to expect that Trumpsky will benefit from re-flogging yet another political dead horse? Again, answer is close to zero.
If France and much of the rest of Europe goes back into lockdown, but the UK doesn't and the Government manages to get R back to 1 with just the 3 Tier System . . . I wonder how many people will be willing to give credit where its due?
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
The Biden story is something, because it connects hin directly to his son's dodgy directorships....but compared to Team Trump, it pales into insignificance.
The Biden story is certainly something because he flat said he never discussed his sons business dealings but if he met one of his son's business associates then that would strain credulity.
But ultimately it is a process stories are process stories are boring as shit.
True . The story is already falling apart . The bloke who gave the computer to Giuliani copied the hard drive which is illegal and his interview shows him to be an unhinged Trump fan ( aren’t they all ) who thought he’d get bumped off by dark forces and is full of contradictions.
No one cares about some Ukraine story no matter how much the Trump groupies want people to .
Hancock is useless - he doesn't understand hospitality although he likes a glass of wine in a subsidised Parliament bar - he's never been to a pub in his life.
But Hindsight LAB won't do it either
Doctor friend and senior nurse booked posh restaurant for their 30th anniversary some weeks ago. Only 2 covers, very swish. You've guessed it. Matt Hancock at the other table. Put a downer on proceedings.
Guardian reporting government want pre-Christmas lockdown at unis. 2 weeks they have to remain on campus with no in person teaching.
What do they mean by “on campus”?
Interesting question. I suspect a huge amount of students do not live on, or anywhere near a campus
There is a significant difference between 1st Years (and possibly Final Years), who will be on campus (ie in University Halls of Residence) and other who will largely not be.
Local somewhat-better-than-anecdata.
Speaking to a letting agent in Nottingham who deals with housing for 500-1000 students, overwhelmingly not First Years, the COVID rates are significantly different by year.
Nottingham numbers are very significantly due to Freshers at the University of Nottingham going relatively beserk, and a lesser extent at the Nottingham Trent University.
One issue in Halls is that the groups living together are far larger. In student houses it is typically 4-6 per house. Halls are more like 10-30 per kitchen.
Newark and Sherwood is interesting. A majority of current cases are prison inmates.
Just how local should this be?
Should 50 million people be restricted because the Mayor of Manchester is jumping up and down?
It is driven by SAGE not Burnham.
Not so. Burnham was opposing days before that was released. I think he's politicking.
As far as I can see Mr Starmer's about turn was even more abrupt.
SAGE recommended national circuit breaks on the 21 September. I presume that is what you are referring to with restricting 50m?
Of course Burnham is playing politics as are all politicians, Tory, Labour, LD, SNP, Green alike, it is their job. Some of it is counter productive but Burnham will see it as standing up for his constituents. He is not opposed to local lockdowns but wants cash for businesses impacted to protect jobs - not to lock up 50m.
A poster on here this evening has already made the fair point - when rates were high in London we got a national lockdown with very strong govt financial support, when rates are high in the north, its a local lockdown with minimal govt support. It is the job of northern mayors to stand up for their regions, and ultimately the govt can overrule them if they want anyway.
The government bailed out banks in 2009. Banks who were largely responsible for the mess they got into.
Now the government won’t bail out businesses who are in trouble through no fault of their own.
One of the major problems I have with the circuit break lockdown is that the research was conducted by a professor of mathematics in isolation using a mathematical model of viral replication. As many people have said before, these models don't ever seem to survive contact with the real world and don't seem to take real people into account when being written.
People are predictably unpredictable and all of the mathematical models that support the 10pm closing times and other curfew like measures never seem to take this into account. I saw a calculation from a Tory person I know that said the 10pm closing time reduces contact hours by x many million hours and should therefore reduce the chances of transmission, the mathematical model didn't take into account city centres being flooded with loads of drunk people who have fit their evening's drinking into a shorter space of time then realising that milling about in the street is an option for them, or that it would create a transport crunch in big cities of drunk people less likely to observe any kind of social distancing.
These ever so smart professors and their mathematical models are going to cause the death of many thousands of viable businesses and millions of jobs, but they won't feel or see any of the consequences of their inadequate models.
You're not wrong.
But as someone who builds models (not this kind, to be fair, but still trying to predict the essentially unpredictable), you have no choice but to make simplifications and assumptions to make the analysis tractable. It's mixing the metaphor but there's a reason the old spherical chicken in a vacuum physics joke exists.
It's like economic forecasting. It's nigh-on impossible to do accurately and if you could do it you'd probably be doing something better anyway, but you still have to try. The alternative is having no feel for the issue at all and pulling stuff out your ass, as opposed to something that is probably wrong but still gives you a steer as long as you understand what the assumptions, weaknesses and limitations of it are.
One of the problems, as was discussed earlier, is that our newspaper and TV journalists don't even know basic stats, let alone how to understand how to interpret a model, so they can't interpret the results appropriately or challenge the developers the right way. Which only leads to them thinking a model is somehow a perfect prediction etc.
The Biden story is something, because it connects hin directly to his son's dodgy directorships....but compared to Team Trump, it pales into insignificance.
The Biden story is certainly something because he flat said he never discussed his sons business dealings but if he met one of his son's business associates then that would strain credulity.
But ultimately it is a process stories are process stories are boring as shit.
True . The story is already falling apart . The bloke who gave the computer to Giuliani copied the hard drive which is illegal and his interview shows him to be an unhinged Trump fan ( aren’t they all ) who thought he’d get bumped off by dark forces and is full of contradictions.
No one cares about some Ukraine story no matter how much the Trump groupies want people to .
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Good post - I do tend to agree with your analysis, but feel (or is that hope) that your being slightly pessimistic regarding the tsunami of corpses you speak of.
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
He wanted a 2000 person mosque in Piccadilly Circus
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Except...
There's reasonable evidence that local public health teams can do a good-enough job of contact tracing. By being on the ground, they can spot the patterns, they know who to talk to in the communities and people are more likely to co-operate with them than with a random message from a call centre. It's low-tech and, let's face it, boring, but it's an obvious improvement to make. (And, to be fair, that pivot does seem to be happening.)
Oh, and add a decent triage on testing, so that the system isn't bumping up against capacity all the time. And, as @Max points out, make sure that those who need to isolate can do so and do do so.
Should that have been done by now? Of course. Can it be done in a 2 - 3 week "closure for system upgrades"? I don't know, but maybe.
We're all expecting Dems to vote early and by post compared to Reps, aren't we? Let me take you to sunny Wisconsin.
R won Waukesha County, WI roughly 65-35 or thereabouts in 2016, ignoring 3rd parties. It's run-of-the-mill American suburbia, straight out of an Updike novel. Translating the national polling, you'd expect to see R60-D40, and maybe 50-50 at this stage once you allow for the Dem-votes-early phenomenon.
But the TargetEarly figures show Reps winning somewhere between 70-30 and 90-10 so far. TE figures aren't votes, of course, they are counts of people who have declared their affiliation and returned a vote, so it can't say which way the indis went, hence the uncertainty. It does suggest that Reps have done a lot of voter reg and GOTV round that way though.
If you play around with the TE site you can see that urban WI is going more Dem, rural WI is going more Rep, and Rep might just be gaining in suburbia too.
What you need to know - Biden did not push out a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son, The Washington Post confirms - The NY Post’s story had several red flags and holes that raise questions about its authenticity, according to journalists
The Biden story is something, because it connects hin directly to his son's dodgy directorships....but compared to Team Trump, it pales into insignificance.
The Biden story is certainly something because he flat said he never discussed his sons business dealings but if he met one of his son's business associates then that would strain credulity.
But ultimately it is a process stories are process stories are boring as shit.
The irony is fantastic. If it was a story with the same details but about Trump we would be hearing nothing else but how it showed him unfit to be President etc etc.
Both stories ramp up false stories and both are wrong when they do it.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Again, if you have a sufficiently large number of rapid tests, you don’t need a track & trace program. You just isolate everyone who tests positive.
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Good post - I do tend to agree with your analysis, but feel (or is that hope) that your being slightly pessimistic regarding the tsunami of corpses you speak of.
It's the logical outcome of societal collapse following national bankruptcy. There's no value in saving the old from Covid if they then die of hypothermia or starvation once the electricity goes off and their pensions stop being paid.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Again, if you have a sufficiently large number of rapid tests, you don’t need a track & trace program. You just isolate everyone who tests positive.
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
They could get ten thousand highly paid consultants to look into it for a thousand years. We are never getting to millions of tests a day, all processed and results sent out within hours. It's a complete fantasy.
Accept the deaths, but try to minimize them. Let the VERY old people snuff it, sadly.
Protect the younger and more vulnerable: life deserving of life, but do not cripple the economy to do it.
Let everyone younger and at-risk make their own choices, give them places to quarantine and isolate, turn the many empty hotels into isolation units. GET THE FUCKING TEST AND TRACE WORKING. Use the Nightingales to deal with the excess ill and dying, that's what they are there for.
And then let everyone else go back to work, and play, with masks and social distancing where possible. Keep the economy from self-destructing.
This is, now, the only option. A mix of Sweden and Germany.
Guardian reporting government want pre-Christmas lockdown at unis. 2 weeks they have to remain on campus with no in person teaching.
What do they mean by “on campus”?
Interesting question. I suspect a huge amount of students do not live on, or anywhere near a campus
There is a significant difference between 1st Years (and possibly Final Years), who will be on campus (ie in University Halls of Residence) and other who will largely not be.
Local somewhat-better-than-anecdata.
Speaking to a letting agent in Nottingham who deals with housing for 500-1000 students, overwhelmingly not First Years, the COVID rates are significantly different by year.
Nottingham numbers are very significantly due to Freshers at the University of Nottingham going relatively beserk, and a lesser extent at the Nottingham Trent University.
One issue in Halls is that the groups living together are far larger. In student houses it is typically 4-6 per house. Halls are more like 10-30 per kitchen.
Newark and Sherwood is interesting. A majority of current cases are prison inmates.
Just how local should this be?
Should 50 million people be restricted because the Mayor of Manchester is jumping up and down?
It is driven by SAGE not Burnham.
Not so. Burnham was opposing days before that was released. I think he's politicking.
As far as I can see Mr Starmer's about turn was even more abrupt.
SAGE recommended national circuit breaks on the 21 September. I presume that is what you are referring to with restricting 50m?
Of course Burnham is playing politics as are all politicians, Tory, Labour, LD, SNP, Green alike, it is their job. Some of it is counter productive but Burnham will see it as standing up for his constituents. He is not opposed to local lockdowns but wants cash for businesses impacted to protect jobs - not to lock up 50m.
A poster on here this evening has already made the fair point - when rates were high in London we got a national lockdown with very strong govt financial support, when rates are high in the north, its a local lockdown with minimal govt support. It is the job of northern mayors to stand up for their regions, and ultimately the govt can overrule them if they want anyway.
The government bailed out banks in 2009. Banks who were largely responsible for the mess they got into.
Now the government won’t bail out businesses who are in trouble through no fault of their own.
That’s the message which will be remembered.
We really don't do capitalism.
The banks in 2009 should have been rescued.
The bankers should have lost their shirts. I mean that. Om JSA.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Again, if you have a sufficiently large number of rapid tests, you don’t need a track & trace program. You just isolate everyone who tests positive.
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
Even from a standing start we could probably make a system as I have outlined work within a month without the need for another lockdown. It's something that also builds up over time. You wouldn't need 600,000 hotel rooms organised on day 1. Even if we managed to get half of people to isolate properly it would be a huge win and bring the R down to below 1 fairly quickly. Wrist bracelet tracking and hotel rooms are the answer, it actually makes me very mad that no one in government has the creativity or balls to do it.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Again, if you have a sufficiently large number of rapid tests, you don’t need a track & trace program. You just isolate everyone who tests positive.
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
They could get ten thousand highly paid consultants to look into it for a thousand years. We are never getting to millions of tests a day, all processed and results sent out within hours. It's a complete fantasy.
We don't need to, a hotel based isolation system works with the testing system we've already got.
One of the major problems I have with the circuit break lockdown is that the research was conducted by a professor of mathematics in isolation using a mathematical model of viral replication. As many people have said before, these models don't ever seem to survive contact with the real world and don't seem to take real people into account when being written.
People are predictably unpredictable and all of the mathematical models that support the 10pm closing times and other curfew like measures never seem to take this into account. I saw a calculation from a Tory person I know that said the 10pm closing time reduces contact hours by x many million hours and should therefore reduce the chances of transmission, the mathematical model didn't take into account city centres being flooded with loads of drunk people who have fit their evening's drinking into a shorter space of time then realising that milling about in the street is an option for them, or that it would create a transport crunch in big cities of drunk people less likely to observe any kind of social distancing.
These ever so smart professors and their mathematical models are going to cause the death of many thousands of viable businesses and millions of jobs, but they won't feel or see any of the consequences of their inadequate models.
The country has had enough of modellers.
Quite.
The thing is I work on predictive ML modelling on a daily basis, for my line of work it has good predictive value because markets are fairly rational and eventually the model will come good.
I can't even pretend to understand how many variables a model that has to deal with real people and behavioural science would have. Individual people are just so fucking unpredictable, especially in a "freedom loving country" like the UK. I genuinely couldn't imagine what would go into it and how it could even be trained.
Scientists and academics, especially those in pure subjects like maths or theoretical physics never seem to take real people into account and in this scenario it is real people who will be subjected to their models.
Agreed. Modelling the human interactions of an entire country as you do things to it which have no precedent would seem to be a fairly futile task.
A great deal easier to look at the particular effect of individual direct interventions like mandatory isolation of the infected.
A 10pm pub curfew just doesn’t fall into that category. And the data we have on transmission in various settings simply isn’t good enough to model stuff like that.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Except...
There's reasonable evidence that local public health teams can do a good-enough job of contact tracing. By being on the ground, they can spot the patterns, they know who to talk to in the communities and people are more likely to co-operate with them than with a random message from a call centre. It's low-tech and, let's face it, boring, but it's an obvious improvement to make. (And, to be fair, that pivot does seem to be happening.)
Oh, and add a decent triage on testing, so that the system isn't bumping up against capacity all the time. And, as @Max points out, make sure that those who need to isolate can do so and do do so.
Should that have been done by now? Of course. Can it be done in a 2 - 3 week "closure for system upgrades"? I don't know, but maybe.
Not a prayer. We shut down, it does no good, it's extended and extended and extended until next Summer. If it does any good and the restrictions are lifted, the cases will start to go up again and we shut down again in panic.
Once lockdowns start up again they ain't stopping. It becomes a matter of sunk costs. So much effort has already gone into the strategy that it has to keep being pursued because to change tack would imply that it had been the biggest waste of time and money in history. We'd be stuck with it until the pandemic was over or until the state itself collapsed under the strain.
What you need to know - Biden did not push out a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son, The Washington Post confirms - The NY Post’s story had several red flags and holes that raise questions about its authenticity, according to journalists
Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos vs Rupert Murdoch
Actually the only question we need to know is did Biden meet him or not?
Because if he did, via his son, then there is a good chance Biden lies
We're all expecting Dems to vote early and by post compared to Reps, aren't we? Let me take you to sunny Wisconsin.
R won Waukesha County, WI roughly 65-35 or thereabouts in 2016, ignoring 3rd parties. It's run-of-the-mill American suburbia, straight out of an Updike novel. Translating the national polling, you'd expect to see R60-D40, and maybe 50-50 at this stage once you allow for the Dem-votes-early phenomenon.
But the TargetEarly figures show Reps winning somewhere between 70-30 and 90-10 so far. TE figures aren't votes, of course, they are counts of people who have declared their affiliation and returned a vote, so it can't say which way the indis went, hence the uncertainty. It does suggest that Reps have done a lot of voter reg and GOTV round that way though.
If you play around with the TE site you can see that urban WI is going more Dem, rural WI is going more Rep, and Rep might just be gaining in suburbia too.
R win Wisconsin is 11/4.
While I was nerdily looking at this it appears the leaders of the country's major cities decided they want to revert to Soviet levels of economic activity again. Nice work, idiots.
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
Clearly you don't like Khan. But to suggest he doesn't get London is absurd. Born in Tooting in 1970, educated at the local comp, and as far as I can see has never lived anywhere except London. Your observation is at best patronising. Disagree with his policies by all means, but don't say he doesn't understand London.
Accept the deaths, but try to minimize them. Let the VERY old people snuff it, sadly.
Protect the younger and more vulnerable: life deserving of life, but do not cripple the economy to do it.
Let everyone younger and at-risk make their own choices, give them places to quarantine and isolate, turn the many empty hotels into isolation units. GET THE FUCKING TEST AND TRACE WORKING. Use the Nightingales to deal with the excess ill and dying, that's what they are there for.
And then let everyone else go back to work, and play, with masks and social distancing where possible. Keep the economy from self-destructing.
This is, now, the only option. A mix of Sweden and Germany.
This is what Sumption has been saying since March or April.
Some might question the wisdom of a Trump attack ad that mocks OAPs but I am not a super election winning genius so I will remain silent.
it's all he has left.
He's a petulant troll not a thinking politician.
That worked in 2016 because his lashing out hit a nerve with enough others. History isn't repeating itself though as he's not some genius that figured out a brilliant message last time and can repeat the trick now . . . he's just literally is the way he came across last time and he can't adapt.
It didn't work in 2016 though. That's the big thing - Trump succeeded despite himself. Trump won due to Hilary being an astoundingly awful campaigner. In WI, PA and MI the Dem vote plummeted but the GOP vote rose by fractions of a percent. As I keep banging on Trump won less votes in WI than Romney.
Trump winning covered up how terrible his campaign was.
This is like how Cameron thought Better Together was the perfect model for the Remain campaign. Just because it won doesn't mean it was good.
Indeed, but its worth thinking that turnout was down dramatically in those states - possibly in part precisely because people didn't take Trump seriously. So yes he he won despite being shit, but he also possibly won because people were lulled into a false sense of security that he couldn't win.
There's no such thinking this time. I don't know what the spreads are saying about turnout this year but if I was to put my money on that it would be for it to be well up. That is not going to play in Trump's favour.
Turnout in 2016 was not that low, it was 55.7% which was actually higher than the 54.9% it was in 2012 even if slightly lower than the 58.2% in 2008 and the 56.7% in 2004.
The lowest turnout in recent decades in the US was 1996 when only 49% of Americans bothered to vote for Bill Clinton or Bob Dole
(Ah hem, you're forgetting Ross Perot. Only about 45% of people of voting age went for Clinton or Dole.)
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
Clearly you don't like Khan. But to suggest he doesn't get London is absurd. Born in Tooting in 1970, educated at the local comp, and as far as I can see has never lived anywhere except London. Your observation is at best patronising. Disagree with his policies by all means, but don't say he doesn't understand London.
Some might question the wisdom of a Trump attack ad that mocks OAPs but I am not a super election winning genius so I will remain silent.
it's all he has left.
He's a petulant troll not a thinking politician.
That worked in 2016 because his lashing out hit a nerve with enough others. History isn't repeating itself though as he's not some genius that figured out a brilliant message last time and can repeat the trick now . . . he's just literally is the way he came across last time and he can't adapt.
It didn't work in 2016 though. That's the big thing - Trump succeeded despite himself. Trump won due to Hilary being an astoundingly awful campaigner. In WI, PA and MI the Dem vote plummeted but the GOP vote rose by fractions of a percent. As I keep banging on Trump won less votes in WI than Romney.
Trump winning covered up how terrible his campaign was.
This is like how Cameron thought Better Together was the perfect model for the Remain campaign. Just because it won doesn't mean it was good.
Indeed, but its worth thinking that turnout was down dramatically in those states - possibly in part precisely because people didn't take Trump seriously. So yes he he won despite being shit, but he also possibly won because people were lulled into a false sense of security that he couldn't win.
There's no such thinking this time. I don't know what the spreads are saying about turnout this year but if I was to put my money on that it would be for it to be well up. That is not going to play in Trump's favour.
Turnout in 2016 was not that low, it was 55.7% which was actually higher than the 54.9% it was in 2012 even if slightly lower than the 58.2% in 2008 and the 56.7% in 2004.
The lowest turnout in recent decades in the US was 1996 when only 49% of Americans bothered to vote for Bill Clinton or Bob Dole
(Ah hem, you're forgetting Ross Perot. Only about 45% of people of voting age went for Clinton or Dole.)
Which just makes the point even more, though as ideologically there was not actually a vast difference between Clinton and Dole anyway, both on the moderate wing of their parties and Ross Perot while a deficit hawk was not miles away from the mainstream either 1996 was probably 'the least consequential US election of our lifetimes' which makes a change from all the rhetoric about this election and many Americans therefore could not be bothered to get up from their sofas
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
Clearly you don't like Khan. But to suggest he doesn't get London is absurd. Born in Tooting in 1970, educated at the local comp, and as far as I can see has never lived anywhere except London. Your observation is at best patronising. Disagree with his policies by all means, but don't say he doesn't understand London.
He doesn't understand non-Muslim London on a basic emotional level
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Again, if you have a sufficiently large number of rapid tests, you don’t need a track & trace program. You just isolate everyone who tests positive.
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
Even from a standing start we could probably make a system as I have outlined work within a month without the need for another lockdown. It's something that also builds up over time. You wouldn't need 600,000 hotel rooms organised on day 1. Even if we managed to get half of people to isolate properly it would be a huge win and bring the R down to below 1 fairly quickly. Wrist bracelet tracking and hotel rooms are the answer, it actually makes me very mad that no one in government has the creativity or balls to do it.
Agreed. As I said, your scheme is probably the most quickly achievable, as all it requires is funding and a determination to do it.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Again, if you have a sufficiently large number of rapid tests, you don’t need a track & trace program. You just isolate everyone who tests positive.
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
They could get ten thousand highly paid consultants to look into it for a thousand years. We are never getting to millions of tests a day, all processed and results sent out within hours. It's a complete fantasy.
We don't need to, a hotel based isolation system works with the testing system we've already got.
We are running at nearly 20,000 confirmed cases a day right now. That's not something with which a "hotel-based isolation system" can cope.
One of the major problems I have with the circuit break lockdown is that the research was conducted by a professor of mathematics in isolation using a mathematical model of viral replication. As many people have said before, these models don't ever seem to survive contact with the real world and don't seem to take real people into account when being written.
People are predictably unpredictable and all of the mathematical models that support the 10pm closing times and other curfew like measures never seem to take this into account. I saw a calculation from a Tory person I know that said the 10pm closing time reduces contact hours by x many million hours and should therefore reduce the chances of transmission, the mathematical model didn't take into account city centres being flooded with loads of drunk people who have fit their evening's drinking into a shorter space of time then realising that milling about in the street is an option for them, or that it would create a transport crunch in big cities of drunk people less likely to observe any kind of social distancing.
These ever so smart professors and their mathematical models are going to cause the death of many thousands of viable businesses and millions of jobs, but they won't feel or see any of the consequences of their inadequate models.
The country has had enough of modellers.
Quite.
The thing is I work on predictive ML modelling on a daily basis, for my line of work it has good predictive value because markets are fairly rational and eventually the model will come good.
I can't even pretend to understand how many variables a model that has to deal with real people and behavioural science would have. Individual people are just so fucking unpredictable, especially in a "freedom loving country" like the UK. I genuinely couldn't imagine what would go into it and how it could even be trained.
Scientists and academics, especially those in pure subjects like maths or theoretical physics never seem to take real people into account and in this scenario it is real people who will be subjected to their models.
Agreed. Modelling the human interactions of an entire country as you do things to it which have no precedent would seem to be a fairly futile task.
A great deal easier to look at the particular effect of individual direct interventions like mandatory isolation of the infected.
A 10pm pub curfew just doesn’t fall into that category. And the data we have on transmission in various settings simply isn’t good enough to model stuff like that.
Last week on one evening Daughter’s place was full - all tables being used by people happily eating and drinking. In a previous life plenty of the people there would have stayed until the wee small hours of the morning. At 10 pm everyone left - to go to a house party in the village.
The curfew achieves nothing other than to strangle businesses.
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
Clearly you don't like Khan. But to suggest he doesn't get London is absurd. Born in Tooting in 1970, educated at the local comp, and as far as I can see has never lived anywhere except London. Your observation is at best patronising. Disagree with his policies by all means, but don't say he doesn't understand London.
I am London. He doesn't get London
If you are London why did you elect a man who doesn't get you?
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
He wanted a 2000 person mosque in Piccadilly Circus
Oh well, he clearly can't be a Londoner then. Bloody foreigners.... Bring back the Pearly Queen, more Beefeaters, the Krays and Oswald Moseley to get back to a proper London.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Again, if you have a sufficiently large number of rapid tests, you don’t need a track & trace program. You just isolate everyone who tests positive.
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
They could get ten thousand highly paid consultants to look into it for a thousand years. We are never getting to millions of tests a day, all processed and results sent out within hours. It's a complete fantasy.
With rapid antigen tests, there is no processing, or sending out of results. You take them and watch for a result - like a pregnancy test.
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Again, if you have a sufficiently large number of rapid tests, you don’t need a track & trace program. You just isolate everyone who tests positive.
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
They could get ten thousand highly paid consultants to look into it for a thousand years. We are never getting to millions of tests a day, all processed and results sent out within hours. It's a complete fantasy.
We don't need to, a hotel based isolation system works with the testing system we've already got.
We are running at nearly 20,000 confirmed cases a day right now. That's not something with which a "hotel-based isolation system" can cope.
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
Clearly you don't like Khan. But to suggest he doesn't get London is absurd. Born in Tooting in 1970, educated at the local comp, and as far as I can see has never lived anywhere except London. Your observation is at best patronising. Disagree with his policies by all means, but don't say he doesn't understand London.
I am London. He doesn't get London
If you are London why did you elect a man who doesn't get you?
One of the major problems I have with the circuit break lockdown is that the research was conducted by a professor of mathematics in isolation using a mathematical model of viral replication. As many people have said before, these models don't ever seem to survive contact with the real world and don't seem to take real people into account when being written.
People are predictably unpredictable and all of the mathematical models that support the 10pm closing times and other curfew like measures never seem to take this into account. I saw a calculation from a Tory person I know that said the 10pm closing time reduces contact hours by x many million hours and should therefore reduce the chances of transmission, the mathematical model didn't take into account city centres being flooded with loads of drunk people who have fit their evening's drinking into a shorter space of time then realising that milling about in the street is an option for them, or that it would create a transport crunch in big cities of drunk people less likely to observe any kind of social distancing.
These ever so smart professors and their mathematical models are going to cause the death of many thousands of viable businesses and millions of jobs, but they won't feel or see any of the consequences of their inadequate models.
The country has had enough of modellers.
Quite.
The thing is I work on predictive ML modelling on a daily basis, for my line of work it has good predictive value because markets are fairly rational and eventually the model will come good.
I can't even pretend to understand how many variables a model that has to deal with real people and behavioural science would have. Individual people are just so fucking unpredictable, especially in a "freedom loving country" like the UK. I genuinely couldn't imagine what would go into it and how it could even be trained.
Scientists and academics, especially those in pure subjects like maths or theoretical physics never seem to take real people into account and in this scenario it is real people who will be subjected to their models.
Agreed. Modelling the human interactions of an entire country as you do things to it which have no precedent would seem to be a fairly futile task.
A great deal easier to look at the particular effect of individual direct interventions like mandatory isolation of the infected.
A 10pm pub curfew just doesn’t fall into that category. And the data we have on transmission in various settings simply isn’t good enough to model stuff like that.
Last week on one evening Daughter’s place was full - all tables being used by people happily eating and drinking. In a previous life plenty of the people there would have stayed until the wee small hours of the morning. At 10 pm everyone left - to go to a house party in the village.
The curfew achieves nothing other than to strangle businesses.
I don’t disagree. My point was that modelling it would be close to meaningless.
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
Clearly you don't like Khan. But to suggest he doesn't get London is absurd. Born in Tooting in 1970, educated at the local comp, and as far as I can see has never lived anywhere except London. Your observation is at best patronising. Disagree with his policies by all means, but don't say he doesn't understand London.
I am London. He doesn't get London
If you are London why did you elect a man who doesn't get you?
Sunak to walk if Johnson goes full national lockdown?
It is a very real possibility. He knows that a second lockdown will ruin the country. The economic cost of going back to what we were doing in April and then either trying to switch the economy on and off until the warm weather comes next Summer (or simply just leaving it switched off until then) is impossible to bear.
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
Good post - I do tend to agree with your analysis, but feel (or is that hope) that your being slightly pessimistic regarding the tsunami of corpses you speak of.
It's the logical outcome of societal collapse following national bankruptcy. There's no value in saving the old from Covid if they then die of hypothermia or starvation once the electricity goes off and their pensions stop being paid.
Ok, I'd go as far as to say that's slightly pessimistic for my tastes.
My fear is, looking at the stats - cases, deaths, ICU admits - we are AT BEST a week behind France. So that shite is coming across the Channel.
Last spring we had two weeks notice, we could have acted but didn’t. This autumn we appear to have not learned the lesson.
This time we had MONTHS notice. Copy the best of Germany and Sweden, consistent rules, proper test and trace, be ready for a marathon not a sprint.
It's a total government failure. The fact that many other European governments, from Holland to Czechia, from Belgium to Spain and France, have also lost control, is no excuse. HMG fucked up. Again. And this includes the scientists not just the politicians.
It's illustrated some of Dominic Cummings' complaints about the incompetence of the state while also demonstrating that he doesn't have a clue about how to fix it in practice. Everyone is out of their depth, administratively, technically, and philosophically.
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
Clearly you don't like Khan. But to suggest he doesn't get London is absurd. Born in Tooting in 1970, educated at the local comp, and as far as I can see has never lived anywhere except London. Your observation is at best patronising. Disagree with his policies by all means, but don't say he doesn't understand London.
I am London. He doesn't get London
If you are London why did you elect a man who doesn't get you?
He's a complete fucking moron. London has an average rate of around 100 per 100k for the last 7 days, he's going to destroy London's hospitality industry for nothing.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
Clearly you don't like Khan. But to suggest he doesn't get London is absurd. Born in Tooting in 1970, educated at the local comp, and as far as I can see has never lived anywhere except London. Your observation is at best patronising. Disagree with his policies by all means, but don't say he doesn't understand London.
I am London. He doesn't get London
If you are London why did you elect a man who doesn't get you?
I don't vote for him
Well most Londoners did, and will again. So maybe they are more London than the minority like you?
We're all expecting Dems to vote early and by post compared to Reps, aren't we? Let me take you to sunny Wisconsin.
R won Waukesha County, WI roughly 65-35 or thereabouts in 2016, ignoring 3rd parties. It's run-of-the-mill American suburbia, straight out of an Updike novel. Translating the national polling, you'd expect to see R60-D40, and maybe 50-50 at this stage once you allow for the Dem-votes-early phenomenon.
But the TargetEarly figures show Reps winning somewhere between 70-30 and 90-10 so far. TE figures aren't votes, of course, they are counts of people who have declared their affiliation and returned a vote, so it can't say which way the indis went, hence the uncertainty. It does suggest that Reps have done a lot of voter reg and GOTV round that way though.
If you play around with the TE site you can see that urban WI is going more Dem, rural WI is going more Rep, and Rep might just be gaining in suburbia too.
R win Wisconsin is 11/4.
While I was nerdily looking at this it appears the leaders of the country's major cities decided they want to revert to Soviet levels of economic activity again. Nice work, idiots.
Good work Drutt. It gets forgotten but Trump has been on an election footing for 4 years and the Republicans have been maximising their GOTV capabilities by going round door to door while the Democrats have relied on virtual campaigns
Sorry to sound like an old fart but why does everyone use the word "impacted" instead of "affected"? Lance Price just used it on the BBC News paper review.
Comments
The thing is I work on predictive ML modelling on a daily basis, for my line of work it has good predictive value because markets are fairly rational and eventually the model will come good.
I can't even pretend to understand how many variables a model that has to deal with real people and behavioural science would have. Individual people are just so fucking unpredictable, especially in a "freedom loving country" like the UK. I genuinely couldn't imagine what would go into it and how it could even be trained.
Scientists and academics, especially those in pure subjects like maths or theoretical physics never seem to take real people into account and in this scenario it is real people who will be subjected to their models.
Glasses = gravitas.
So what's the game?
Sounds fairly straightforward to implement?
There's no such thinking this time. I don't know what the spreads are saying about turnout this year but if I was to put my money on that it would be for it to be well up. That is not going to play in Trump's favour.
"People don't move."
This has never happened before, so there are no data on e.g., how shutting all the pubs at 10.00 pm will actually affect the R number of the pandemic.
The models are not complete nonsense, they may get the rough size of the effect right, but they are useless for actual prediction.
When SAGE says "closing all schools could reduce R by 0.2-0.5" it is probably better than guesswork, but only a little better.
My fear is, looking at the stats - cases, deaths, ICU admits - we are AT BEST a week behind France. So that shite is coming across the Channel.
People who are in a care home can't just be checked in to a hotel room and picked up the next day. There's a reason they're in a care home, they have needs.
Then 45,000 students arrived.
The lowest turnout in recent decades in the US was 1996 when only 49% of Americans bothered to vote for Bill Clinton or Bob Dole
Anyone who claims to know what the political fallout from that is going to be is a fool.
It's a total government failure. The fact that many other European governments, from Holland to Czechia, from Belgium to Spain and France, have also lost control, is no excuse. HMG fucked up. Again. And this includes the scientists not just the politicians.
Here's Burnham expressing support for a 3 tier system 10 days ago:
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/mayor-andy-burnham-backs-simplified-19047274
Here he is threatening legal action if it went ahead about 6 days ago:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12886013/northern-lockdown-legal-action-burnham/
The SAGE story started 2 days ago.
As far as I can see Mr Starmer's about turn was even more abrupt.
Hancock is useless - he doesn't understand hospitality although he likes a glass of wine in a subsidised Parliament bar - he's never been to a pub in his life.
But Hindsight LAB won't do it either
This time it is at least a month...see you all after Christmas.
When are we going to seriously look at Sweden? I fear it is too much for the British State to accept that there are lessons to learn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RPoymt3Jx4
Sadiq wants it
The Treasury has apparently estimated the cost of full national lockdown at £25bn per week. That would be £700bn if it started now and carried on until the end of next April. We might as well all commit mass suicide and get the agony over with rather than attempting something that insane. You can't imagine that Sunak would want to be associated with such a course of action.
There are absolutely no good options available to the Government and mass casualties are inevitable. Yet eternal lockdown is the worst of the lot - and it's not at all clear that trying to do it again will even delay those casualties like it did the first time around. It's arguable - and backed up by the hospital admission stats, which suggest that the initial wave of infections peaked a few days before lockdown started - that it only worked through public terror of the virus and very high levels of cooperation with the suppression measures. This time around, public faith in and goodwill towards the Government is spent, and a large fraction of the population won't comply - because they have concluded that it is very unlikely to do them serious harm, or they don't believe that lockdown does any good, or they loathe the restrictions and bridle against the loss of liberty and the real damage that it causes to their lives, or some combination of all of those things. This means that social contact in private dwellings, which is impossible to police effectively beyond dealing with the most egregious breaches, is liable to continue unchecked even if every pub, bar, restaurant, gym, swimming pool, salon, place of worship and village hall in the land is padlocked for the duration.
Neither a hyper-efficient tracking and testing programme nor a vaccine is coming to rescue us any time soon. The former will probably never be achieved and the latter might not either. That leaves the country in a total bind, as @Cyclefree succinctly describes, and everyone in Government will know that too. All we can now do is either roll the dice on risk segmentation, or try to save more lives with full-on suppression now - at the cost of national bankruptcy and a consequent tsunami of corpses in maybe three months' time.
From what is reported one suspects that the latter option is not supported by the Chancellor.
We're not rushing in to the absurd "two weeks" lockdown that we all know would never last two weeks, instead the Government is seeking to find a balance that can be lasted in for months knowing this is a marathon not a sprint.
The marathon from here is finding a way to get R to 1 and stay there. The lockdown for a fortnight brigade are doing the opposite.
It was an obvious blunder six months ago.
Not to have worked out how to provide separate isolation facilities for those infected, even for a single vulnerable segment of the population, beggars belief.
As @MaxPB has pointed out, ad nauseam, rapidly isolating the infected is perhaps the single largest and most easily achievable improvement in getting on top of this thing.
Of course Burnham is playing politics as are all politicians, Tory, Labour, LD, SNP, Green alike, it is their job. Some of it is counter productive but Burnham will see it as standing up for his constituents. He is not opposed to local lockdowns but wants cash for businesses impacted to protect jobs - not to lock up 50m.
A poster on here this evening has already made the fair point - when rates were high in London we got a national lockdown with very strong govt financial support, when rates are high in the north, its a local lockdown with minimal govt support. It is the job of northern mayors to stand up for their regions, and ultimately the govt can overrule them if they want anyway.
IF in the final weeks before EDay, the sexting scandal re: NC US Senate Democratic nominee is NOT denting his lead over the GOP incumbent, then what grounds are there to expect that Trumpsky will benefit from re-flogging yet another political dead horse? Again, answer is close to zero.
Indeed, even when we do get a vaccine we will have to adopt risk segmentation, prioritising the infirm, the elderly and those on the frontline.
Doesn't stop the fact that hospitals in Merseyside are already approaching capacity from covid.
Honestly, I wish we had a proper mayor in charge. Sadiq just doesn't get London, he doesn't understand what makes London what it is.
No one cares about some Ukraine story no matter how much the Trump groupies want people to .
You've guessed it. Matt Hancock at the other table.
Put a downer on proceedings.
Now the government won’t bail out businesses who are in trouble through no fault of their own.
That’s the message which will be remembered.
But as someone who builds models (not this kind, to be fair, but still trying to predict the essentially unpredictable), you have no choice but to make simplifications and assumptions to make the analysis tractable. It's mixing the metaphor but there's a reason the old spherical chicken in a vacuum physics joke exists.
It's like economic forecasting. It's nigh-on impossible to do accurately and if you could do it you'd probably be doing something better anyway, but you still have to try. The alternative is having no feel for the issue at all and pulling stuff out your ass, as opposed to something that is probably wrong but still gives you a steer as long as you understand what the assumptions, weaknesses and limitations of it are.
One of the problems, as was discussed earlier, is that our newspaper and TV journalists don't even know basic stats, let alone how to understand how to interpret a model, so they can't interpret the results appropriately or challenge the developers the right way. Which only leads to them thinking a model is somehow a perfect prediction etc.
Total garbage.
And the story came through Giuliani ?
LOL.
There's reasonable evidence that local public health teams can do a good-enough job of contact tracing. By being on the ground, they can spot the patterns, they know who to talk to in the communities and people are more likely to co-operate with them than with a random message from a call centre. It's low-tech and, let's face it, boring, but it's an obvious improvement to make. (And, to be fair, that pivot does seem to be happening.)
Oh, and add a decent triage on testing, so that the system isn't bumping up against capacity all the time. And, as @Max points out, make sure that those who need to isolate can do so and do do so.
Should that have been done by now? Of course. Can it be done in a 2 - 3 week "closure for system upgrades"? I don't know, but maybe.
R won Waukesha County, WI roughly 65-35 or thereabouts in 2016, ignoring 3rd parties. It's run-of-the-mill American suburbia, straight out of an Updike novel. Translating the national polling, you'd expect to see R60-D40, and maybe 50-50 at this stage once you allow for the Dem-votes-early phenomenon.
But the TargetEarly figures show Reps winning somewhere between 70-30 and 90-10 so far. TE figures aren't votes, of course, they are counts of people who have declared their affiliation and returned a vote, so it can't say which way the indis went, hence the uncertainty. It does suggest that Reps have done a lot of voter reg and GOTV round that way though.
If you play around with the TE site you can see that urban WI is going more Dem, rural WI is going more Rep, and Rep might just be gaining in suburbia too.
R win Wisconsin is 11/4.
- Biden did not push out a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating his son, The Washington Post confirms
- The NY Post’s story had several red flags and holes that raise questions about its authenticity, according to journalists
Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos vs Rupert Murdoch
That is achievable with current technology. Though God knows how long it would take from a standing start.
Perhaps one of those highly paid consultants could look into it.
Protect the younger and more vulnerable: life deserving of life, but do not cripple the economy to do it.
Let everyone younger and at-risk make their own choices, give them places to quarantine and isolate, turn the many empty hotels into isolation units. GET THE FUCKING TEST AND TRACE WORKING. Use the Nightingales to deal with the excess ill and dying, that's what they are there for.
And then let everyone else go back to work, and play, with masks and social distancing where possible. Keep the economy from self-destructing.
This is, now, the only option. A mix of Sweden and Germany.
The banks in 2009 should have been rescued.
The bankers should have lost their shirts. I mean that. Om JSA.
@Cyclefree
The government bailed out banks in 2009. Banks who were largely responsible for the mess they got into.
Now the government won’t bail out businesses who are in trouble through no fault of their own.
That’s the message which will be remembered.
Dixiedean
Northern businesses.
Modelling the human interactions of an entire country as you do things to it which have no precedent would seem to be a fairly futile task.
A great deal easier to look at the particular effect of individual direct interventions like mandatory isolation of the infected.
A 10pm pub curfew just doesn’t fall into that category. And the data we have on transmission in various settings simply isn’t good enough to model stuff like that.
Once lockdowns start up again they ain't stopping. It becomes a matter of sunk costs. So much effort has already gone into the strategy that it has to keep being pursued because to change tack would imply that it had been the biggest waste of time and money in history. We'd be stuck with it until the pandemic was over or until the state itself collapsed under the strain.
Because if he did, via his son, then there is a good chance Biden lies
As I said, your scheme is probably the most quickly achievable, as all it requires is funding and a determination to do it.
The curfew achieves nothing other than to strangle businesses.
You take them and watch for a result - like a pregnancy test.
The government bailed out banks in 2009. Banks who were largely responsible for the mess they got into.
Now the government won’t bail out businesses who are in trouble through no fault of their own.
That’s the message which will be remembered.
Dixiedean
Northern businesses.
Well, quite. “Levelling up” I believe it’s called.
My point was that modelling it would be close to meaningless.
Sean, think you may be onto something.