We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
When Jimmy Carter won in 1976 the first thing Gerald and Betty Ford did was to invite the Carter family round to dinner and give them a tour of the White House, good manners seem to be lost there now.
What's the betting Trump refuses to attend the inauguration? or if he does he'll probably start heckling. Incidentally I wonder if Biden will invite Neil Kinnock.
...and John Major leaving the Blair's a bottle of champagne on ice in the Downing Street flat with a congratulatory note.
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
Dubya was a dire President in many ways, including on the Middle East, environment, New Orleans response, and preparedness for economic crash. But the more one hears about him, the more one has to conclude that on a purely personal level he seems to be an extremely decent, generous man.
And people thought he was the worst possible president.
The difference between an optimist and a pessimist.....
There could easily be worse than Trump. Bad as he is.
Yep, Trump's one redeeming feature is his incompetence, which meant he hasn't been able to do as much damage as might have been possible. And he did refrain from starting any more wars.
Although does this mean that? 'The court refused to award the Pirates of the Caribbean star compensation for damage to his reputation at the end of one of the most widely followed libel trials of the century.'
I think the decision over costs will be more significant than the decision over damages.
(Depp is apparently £5m in the hole on legal fees).
Yet another pirates of the carribean movie it is then.....
Worse, a shitload of these terrible Dior Sauvage ads.
The midden reference not being to a flower kind of bed I take it?
I'll put that in the "nope" pile. The very best judgments are a maximum of 10 pages long!
That's rather unfair to the judge in this case. He's not determining some very narrow point of law which can be elegantly dispatched - he's a trial judge in a case which heard a LOT of contradictory evidence, and has to exhaustively go through and say whose evidence he accepts, whose he doesn't (and why), and which specific allegations are proven to the civil standard and which aren't. He'd be instantly and successfully appealed if he said "Well, some of the allegations must be true and, given there's no smoke without fire, I find for the Sun".
Biden +6 in FL and +9 in PA look very positive for him. Two quite different states that Trump must win well outside MoE. Admittedly Morning Consult is only rated B/C by 538 but encouraging...
Both those states you mention look too high. I think HYUFD posted some polls earlier (not just Trafalgars) from mid rated posters with much closer margins than that. But the trend does seem to suggest overall FL is very close and PA is fairly safe for Biden.
Stop looking at single polls and look at weighted average polls, such as in 538. You can argue about exactly how the weighting is done, but almost any sensible analysis will be more reliable than taking just one poll (that is until the benefit of hindsight becomes available to us) 538 has: FLA Biden up 2.1 PA Biden up 5.1
Biden +6 in FL and +9 in PA look very positive for him. Two quite different states that Trump must win well outside MoE. Admittedly Morning Consult is only rated B/C by 538 but encouraging...
Should be a final Monmouth PA poll soon, next 20-30 mins
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
Dubya was a dire President in many ways, including on the Middle East, environment, New Orleans response, and preparedness for economic crash. But the more one hears about him, the more one has to conclude that on a purely personal level he seems to be an extremely decent, generous man.
And people thought he was the worst possible president.
The difference between an optimist and a pessimist.....
There could easily be worse than Trump. Bad as he is.
Yep, Trump's one redeeming feature is his incompetence, which meant he hasn't been able to do as much damage as might have been possible. And he did refrain from starting any more wars.
Exactly what was thinking - Trump is one of the biggest obstacles to his own policies. Thank god.
There are some quite terrifying Trump Republicans waiting in the wings. Without the baggage, young, articulate and pretty much QAnon + BugFuckCrazy....
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
When Jimmy Carter won in 1976 the first thing Gerald and Betty Ford did was to invite the Carter family round to dinner and give them a tour of the White House, good manners seem to be lost there now.
What's the betting Trump refuses to attend the inauguration? or if he does he'll probably start heckling. Incidentally I wonder if Biden will invite Neil Kinnock.
That's all the more impressive from Ford in that he'd lost an election. With the Bush to Obama transition, okay Obama ran on a fresh start message and was criticising the previous administration (as all opposition candidates do) but it's not quite the same.
I believe the Carter to Reagan transition (also a victor/vanquished handover) was personally a little cool, but essentially businesslike (and actually held up as quite efficient in terms of allowing the Reagan administration to hit the ground running). I worry, if Trump loses, that as well as being an arsehole on a personal level, he's bloody minded enough to do deliberate damage on his way out of the door if his people will allow him.
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
When Jimmy Carter won in 1976 the first thing Gerald and Betty Ford did was to invite the Carter family round to dinner and give them a tour of the White House, good manners seem to be lost there now.
What's the betting Trump refuses to attend the inauguration? or if he does he'll probably start heckling. Incidentally I wonder if Biden will invite Neil Kinnock.
That's all the more impressive from Ford in that he'd lost an election. With the Bush to Obama transition, okay Obama ran on a fresh start message and was criticising the previous administration (as all opposition candidates do) but it's not quite the same.
I believe the Carter to Reagan transition (also a victor/vanquished handover) was personally a little cool, but essentially businesslike (and actually held up as quite efficient in terms of allowing the Reagan administration to hit the ground running). I worry, if Trump loses, that as well as being an arsehole on a personal level, he's bloody minded enough to do deliberate damage on his way out of the door if his people will allow him.
You mean more than just removing letters from keyboards?
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
Dubya was a dire President in many ways, including on the Middle East, environment, New Orleans response, and preparedness for economic crash. But the more one hears about him, the more one has to conclude that on a purely personal level he seems to be an extremely decent, generous man.
And people thought he was the worst possible president.
The difference between an optimist and a pessimist.....
There could easily be worse than Trump. Bad as he is.
Yep, Trump's one redeeming feature is his incompetence, which meant he hasn't been able to do as much damage as might have been possible. And he did refrain from starting any more wars.
Doing a great job on turning the culture war from warm to hot, mind.
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
When Jimmy Carter won in 1976 the first thing Gerald and Betty Ford did was to invite the Carter family round to dinner and give them a tour of the White House, good manners seem to be lost there now.
What's the betting Trump refuses to attend the inauguration? or if he does he'll probably start heckling. Incidentally I wonder if Biden will invite Neil Kinnock.
That's all the more impressive from Ford in that he'd lost an election. With the Bush to Obama transition, okay Obama ran on a fresh start message and was criticising the previous administration (as all opposition candidates do) but it's not quite the same.
I believe the Carter to Reagan transition (also a victor/vanquished handover) was personally a little cool, but essentially businesslike (and actually held up as quite efficient in terms of allowing the Reagan administration to hit the ground running). I worry, if Trump loses, that as well as being an arsehole on a personal level, he's bloody minded enough to do deliberate damage on his way out of the door if his people will allow him.
You mean more than just removing letters from keyboards?
I'll put that in the "nope" pile. The very best judgments are a maximum of 10 pages long!
That's rather unfair to the judge in this case. He's not determining some very narrow point of law which can be elegantly dispatched - he's a trial judge in a case which heard a LOT of contradictory evidence, and has to exhaustively go through and say whose evidence he accepts, whose he doesn't (and why), and which specific allegations are proven to the civil standard and which aren't. He'd be instantly and successfully appealed if he said "Well, some of the allegations must be true and, given there's no smoke without fire, I find for the Sun".
Lord Denning had no problem doing that. 🤷♂️
But I know - I'm only joking anyway.
A quick scan suggests a lot of time was spent on irrelevancies but perhaps they establish a pattern, or some such. I know nothing of the law but am sometimes surprised by reports of trials where it looks like more time is spent establishing the defendant is clearly a wrong'un than on the precise question of whether he did hold up Lloyds Bank with a sawn-off Purdey.
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
I worry, if Trump loses, that as well as being an arsehole on a personal level, he's bloody minded enough to do deliberate damage on his way out of the door if his people will allow him.
If Trump loses, and his defeat is confirmed in the official counts, court judgments, etc, then attention will quickly turn to after.
We're helped here, I think, by Trump's obsession with himself. I'm not sure he'll care enough about the country to do more damage, except as a consequence of helping himself.
I'll put that in the "nope" pile. The very best judgments are a maximum of 10 pages long!
That's rather unfair to the judge in this case. He's not determining some very narrow point of law which can be elegantly dispatched - he's a trial judge in a case which heard a LOT of contradictory evidence, and has to exhaustively go through and say whose evidence he accepts, whose he doesn't (and why), and which specific allegations are proven to the civil standard and which aren't. He'd be instantly and successfully appealed if he said "Well, some of the allegations must be true and, given there's no smoke without fire, I find for the Sun".
Lord Denning had no problem doing that. 🤷♂️
But I know - I'm only joking anyway.
I do love Lord Denning judgments. Although they did make him Master of the Rolls purely so they could get him out of the House of Lords (at the time - Supreme Court now) such that there was always a level of appeal above him.
It was actually a good system in that he could develop the law in imaginative ways to address new problems, and the House of Lords could check his homework when he went a bit mad (either at the time or, in many cases, years later).
(It's quite often said none of his new law really stands now, but that's a little unfair - some things have evolved into statute, others overturned, but it isn't as if he never existed).
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
Dubya was a dire President in many ways, including on the Middle East, environment, New Orleans response, and preparedness for economic crash. But the more one hears about him, the more one has to conclude that on a purely personal level he seems to be an extremely decent, generous man.
Which is important. People can argue about policies till the cows come home but to have the biggest role model in the world - the US president - validating and promoting all the worst aspects of human nature is a terrible thing. No caveats - he has to go.
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
When Jimmy Carter won in 1976 the first thing Gerald and Betty Ford did was to invite the Carter family round to dinner and give them a tour of the White House, good manners seem to be lost there now.
What's the betting Trump refuses to attend the inauguration? or if he does he'll probably start heckling. Incidentally I wonder if Biden will invite Neil Kinnock.
...and John Major leaving the Blair's a bottle of champagne on ice in the Downing Street flat with a congratulatory note.
Because that's the classy, right thing to do- and most politicians on all sides recognise that. Even Liam Byrne's "I'm afraid that there is no money. Kind regards and good luck." note was in the same tradition, albeit as a joke that fell flat. It's the same reason that new MPs find something nice to say about their predecessor in their maiden speech. The opposition aren't the enemy, they're wrong not evil.
Mostly that works and is a good thing, because it keeps the nation a bit more united. It falls down in the face of angry people- Trumps and Farages, say, who see a cosy consensus and weakness. But it really is better that way.
If Joe Biden does nothing for four years but smile a lot and calm Americans down, he'll have earned his place in the Good Place.
I'll put that in the "nope" pile. The very best judgments are a maximum of 10 pages long!
That's rather unfair to the judge in this case. He's not determining some very narrow point of law which can be elegantly dispatched - he's a trial judge in a case which heard a LOT of contradictory evidence, and has to exhaustively go through and say whose evidence he accepts, whose he doesn't (and why), and which specific allegations are proven to the civil standard and which aren't. He'd be instantly and successfully appealed if he said "Well, some of the allegations must be true and, given there's no smoke without fire, I find for the Sun".
Lord Denning had no problem doing that. 🤷♂️
But I know - I'm only joking anyway.
"If Johnny Depp were to win, this would undermine public confidence in the hell-raising image of Hollywood stars. This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that I must find against him in his own interests."
Biden +6 in FL and +9 in PA look very positive for him. Two quite different states that Trump must win well outside MoE. Admittedly Morning Consult is only rated B/C by 538 but encouraging...
Both those states you mention look too high. I think HYUFD posted some polls earlier (not just Trafalgars) from mid rated posters with much closer margins than that. But the trend does seem to suggest overall FL is very close and PA is fairly safe for Biden.
Stop looking at single polls and look at weighted average polls, such as in 538. You can argue about exactly how the weighting is done, but almost any sensible analysis will be more reliable than taking just one poll (that is until the benefit of hindsight becomes available to us) 538 has: FLA Biden up 2.1 PA Biden up 5.1
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
Dubya was a dire President in many ways, including on the Middle East, environment, New Orleans response, and preparedness for economic crash. But the more one hears about him, the more one has to conclude that on a purely personal level he seems to be an extremely decent, generous man.
His one outstanding contribution which could have made a world of difference was his Pandemic Disaster planning. Had that still be in place when this current pandemic started the US would be in a very different place right now. Sadly it was scrapped by his successors - not sure of it was Obama or Trump.
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
When Jimmy Carter won in 1976 the first thing Gerald and Betty Ford did was to invite the Carter family round to dinner and give them a tour of the White House, good manners seem to be lost there now.
What's the betting Trump refuses to attend the inauguration? or if he does he'll probably start heckling. Incidentally I wonder if Biden will invite Neil Kinnock.
...and John Major leaving the Blair's a bottle of champagne on ice in the Downing Street flat with a congratulatory note.
Because that's the classy, right thing to do- and most politicians on all sides recognise that. Even Liam Byrne's "I'm afraid that there is no money. Kind regards and good luck." note was in the same tradition, albeit as a joke that fell flat. It's the same reason that new MPs find something nice to say about their predecessor in their maiden speech. The opposition aren't the enemy, they're wrong not evil.
Mostly that works and is a good thing, because it keeps the nation a bit more united. It falls down in the face of angry people- Trumps and Farages, say, who see a cosy consensus and weakness. But it really is better that way.
If Joe Biden does nothing for four years but smile a lot and calm Americans down, he'll have earned his place in the Good Place.
Quite.
I have been to countries where the "Other lot are EVUL" has been taken to its logical conclusion.
Which is to tie an opponent to a chair, pile dynamite under it and light a slow fuse coiled around the chair. So he can watch. Literally.
We seem to be a thousand years away from the time when Bush II's daughters left a kind letter to Obama's daughters after Obama won....
Dubya was a dire President in many ways, including on the Middle East, environment, New Orleans response, and preparedness for economic crash. But the more one hears about him, the more one has to conclude that on a purely personal level he seems to be an extremely decent, generous man.
And people thought he was the worst possible president.
The difference between an optimist and a pessimist.....
There could easily be worse than Trump. Bad as he is.
Yep, Trump's one redeeming feature is his incompetence, which meant he hasn't been able to do as much damage as might have been possible. And he did refrain from starting any more wars.
Doing a great job on turning the culture war from warm to hot, mind.
The Arizona data is signaling a Biden win, but I’m very cautious about this because party registration is not quite the same here as elsewhere. Party registration is applied only to presidential elections, whereas the state has semi-open primaries for all other primary elections. With only Democrats holding a contested primary in 2020, it may be that the changes in party registration of the early vote is sending too bullish of a signal.
I’m not saying anything about Pennsylvania, a state with party registration. The state had excuse-required absentee voting in 2016, so there no comparison should be made to the partisan distribution of the small number of voters who cast absentee ballots in 2016 to the much larger number voting in 2020.
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Sadly, that seems to me, to be intelligent and reasonable work.
The Arizona data is signaling a Biden win, but I’m very cautious about this because party registration is not quite the same here as elsewhere. Party registration is applied only to presidential elections, whereas the state has semi-open primaries for all other primary elections. With only Democrats holding a contested primary in 2020, it may be that the changes in party registration of the early vote is sending too bullish of a signal.
Does this assume that if you're registered Dem you vote Dem and vice versa? What about independents?
Party % 2020 Early Vote % 2016 Early Vote % 2016 Actual Vote Democrats 39.2% 39.8% 47.8% Republicans 38.1% 38.3% 49.0% Dem Lead +1.1 +1.5 -1.2
But read the Blog
Isn't one problem with that analysis that it doesn't give the full picture because it's percentages rather than absolute numbers? So a 1.1% advantage in early votes in 2020 is a much bigger lead numerically than a 1.5% advantage in 2016.
Another is that party registration data is somewhat unreliable in terms of actual votes, partly due to unaffiliated voters (which are NOT the same as independents - these are essentially people who can't be arsed with primary elections but may well have a preference) and partly that, while vote splitting is in decline, it isn't all that unusual.
I'd also note Florida has a very high elderly population (second only to Maine) so not massively shocking if more Republicans vote early there than elsewhere.
So it's interesting but slightly inclined to take with a pinch of salt.
Re the over 30 million outstanding EV that I have been posting about regularly the Blog says
Outstanding Mail Ballots If much concern to Democrats are all the mail ballots that have yet to be returned. These should be of concern, but I want to put these statistics in context.
As of this writing, there are 31,958,869 outstanding mail ballots that have not been entered as returned by election officials.
There are many unknowns with the outstanding mail ballots, so it is difficult to take these numbers at face value.
Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an over-count:
Some mail ballots are in transit. Some states continue to accept mail ballots if postmarked by Election Day. Some are at election offices but have not been entered into their databases. It is unclear how election officials manage data for voters who requested a mail ballot, but decided to cast an in-person vote. Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an under-count:
Some states do not report mail ballot applications or the number of ballots sent; Texas probably being the largest of these states. Although not affecting the total number, the mail ballot return rate is too high in states where in-person votes are co-mingled with mail ballots; states like Iowa, among others.
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Are we staying within hospital capacity? Otherwise that IFR will go up significantly.
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Depressing, but excellent work. Obviously lots of uncertainties in that, but it is certainly true that lots more deaths are now inevitable in the next couple of months.
Party % 2020 Early Vote % 2016 Early Vote % 2016 Actual Vote Democrats 39.2% 39.8% 47.8% Republicans 38.1% 38.3% 49.0% Dem Lead +1.1 +1.5 -1.2
But read the Blog
Isn't one problem with that analysis that it doesn't give the full picture because it's percentages rather than absolute numbers? So a 1.1% advantage in early votes in 2020 is a much bigger lead numerically than a 1.5% advantage in 2016.
Another is that party registration data is somewhat unreliable in terms of actual votes, partly due to unaffiliated voters (which are NOT the same as independents - these are essentially people who can't be arsed with primary elections but may well have a preference) and partly that, while vote splitting is in decline, it isn't all that unusual.
I'd also note Florida has a very high elderly population (second only to Maine) so not massively shocking if more Republicans vote early there than elsewhere.
So it's interesting but slightly inclined to take with a pinch of salt.
Yes the Blog talks about some of the factors why you cant take them at face value not all of which you have noted.
I'll put that in the "nope" pile. The very best judgments are a maximum of 10 pages long!
That's rather unfair to the judge in this case. He's not determining some very narrow point of law which can be elegantly dispatched - he's a trial judge in a case which heard a LOT of contradictory evidence, and has to exhaustively go through and say whose evidence he accepts, whose he doesn't (and why), and which specific allegations are proven to the civil standard and which aren't. He'd be instantly and successfully appealed if he said "Well, some of the allegations must be true and, given there's no smoke without fire, I find for the Sun".
Lord Denning had no problem doing that. 🤷♂️
But I know - I'm only joking anyway.
"If Johnny Depp were to win, this would undermine public confidence in the hell-raising image of Hollywood stars. This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that I must find against him in his own interests."
"It was bluebell time in Beverly Hills. And what could be more typically Californian than hearing the gentle thwack of..."
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Nice work. Peak at a ~1000 a day, seems very much in line with what the Cambridge model now predicts..
Cut for space ... Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
I hope so too. I'm particularly concerned that you can fit the ONS and death data together with an IFR of 0.65%.
Given the improvements to treatment and the age profile early in this wave, I'd really have thought it would have been lower.
Early in the wave, it gave an extrapolated IFR of 0.25%-0.3%. Unfortunately, this migrated up to around 0.65% again within a month. Over the same period, the ICNARC stats showed the median age of those being hospitalised raising from 47 years old to 61 years old, which marches with that.
Re the over 30 million outstanding EV that I have been posting about regularly the Blog says
Outstanding Mail Ballots If much concern to Democrats are all the mail ballots that have yet to be returned. These should be of concern, but I want to put these statistics in context.
As of this writing, there are 31,958,869 outstanding mail ballots that have not been entered as returned by election officials.
There are many unknowns with the outstanding mail ballots, so it is difficult to take these numbers at face value.
Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an over-count:
Some mail ballots are in transit. Some states continue to accept mail ballots if postmarked by Election Day. Some are at election offices but have not been entered into their databases. It is unclear how election officials manage data for voters who requested a mail ballot, but decided to cast an in-person vote. Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an under-count:
Some states do not report mail ballot applications or the number of ballots sent; Texas probably being the largest of these states. Although not affecting the total number, the mail ballot return rate is too high in states where in-person votes are co-mingled with mail ballots; states like Iowa, among others.
The west coast surely has loads of ballots outstanding. If you live there you know they're going Democrat, know they only have to be postmarked 3rd November. Know the counting takes ages so no hurry anyway. No real urgency to get those in compared to say Michigan.
Once again for a Political Betting Site The insight in the attached is absolute Gold
I urge Bettors with serious money at stake to read it in full rather than my brief extracts (that cant tell the full picture contained in a 10 page Blog)
The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to Church of England clergy about the new lockdown provisions in England, which allow churches to remain open but ban communal acts of worship.
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
The UK should be looking at accelerating the deployment of possible Covid vaccines and therapeutic drugs to more people during the November lockdown period, says Tony Blair.
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Are we staying within hospital capacity? Otherwise that IFR will go up significantly.
I think so. The peak is very close to the March/April peak, and we stayed (just?) within hospital capacity then. It does imply that they acted not a moment too soon. Another week (if - and it's a big if - the virus spread was continuing at that rate) and we'd have gone over.
Disgraceful comments from the crook who runs Trafalgar. Saying on Fox that the Dems will steal Pennsylvania from Trump with voter fraud . This of course is his way of saying his poll would have been correct but for the alleged voter fraud . So he wins either way! Has any other pollster gone on tv and alleged voter fraud . His polls should no longer be included in any averages and should no longer be posted in here.
The UK should be looking at accelerating the deployment of possible Covid vaccines and therapeutic drugs to more people during the November lockdown period, says Tony Blair.
Thanks for that Tony.....
I'm sure they are going as fast as they can in that area.
Re the over 30 million outstanding EV that I have been posting about regularly the Blog says
Outstanding Mail Ballots If much concern to Democrats are all the mail ballots that have yet to be returned. These should be of concern, but I want to put these statistics in context.
As of this writing, there are 31,958,869 outstanding mail ballots that have not been entered as returned by election officials.
There are many unknowns with the outstanding mail ballots, so it is difficult to take these numbers at face value.
Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an over-count:
Some mail ballots are in transit. Some states continue to accept mail ballots if postmarked by Election Day. Some are at election offices but have not been entered into their databases. It is unclear how election officials manage data for voters who requested a mail ballot, but decided to cast an in-person vote. Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an under-count:
Some states do not report mail ballot applications or the number of ballots sent; Texas probably being the largest of these states. Although not affecting the total number, the mail ballot return rate is too high in states where in-person votes are co-mingled with mail ballots; states like Iowa, among others.
Don't some states (including big ones like California and New Jersey) send postal ballots to ALL registered voters? Quite a few of the 30 million would then be in the hands of people who have never had the slightest intention of voting.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to Church of England clergy about the new lockdown provisions in England, which allow churches to remain open but ban communal acts of worship.
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
My church is going online again from Sunday, however that does not mean we are happy about not being able to have communion but we will abide by the law
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Are we staying within hospital capacity? Otherwise that IFR will go up significantly.
I think so. The peak is very close to the March/April peak, and we stayed (just?) within hospital capacity then. It does imply that they acted not a moment too soon. Another week (if - and it's a big if - the virus spread was continuing at that rate) and we'd have gone over.
Will be interesting to see how reality compares to this prediction. Can we expect updates?
I'll put that in the "nope" pile. The very best judgments are a maximum of 10 pages long!
That's rather unfair to the judge in this case. He's not determining some very narrow point of law which can be elegantly dispatched - he's a trial judge in a case which heard a LOT of contradictory evidence, and has to exhaustively go through and say whose evidence he accepts, whose he doesn't (and why), and which specific allegations are proven to the civil standard and which aren't. He'd be instantly and successfully appealed if he said "Well, some of the allegations must be true and, given there's no smoke without fire, I find for the Sun".
Having an obvious typo in the opening paragraph as soon as line five is poor show.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to Church of England clergy about the new lockdown provisions in England, which allow churches to remain open but ban communal acts of worship.
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
My church is going online again from Sunday, however that does not mean we are happy about not being able to have communion but we will abide by the law
I'm sure it will give you great comfort that the Queen's church is definitely going online too.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to Church of England clergy about the new lockdown provisions in England, which allow churches to remain open but ban communal acts of worship.
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
The government, much as everyone loves to criticise, have got this one right.
They're happy to keep large indoor spaces such as churches open, but don't want organised events taking place inside where many people congregate at the same time. The alternative is to shut them, alongside pubs and shops.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to Church of England clergy about the new lockdown provisions in England, which allow churches to remain open but ban communal acts of worship.
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
My church is going online again from Sunday, however that does not mean we are happy about not being able to have communion but we will abide by the law
Interestingly, the local Catholic Church was investigating, already, having an outdoor, carefully spaced Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, in the local park...
Interesting, suggests Biden is ahead of Hillary in Arizona and Iowa and Maine on 2016, doing relatively better compared to Trump in Oregon and Colorado but doing worse in North Carolina and Nevada than Hillary and fractionally worse in Florida based on early voting
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Are we staying within hospital capacity? Otherwise that IFR will go up significantly.
I think so. The peak is very close to the March/April peak, and we stayed (just?) within hospital capacity then. It does imply that they acted not a moment too soon. Another week (if - and it's a big if - the virus spread was continuing at that rate) and we'd have gone over.
Will be interesting to see how reality compares to this prediction. Can we expect updates?
Sure. I can do it daily, but the death figures are usually fairly laggy. Might make more sense to update it on Thursdays and Mondays. And I'll be hoping the model is overpredicting.
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Are we staying within hospital capacity? Otherwise that IFR will go up significantly.
I think so. The peak is very close to the March/April peak, and we stayed (just?) within hospital capacity then. It does imply that they acted not a moment too soon. Another week (if - and it's a big if - the virus spread was continuing at that rate) and we'd have gone over.
Will be interesting to see how reality compares to this prediction. Can we expect updates?
Sure. I can do it daily, but the death figures are usually fairly laggy. Might make more sense to update it on Thursdays and Mondays. And I'll be hoping the model is overpredicting.
Weekly is fine, daily would be too much I think! Hopefully deaths start to come down a bit sooner, otherwise it is very close to the supposed end of the restrictions.
I don't think 'populist' is the right word there; 'opportunist' seems more fitting.
Farage is just one of the more prominent assclowns in this. Heard plenty of people declaring Total Lockdown Forever Is The Only Moral Choice followed by (it seems about 10 minutes later) Lockdown Is Destroying Everything.
Yay! Mrs RP reports that two of her teaching colleagues now have Covid. Does make me laugh how people are flapping about "lockdown" when its nothing of the sort
Once again for a Political Betting Site The insight in the attached is absolute Gold
I urge Bettors with serious money at stake to read it in full rather than my brief extracts (that cant tell the full picture contained in a 10 page Blog)
Re the over 30 million outstanding EV that I have been posting about regularly the Blog says
Outstanding Mail Ballots If much concern to Democrats are all the mail ballots that have yet to be returned. These should be of concern, but I want to put these statistics in context.
As of this writing, there are 31,958,869 outstanding mail ballots that have not been entered as returned by election officials.
There are many unknowns with the outstanding mail ballots, so it is difficult to take these numbers at face value.
Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an over-count:
Some mail ballots are in transit. Some states continue to accept mail ballots if postmarked by Election Day. Some are at election offices but have not been entered into their databases. It is unclear how election officials manage data for voters who requested a mail ballot, but decided to cast an in-person vote. Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an under-count:
Some states do not report mail ballot applications or the number of ballots sent; Texas probably being the largest of these states. Although not affecting the total number, the mail ballot return rate is too high in states where in-person votes are co-mingled with mail ballots; states like Iowa, among others.
Don't some states (including big ones like California and New Jersey) send postal ballots to ALL registered voters? Quite a few of the 30 million would then be in the hands of people who have never had the slightest intention of voting.
Truthfully I dont know but If that were the case it would be a massive omission from the Blog.
Given that he is referring to the 32 milllion outstanding he would surely have listed that as a reason (a massive reason) why they are being overcounted the fact he doesnt makes me think the 32m actually only counts REQUESTED and not sent universally.
The UK should be looking at accelerating the deployment of possible Covid vaccines and therapeutic drugs to more people during the November lockdown period, says Tony Blair.
Thanks for that Tony.....
TB was as usual exuding confidence and certainty but was even less plausible than usual. The big difficulties he couldn't quite hide were that what he was saying was meaningless without (a) proven safety and (b) a UK state that could ensure competent delivery of that which did not yet exist and to do so this month of November.
Interesting, suggests Biden is ahead of Hillary in Arizona and Iowa and Maine on 2016, doing relatively better compared to Trump in Oregon and Colorado but doing worse in North Carolina and Nevada than Hillary and fractionally worse in Florida based on early voting
You are right about NC but he does say about Florida
"At first blush, the numbers are bullish for Trump. Republicans are doing slightly better in the partisan distribution of the 2020 early vote than in 2016, in a state Trump won narrowly in 2016.
But, there are two factors suggesting these Florida data are sending too bullish of a signal.
First, as in-person early voting has ended, Democrats should build on their early vote lead on the strength of additional mail ballots to be returned, which are expected todecidedly break Democratic.
Second, like Nevada, there is only so much more Election Day vote possible. In 2016, only 40% of Florida’s vote was cast early. We’re probably looking somewhere around 75% of Florida’s vote cast early, unless Florida will have astronomical turnout unlike anything ever seen before in any state in modern times. That isn’t supported in the early vote we’re seeing so far elsewhere, and it would be very odd to see a huge turnout spike localized in a single state.
I'll put that in the "nope" pile. The very best judgments are a maximum of 10 pages long!
That's rather unfair to the judge in this case. He's not determining some very narrow point of law which can be elegantly dispatched - he's a trial judge in a case which heard a LOT of contradictory evidence, and has to exhaustively go through and say whose evidence he accepts, whose he doesn't (and why), and which specific allegations are proven to the civil standard and which aren't. He'd be instantly and successfully appealed if he said "Well, some of the allegations must be true and, given there's no smoke without fire, I find for the Sun".
Having an obvious typo in the opening paragraph as soon as line five is poor show.
After an excruciatingly long blow by blow account of all the incidents, it boils down to “there is enough evidence to suggest most of them are true” and “that Depp is a nasty piece of work is evidenced by an abusive threatening text about her that he sent to a friend”.
Farage has judged this wrong in terms of mass appeal among those that don't hate his guts. Oldies are scared and want to be locked away. It is mostly the youngsters, who believe he is a massive racist, that are willing to entertain the idea of just getting on it, as lockdowns are destroying their jobs and prospects.
Disgraceful comments from the crook who runs Trafalgar. Saying on Fox that the Dems will steal Pennsylvania from Trump with voter fraud . This of course is his way of saying his poll would have been correct but for the alleged voter fraud . So he wins either way! Has any other pollster gone on tv and alleged voter fraud . His polls should no longer be included in any averages and should no longer be posted in here.
Shocking. He's a complete charlatan - like pretty much every apologist for this manifestation of the Republican Party.
That Rudy Giuliani, for example. Jesus. WTF has happened to that guy? He used to be a serious respected politician, didn't he?
The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to Church of England clergy about the new lockdown provisions in England, which allow churches to remain open but ban communal acts of worship.
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
The government, much as everyone loves to criticise, have got this one right.
They're happy to keep large indoor spaces such as churches open, but don't want organised events taking place inside where many people congregate at the same time. The alternative is to shut them, alongside pubs and shops.
It will be interesting to see what list of exceptions there is in these regulations, when the proposals are published. There were so many in the last lot that, with a bit of imagination, almost anything could have been made legal.
Farage has judged this wrong in terms of mass appeal among those that don't hate his guts. Oldies are scared and want to be locked away. It is mostly the youngsters, who believe he is a massive racist, that are willing to entertain the idea of just getting on it, as lockdowns are destroying their jobs and prospects.
Hmmm, not sure about this, I guess it depends on how you define "old". The sixty and seventy somethings I know aren't too keen on lockdown.
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Nice work. Peak at a ~1000 a day, seems very much in line with what the Cambridge model now predicts..
My "number crunching" was just applying some rules of thumb but back in September I said we'd reach 1,000 deaths a day again if the trends continued as I thought they would. Every day we have waited for proper supression measures since then has made such an outcome more likely. People get way too hung up on arguing about the accuracy of predictions, when they are inevitably going to have some significant errors. We should focus more on the ballpark forecasts which should have resulted in action being taken sooner rather than later.
I appreciate all the efforts people make to model and forecast what may happen, but there was ample evidence a couple of months ago that just bumbling along with minor measures being taken wasn't going to cut it.
Once again for a Political Betting Site The insight in the attached is absolute Gold
I urge Bettors with serious money at stake to read it in full rather than my brief extracts (that cant tell the full picture contained in a 10 page Blog)
The big betting steer for me is on TURNOUT. Projected 160m.
I did Biden to get over 75m when it was even money. 1.3 now but it's still buying money.
Trump to get over 70m is available at 1.9. That's great value imo. Done that too now.
Indeed if Turnout is circa the 160m that he predicts, on the day voting will represent 37.5% of the total vote if it were only at 2016 levels it would represent less than 26% of total vote
The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to Church of England clergy about the new lockdown provisions in England, which allow churches to remain open but ban communal acts of worship.
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
The government, much as everyone loves to criticise, have got this one right.
They're happy to keep large indoor spaces such as churches open, but don't want organised events taking place inside where many people congregate at the same time. The alternative is to shut them, alongside pubs and shops.
It will be interesting to see what list of exceptions there is in these regulations, when the proposals are published. There were so many in the last lot that, with a bit of imagination, almost anything could have been made legal.
The local Catholic Church is doing things, but at massively reduced capacity, with social distancing enforce. You have to book a slot to go to a service etc.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has written to Church of England clergy about the new lockdown provisions in England, which allow churches to remain open but ban communal acts of worship.
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
The government, much as everyone loves to criticise, have got this one right.
They're happy to keep large indoor spaces such as churches open, but don't want organised events taking place inside where many people congregate at the same time. The alternative is to shut them, alongside pubs and shops.
It will be interesting to see what list of exceptions there is in these regulations, when the proposals are published. There were so many in the last lot that, with a bit of imagination, almost anything could have been made legal.
Do we know when the regulations (ie laws, as opposed to the guidance) will be published?
Farage has judged this wrong in terms of mass appeal among those that don't hate his guts. Oldies are scared and want to be locked away. It is mostly the youngsters, who believe he is a massive racist, that are willing to entertain the idea of just getting on it, as lockdowns are destroying their jobs and prospects.
Really the LibDems should be on this one. I don’t see they have anything to gain by joining Starmer in pushing the government to lockdown sooner and further
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Are we staying within hospital capacity? Otherwise that IFR will go up significantly.
I think so. The peak is very close to the March/April peak, and we stayed (just?) within hospital capacity then. It does imply that they acted not a moment too soon. Another week (if - and it's a big if - the virus spread was continuing at that rate) and we'd have gone over.
Will be interesting to see how reality compares to this prediction. Can we expect updates?
Sure. I can do it daily, but the death figures are usually fairly laggy. Might make more sense to update it on Thursdays and Mondays. And I'll be hoping the model is overpredicting.
Friday (when the ONS survey is updated) and Tuesday (when the highest number of backdated deaths are normally reported) would seem the obvious days if possible.
I don't think 'populist' is the right word there; 'opportunist' seems more fitting.
I think "populist" is fair there. The consistency in his inconsistency is that he's taken an Elites vs People, Them vs Us (i.e. populist) line.
In March, herd immunity was a wicked plan by THEM to kill US. In November, lockdown is a wicked plan by THEM to impoverish and enslave US.
Yes. Very good. Exactly that.
I sense great scope for Conspiracy Theory take-off here. The idea that THEM - the "polidical clarse" and their "unaccountable lackey boffins" - are deliberately producing phoney data and projections so as to have their evil way with the ordinary people. Locking us up, taking our liberties, ruining our finances.
Why would THEY be doing this? Because they love it. It gives them the horn.
Note how even on this high brow blog there are posters succumbing to this way of "thinking".
Farage has judged this wrong in terms of mass appeal among those that don't hate his guts. Oldies are scared and want to be locked away. It is mostly the youngsters, who believe he is a massive racist, that are willing to entertain the idea of just getting on it, as lockdowns are destroying their jobs and prospects.
Really the LibDems should be on this one. I don’t see they have anything to gain by joining Starmer in pushing the government to lockdown sooner and further
The Lib whos? Have we heard anything from them in the past 6 months?
Re the over 30 million outstanding EV that I have been posting about regularly the Blog says
Outstanding Mail Ballots If much concern to Democrats are all the mail ballots that have yet to be returned. These should be of concern, but I want to put these statistics in context.
As of this writing, there are 31,958,869 outstanding mail ballots that have not been entered as returned by election officials.
There are many unknowns with the outstanding mail ballots, so it is difficult to take these numbers at face value.
Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an over-count:
Some mail ballots are in transit. Some states continue to accept mail ballots if postmarked by Election Day. Some are at election offices but have not been entered into their databases. It is unclear how election officials manage data for voters who requested a mail ballot, but decided to cast an in-person vote. Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an under-count:
Some states do not report mail ballot applications or the number of ballots sent; Texas probably being the largest of these states. Although not affecting the total number, the mail ballot return rate is too high in states where in-person votes are co-mingled with mail ballots; states like Iowa, among others.
Don't some states (including big ones like California and New Jersey) send postal ballots to ALL registered voters? Quite a few of the 30 million would then be in the hands of people who have never had the slightest intention of voting.
Truthfully I dont know but If that were the case it would be a massive omission from the Blog.
Given that he is referring to the 32 milllion outstanding he would surely have listed that as a reason (a massive reason) why they are being overcounted the fact he doesnt makes me think the 32m actually only counts REQUESTED and not sent universally.
Looking at the source data on the US Elections Project, I think actually the blog has missed that particular point.
So if you look at large states where everyone receives a postal ballot but you can vote in person, in California only 51% of the 22 million mail ballots have been returned, and only 52% of the 6 million in New Jersey. Whereas in states where you don't automatically get sent a postal vote, it's much higher (e.g. New Hampshire 80%, Michigan 80%).
With all the talk about models this morning, I did a quick'n'dirty simplistic model to try to work out how many deaths are already baked in.
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward. - Red bars are deaths already recorded - Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in) - Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
Are we staying within hospital capacity? Otherwise that IFR will go up significantly.
I think so. The peak is very close to the March/April peak, and we stayed (just?) within hospital capacity then. It does imply that they acted not a moment too soon. Another week (if - and it's a big if - the virus spread was continuing at that rate) and we'd have gone over.
Will be interesting to see how reality compares to this prediction. Can we expect updates?
Sure. I can do it daily, but the death figures are usually fairly laggy. Might make more sense to update it on Thursdays and Mondays. And I'll be hoping the model is overpredicting.
Maybe Friday to coincide with the ONS infection study?
Farage has judged this wrong in terms of mass appeal among those that don't hate his guts. Oldies are scared and want to be locked away. It is mostly the youngsters, who believe he is a massive racist, that are willing to entertain the idea of just getting on it, as lockdowns are destroying their jobs and prospects.
Really the LibDems should be on this one. I don’t see they have anything to gain by joining Starmer in pushing the government to lockdown sooner and further
As pragmatists, the Lib Dems prefer to be to be on the side of reason. They have nothing at all to gain by jumping on a populist bandwagon.
Farage has judged this wrong in terms of mass appeal among those that don't hate his guts. Oldies are scared and want to be locked away. It is mostly the youngsters, who believe he is a massive racist, that are willing to entertain the idea of just getting on it, as lockdowns are destroying their jobs and prospects.
Really the LibDems should be on this one. I don’t see they have anything to gain by joining Starmer in pushing the government to lockdown sooner and further
Arguing for more deaths and more economic damage might weigh a bit more heavily on their conscience than producing dodgy bar charts though. No, this is one for the far left and right.
Comments
But I know - I'm only joking anyway.
538 has:
FLA Biden up 2.1
PA Biden up 5.1
There are some quite terrifying Trump Republicans waiting in the wings. Without the baggage, young, articulate and pretty much QAnon + BugFuckCrazy....
I believe the Carter to Reagan transition (also a victor/vanquished handover) was personally a little cool, but essentially businesslike (and actually held up as quite efficient in terms of allowing the Reagan administration to hit the ground running). I worry, if Trump loses, that as well as being an arsehole on a personal level, he's bloody minded enough to do deliberate damage on his way out of the door if his people will allow him.
It shows Bidens EV lead worse in percentage terms than Clintons in 2016 in Florida and NC but obviously fewer on the day votes.
It predicts 100m early votes and a total turnout up 25m to 160m
In summary Florida TCTC.
NC better for Trump than Florida
Iowa a big cut in GOP lead but still goes Red
Important details about the nuance of the numbers so far by State. I urge you to read it if you are betting in any of the states covered
https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/Early_Vote_Analysis_11_01.html
Party % 2020 Early Vote % 2016 Early Vote % 2016 Actual Vote
Democrats 39.2% 39.8% 47.8%
Republicans 38.1% 38.3% 49.0%
Dem Lead +1.1 +1.5 -1.2
But read the Blog
First graph: Using ONS stats for infections per day in England, take an IFR of 0.65%, take date of death as infection day + 19, multiply by 1.2 for all of UK (matches existing stats pretty well), and extrapolate forward.
- Red bars are deaths already recorded
- Translucent orange bars are against the existing ONS stats (baked in)
- Translucent grey bars are extrapolating the ONS rate of increase between the last two surveys (questionable, but the best prior we can get, really. If rate of increase has fallen, will over-predict. If spread has pushed further into vulnerable demographics, will under-predict. I expect they'll cancel out to some extent).
That's another 5,600 deaths until the lockdown kicks in. Peaking at over 900 deaths per day.
Piling assumption on assumption ("all models are wrong, but some are useful"), assuming an R of 0.9 during the new lockdown, and extrapolating forwards to the end of lockdown (which gives deaths on Christmas Eve), and with the same colour scheme:
Quite depressing. That's a total of 36,000 deaths between now and Christmas.
I really hope this is an overly pessimistic extrapolation.
We're helped here, I think, by Trump's obsession with himself. I'm not sure he'll care enough about the country to do more damage, except as a consequence of helping himself.
It was actually a good system in that he could develop the law in imaginative ways to address new problems, and the House of Lords could check his homework when he went a bit mad (either at the time or, in many cases, years later).
(It's quite often said none of his new law really stands now, but that's a little unfair - some things have evolved into statute, others overturned, but it isn't as if he never existed).
2020EV 2016EV 2016ACT
Democrats 37.4% 41.7% 46.2%
Republicans 31.7% 31.9% 49.8%
Dem Lead +5.7 +9.8 -3.6
But read the Blog
Mostly that works and is a good thing, because it keeps the nation a bit more united. It falls down in the face of angry people- Trumps and Farages, say, who see a cosy consensus and weakness. But it really is better that way.
If Joe Biden does nothing for four years but smile a lot and calm Americans down, he'll have earned his place in the Good Place.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
Result
Trump 304 Cinton 227
I have been to countries where the "Other lot are EVUL" has been taken to its logical conclusion.
Which is to tie an opponent to a chair, pile dynamite under it and light a slow fuse coiled around the chair. So he can watch. Literally.
https://twitter.com/dannythefink/status/1323205973549502464?s=21
The Arizona data is signaling a Biden win, but I’m very cautious about this because party registration is not quite the same here as elsewhere. Party registration is applied only to presidential elections, whereas the state has semi-open primaries for all other primary elections. With only Democrats holding a contested primary in 2020, it may be that the changes in party registration of the early vote is sending too bullish of a signal.
I’m not saying anything about Pennsylvania, a state with party registration. The state had excuse-required absentee voting in 2016, so there no comparison should be made to the partisan distribution of the small number of voters who cast absentee ballots in 2016 to the much larger number voting in 2020.
Given the improvements to treatment and the age profile early in this wave, I'd really have thought it would have been lower.
Alabama 89.6%
Mississippi 88.2%
West Virginia 81%
Oklahoma 70.5%
Missouri 64.3%
Wyoming 60.9%
Alaska 56.7%
Indiana 50.8%
South Dakota 46.6%
South Carolina 41.1%
National 38.2%
There's others too (Nebraska) and some Dem ones (New Hampshire) but the general trend is baked in.
Another is that party registration data is somewhat unreliable in terms of actual votes, partly due to unaffiliated voters (which are NOT the same as independents - these are essentially people who can't be arsed with primary elections but may well have a preference) and partly that, while vote splitting is in decline, it isn't all that unusual.
I'd also note Florida has a very high elderly population (second only to Maine) so not massively shocking if more Republicans vote early there than elsewhere.
So it's interesting but slightly inclined to take with a pinch of salt.
Outstanding Mail Ballots
If much concern to Democrats are all the mail ballots that have yet to be returned. These should be of concern, but I want to put these statistics in context.
As of this writing, there are 31,958,869 outstanding mail ballots that have not been entered as returned by election officials.
There are many unknowns with the outstanding mail ballots, so it is difficult to take these numbers at face value.
Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an over-count:
Some mail ballots are in transit.
Some states continue to accept mail ballots if postmarked by Election Day.
Some are at election offices but have not been entered into their databases.
It is unclear how election officials manage data for voters who requested a mail ballot, but decided to cast an in-person vote.
Factors in favor of the outstanding mail ballots being an under-count:
Some states do not report mail ballot applications or the number of ballots sent; Texas probably being the largest of these states.
Although not affecting the total number, the mail ballot return rate is too high in states where in-person votes are co-mingled with mail ballots; states like Iowa, among others.
Unfortunately, this migrated up to around 0.65% again within a month. Over the same period, the ICNARC stats showed the median age of those being hospitalised raising from 47 years old to 61 years old, which marches with that.
I urge Bettors with serious money at stake to read it in full rather than my brief extracts (that cant tell the full picture contained in a 10 page Blog)
https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/Early_Vote_Analysis_11_01.html
In his letter, Justin Welby says he is grateful that the new provisions allow churches to remain open for private prayer.
But he says worshippers not having access to the sacraments is a huge loss and that the Church was not consulted about the new provisions.
He says he intends to speak to the government about why certain exemptions have been made, but not others, and adds that the sacramental life of the Church is not an optional extra.
But he adds "we will abide by the law".
The letter follows a statement from the leader of Catholics in England and Wales yesterday calling for the government to provide evidence as to why communal worship should be banned and a similar call from the Muslim Council of Britain.
.....if they don't know by now why this is a problem, God help them.
Biden 51 .. Trump 44 - High Turnout
Biden 50 .. Trump 45 - Low Turnout
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/523928-monmouth-poll-biden-leads-by-7-points-in-pennsylvania
Thanks for that Tony.....
It does imply that they acted not a moment too soon. Another week (if - and it's a big if - the virus spread was continuing at that rate) and we'd have gone over.
I still think he will win but it was enough to make me cash out in at least 2 states.
They're happy to keep large indoor spaces such as churches open, but don't want organised events taking place inside where many people congregate at the same time. The alternative is to shut them, alongside pubs and shops.
And I'll be hoping the model is overpredicting.
I did Biden to get over 75m when it was even money. 1.3 now but it's still buying money.
Trump to get over 70m is available at 1.9. That's great value imo. Done that too now.
Given that he is referring to the 32 milllion outstanding he would surely have listed that as a reason (a massive reason) why they are being overcounted the fact he doesnt makes me think the 32m actually only counts REQUESTED and not sent universally.
Apart from that his plan was fine.
In March, herd immunity was a wicked plan by THEM to kill US. In November, lockdown is a wicked plan by THEM to impoverish and enslave US.
"At first blush, the numbers are bullish for Trump. Republicans are doing slightly better in the partisan distribution of the 2020 early vote than in 2016, in a state Trump won narrowly in 2016.
But, there are two factors suggesting these Florida data are sending too bullish of a signal.
First, as in-person early voting has ended, Democrats should build on their early vote lead on the strength of additional mail ballots to be returned, which are expected todecidedly break Democratic.
Second, like Nevada, there is only so much more Election Day vote possible. In 2016, only 40% of Florida’s vote was cast early. We’re probably looking somewhere around 75% of Florida’s vote cast early, unless Florida will have astronomical turnout unlike anything ever seen before in any state in modern times. That isn’t supported in the early vote we’re seeing so far elsewhere, and it would be very odd to see a huge turnout spike localized in a single state.
So, there is a lot of uncertainty."
That Rudy Giuliani, for example. Jesus. WTF has happened to that guy? He used to be a serious respected politician, didn't he?
I appreciate all the efforts people make to model and forecast what may happen, but there was ample evidence a couple of months ago that just bumbling along with minor measures being taken wasn't going to cut it.
I sense great scope for Conspiracy Theory take-off here. The idea that THEM - the "polidical clarse" and their "unaccountable lackey boffins" - are deliberately producing phoney data and projections so as to have their evil way with the ordinary people. Locking us up, taking our liberties, ruining our finances.
Why would THEY be doing this? Because they love it. It gives them the horn.
Note how even on this high brow blog there are posters succumbing to this way of "thinking".
Also notice Starmer did not reference his 8% proposed corporation tax increase to the CBI
So if you look at large states where everyone receives a postal ballot but you can vote in person, in California only 51% of the 22 million mail ballots have been returned, and only 52% of the 6 million in New Jersey. Whereas in states where you don't automatically get sent a postal vote, it's much higher (e.g. New Hampshire 80%, Michigan 80%).
So it does look like it's a factor.
Applying 160m from the Early Voting Blog and assuming 100m are EV The numbers are
Biden
EV 66M
OTD 16.2M
Total 82.2M
Trump
EV 32M
OTD 41.4M
Total 63.4M
If true and Biden doesnt win EC the system is completely fucked
https://www.rte.ie/news/2020/1101/1175252-leo-varadkar/
Everyone seems to think their hobby is an exception.
There is a phrase for that.