I was thinking more about his winding up of the Telegraph reading masses with Brussels balls in the 1990s, opportunism in the referendum and riling MPs against TMay. Like Howard Kirk, Johnson expects gratitude for solving a problem he largely created. But a bright sort like you knew that, didn't you?
I am not sure Howard Kirk is the best literary analogue of Boris Johnson.
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
If we're going to insist on literary analogues then there's really only one, who provides a rather better fit than a stunted sociology lecturer. George MacDonald Fraser's antiheroic epitome of every public schoolboy fantasy made flesh, leaping from bed to bed, and honour to honour...
Flashy looked dashing in a pair of 'Cherrypickers' breeks and actually had a rather fine military mind, no doubt as a consequence of all that effort expended in avoiding danger, so not really seeing it. I daresay Flash may have been reduced to hiding in a refrigerator if they'd been available tho..
And it becomes increasingly obvious throughout the series that Flashman is actually a decent bloke pretending not to be one (or not pretending to be one), so not a terribly good fit for Johnson.
Equally the whole point of the Wodehouse universe is that even the shits aren't really shits. It is playing Johnson's game to suggest that he fits in there.
I was thinking more about his winding up of the Telegraph reading masses with Brussels balls in the 1990s, opportunism in the referendum and riling MPs against TMay. Like Howard Kirk, Johnson expects gratitude for solving a problem he largely created. But a bright sort like you knew that, didn't you?
I am not sure Howard Kirk is the best literary analogue of Boris Johnson.
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
If we're going to insist on literary analogues then there's really only one, who provides a rather better fit than a stunted sociology lecturer. George MacDonald Fraser's antiheroic epitome of every public schoolboy fantasy made flesh, leaping from bed to bed, and honour to honour...
Flashy looked dashing in a pair of 'Cherrypickers' trousers and actually had a rather fine military mind, no doubt as a consequence of all that effort expended in avoiding danger, so not really seeing it. I daresay Flash may have been reduced to hiding in a refrigerator if they'd been available tho..
As the author had served in the British Army in Burman in WW2 I'm not surprised his creation had at lest some of those attributes.
I also find from Wiki that:
'P. G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."'
My dad loved the books, but I didn't get round to them until skiving in the school library in 5th year, and then also learned to love them. Haven't re-read any of them for a while, I wonder if I'm too infected by wokeness to enjoy them nowadays?
I was thinking more about his winding up of the Telegraph reading masses with Brussels balls in the 1990s, opportunism in the referendum and riling MPs against TMay. Like Howard Kirk, Johnson expects gratitude for solving a problem he largely created. But a bright sort like you knew that, didn't you?
I am not sure Howard Kirk is the best literary analogue of Boris Johnson.
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
If we're going to insist on literary analogues then there's really only one, who provides a rather better fit than a stunted sociology lecturer. George MacDonald Fraser's antiheroic epitome of every public schoolboy fantasy made flesh, leaping from bed to bed, and honour to honour...
Flashy looked dashing in a pair of 'Cherrypickers' trousers and actually had a rather fine military mind, no doubt as a consequence of all that effort expended in avoiding danger, so not really seeing it. I daresay Flash may have been reduced to hiding in a refrigerator if they'd been available tho..
As the author had served in the British Army in Burman in WW2 I'm not surprised his creation had at lest some of those attributes.
I also find from Wiki that:
'P. G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."'
My dad loved the books, but I didn't get round to them until skiving in the school library in 5th year, and then also learned to love them. Haven't re-read any of them for a while, I wonder if I'm too infected by wokeness to enjoy them nowadays?
I don't see that should be a problem. Flash For Freedom is a pretty good polemic against the Glaswegian slave trade, for instance.
That afternoon we were confronted with what would happen to our hospitals if the spread of the virus continued at the rate it was growing. Unless we acted, the NHS would be broken.
Infections were doubling fast. The number of days taken to see that increase was open to question. But the trend was not. Infection numbers were growing in areas which had previously seen low prevalence. And as the numbers infected increased so, with iron logic, did the numbers in our hospitals. We could not know exactly when, or how late, we could leave it and still have time to pull the handbrake to avoid disaster, but sooner or later our NHS hospitals would be full.
Not just administratively at full stretch. But physically overwhelmed. Every bed, every ward occupied. All the capacity built in the Nightingales and requisitioned from the private sector too. The NHS could, and would, cancel the operations of patients waiting for hip replacements and other routine procedures to free up more beds. But that wouldn’t be enough. The numbers infected with Covid-19 and requiring a bed would displace all but emergency cases. And then even those. With every NHS bed full, the capacity of the health service to treat new emergency cases — people who had suffered serious accidents, heart attacks, strokes — would go.
Looking around, that appears to be following warnings papers reported the Govt had been given by the scientists:
eg Metro Oct 30
"PM told ‘every hospital bed will be full by December 17’ without more lockdowns .. They would have no choice but to turn people away, including additional Covid patients, people who have heart attacks, cancer, road accident victims – because there would be no beds to put them in or staff to treat them.
‘There could be a repeat here of the scenes in Lombardy in Italy at the start of the pandemic: the sick put in operating rooms or corridors."
I was thinking more about his winding up of the Telegraph reading masses with Brussels balls in the 1990s, opportunism in the referendum and riling MPs against TMay. Like Howard Kirk, Johnson expects gratitude for solving a problem he largely created. But a bright sort like you knew that, didn't you?
I am not sure Howard Kirk is the best literary analogue of Boris Johnson.
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
If we're going to insist on literary analogues then there's really only one, who provides a rather better fit than a stunted sociology lecturer. George MacDonald Fraser's antiheroic epitome of every public schoolboy fantasy made flesh, leaping from bed to bed, and honour to honour...
Flashy looked dashing in a pair of 'Cherrypickers' trousers and actually had a rather fine military mind, no doubt as a consequence of all that effort expended in avoiding danger, so not really seeing it. I daresay Flash may have been reduced to hiding in a refrigerator if they'd been available tho..
As the author had served in the British Army in Burman in WW2 I'm not surprised his creation had at lest some of those attributes.
I also find from Wiki that:
'P. G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."'
My dad loved the books, but I didn't get round to them until skiving in the school library in 5th year, and then also learned to love them. Haven't re-read any of them for a while, I wonder if I'm too infected by wokeness to enjoy them nowadays?
I was wondering that myself. Rather as student rag mags of the 1970s would read horribly dated today. (And I always used to wonder why he [edit: Flashy, not your dad!!] didn't catch something truly terminal from all those bedroom athletics, BTW: but perhaps that was not playing the game of the fantasy.)
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
While I wholeheartedly agree with most of this, for (1) I believe it should say some hospitals reached capacity. Just as in this wave, the burden is not evenly spread. Unfortunately while the tougher versions of tier three were working, the lower tiers were not, and cases were rising almost across the board. I think it would have been possible to ramp the tiers, but the decision to lockdown-lite has done the job so far. What happens after this week will be interesting.
In the first lockdown, they were trying to transfer cases (non-COVID mostly, I believe) between hospitals to even out the load. Yes, they didn't reach 100% everywhere. But not by much.
The issue with the second lockdown-lite (an apt phrase) was that the Tiers were showing some indication of slowing the growth. But, it seemed quite possible that the resultant peak might be too high anyway. To use a popular cliche, slowing the slide to the cliff edge only works if you stop before the edge.
And it's an axiom of operations research that any organisation collapses before you reach 100% loading.
It was a bit of a disappointment that Private Eye gave up on their "Leaves and Booster" parody after one episode. I can see why, though. Partly, Woodhouse parodies are hard work to do well, but also- BoJo isn't Wooster.
Bertie is an idiot, but he means well. Johnson isn't an idiot, but neither does he mean well.
The Vicomte de Valmont ?
Certainly, scheming enough and interested in sex enough.
Howard Kirk is supposed to be based on sociologist and Radio 4 presenter of 'Thinking Aloud' Laurie Taylor. Taylor has a 'new labour' aura written all over him however the programme last week on gambling 25/11/20 was excellent with interviews with Rebecca Cassidy and Emma Casey both of whom had interesting insights into gambling and anybody who bets on politics is recommended to listen to the programme on BBC sounds.
The fact that Laurie Taylor’s Son, Matthew, headed up Blair’s strategy unit would rather bear that out.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
I was thinking more about his winding up of the Telegraph reading masses with Brussels balls in the 1990s, opportunism in the referendum and riling MPs against TMay. Like Howard Kirk, Johnson expects gratitude for solving a problem he largely created. But a bright sort like you knew that, didn't you?
I am not sure Howard Kirk is the best literary analogue of Boris Johnson.
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
If we're going to insist on literary analogues then there's really only one, who provides a rather better fit than a stunted sociology lecturer. George MacDonald Fraser's antiheroic epitome of every public schoolboy fantasy made flesh, leaping from bed to bed, and honour to honour...
Flashy looked dashing in a pair of 'Cherrypickers' trousers and actually had a rather fine military mind, no doubt as a consequence of all that effort expended in avoiding danger, so not really seeing it. I daresay Flash may have been reduced to hiding in a refrigerator if they'd been available tho..
As the author had served in the British Army in Burman in WW2 I'm not surprised his creation had at lest some of those attributes.
I also find from Wiki that:
'P. G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."'
My dad loved the books, but I didn't get round to them until skiving in the school library in 5th year, and then also learned to love them. Haven't re-read any of them for a while, I wonder if I'm too infected by wokeness to enjoy them nowadays?
I don't see that should be a problem. Flash For Freedom is a pretty good polemic against the Glaswegian slave trade, for instance.
Mebbes aye, mebbes no. The last GMF book I read was his memoir 'The Light's on at Signpost' which I found incredibly disappointing, particularly as 'Quartered Safe Out Here' is possibly the best account of the WWII experience from the British pov, certainly in the Far East theatre. It just seemed a massive, political correctness gone mad moan. If he was still around I'd imagine GMF would have a regular gig with The Speccie with the occasional foray onto Spiked.
I was thinking more about his winding up of the Telegraph reading masses with Brussels balls in the 1990s, opportunism in the referendum and riling MPs against TMay. Like Howard Kirk, Johnson expects gratitude for solving a problem he largely created. But a bright sort like you knew that, didn't you?
I am not sure Howard Kirk is the best literary analogue of Boris Johnson.
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
If we're going to insist on literary analogues then there's really only one, who provides a rather better fit than a stunted sociology lecturer. George MacDonald Fraser's antiheroic epitome of every public schoolboy fantasy made flesh, leaping from bed to bed, and honour to honour...
Flashy looked dashing in a pair of 'Cherrypickers' trousers and actually had a rather fine military mind, no doubt as a consequence of all that effort expended in avoiding danger, so not really seeing it. I daresay Flash may have been reduced to hiding in a refrigerator if they'd been available tho..
As the author had served in the British Army in Burman in WW2 I'm not surprised his creation had at lest some of those attributes.
I also find from Wiki that:
'P. G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."'
GMF's war memoir Quartered Safe Out Here is outstanding.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
The other point is that there is no reason that the hospitalisations would stay in the 100% regular NHS + some of the Nightingale capacity level. Unless something stopped the upward trajectory, you would rapidly be in 100% regular NHS + 100% of stewardesses, students, retirees and St Johns Ambulance volunteers. Then more patients arrive.....
I was thinking more about his winding up of the Telegraph reading masses with Brussels balls in the 1990s, opportunism in the referendum and riling MPs against TMay. Like Howard Kirk, Johnson expects gratitude for solving a problem he largely created. But a bright sort like you knew that, didn't you?
I am not sure Howard Kirk is the best literary analogue of Boris Johnson.
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
If we're going to insist on literary analogues then there's really only one, who provides a rather better fit than a stunted sociology lecturer. George MacDonald Fraser's antiheroic epitome of every public schoolboy fantasy made flesh, leaping from bed to bed, and honour to honour...
Flashy looked dashing in a pair of 'Cherrypickers' trousers and actually had a rather fine military mind, no doubt as a consequence of all that effort expended in avoiding danger, so not really seeing it. I daresay Flash may have been reduced to hiding in a refrigerator if they'd been available tho..
As the author had served in the British Army in Burman in WW2 I'm not surprised his creation had at lest some of those attributes.
I also find from Wiki that:
'P. G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."'
My dad loved the books, but I didn't get round to them until skiving in the school library in 5th year, and then also learned to love them. Haven't re-read any of them for a while, I wonder if I'm too infected by wokeness to enjoy them nowadays?
I don't see that should be a problem. Flash For Freedom is a pretty good polemic against the Glaswegian slave trade, for instance.
Mebbes aye, mebbes no. The last GMF book I read was his memoir 'The Light's on at Signpost' which I found incredibly disappointing, particularly as 'Quartered Safe Out Here' is possibly the best account of the WWII experience from the British pov, certainly in the Far East theatre. It just seemed a massive, political correctness gone mad moan. If he was still around I'd imagine GMF would have a regular gig with The Speccie with the occasional foray onto Spiked.
Yes, I didn't read that but judged from the reviews he wasn't aging well. Definitely a lockdown sceptic if he was still here.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
While I wholeheartedly agree with most of this, for (1) I believe it should say some hospitals reached capacity. Just as in this wave, the burden is not evenly spread. Unfortunately while the tougher versions of tier three were working, the lower tiers were not, and cases were rising almost across the board. I think it would have been possible to ramp the tiers, but the decision to lockdown-lite has done the job so far. What happens after this week will be interesting.
In the first lockdown, they were trying to transfer cases (non-COVID mostly, I believe) between hospitals to even out the load. Yes, they didn't reach 100% everywhere. But not by much.
The issue with the second lockdown-lite (an apt phrase) was that the Tiers were showing some indication of slowing the growth. But, it seemed quite possible that the resultant peak might be too high anyway. To use a popular cliche, slowing the slide to the cliff edge only works if you stop before the edge.
And it's an axiom of operations research that any organisation collapses before you reach 100% loading.
How close to 100% did they get? We’ve been commendably open about a lot of data during the epidemic, but hospital capacity, and occupancy seems more guarded. I accept that it it also not going to be a fixed number, but I do wonder if it would help the narrative to know how close to the edge (or not) we are.
A sure sign that this is about seeking to challenge genuine concerns through legitimate use of procedures, and not timewasting and attemptes to undermine the vote through abuse of the system.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
One of the hand egg teams don't have a QB for tonights game....
Starter Drew Lock, backup Brett Rypien and practice squad veteran Blake Bortles were deemed high-risk close contacts with No3 quarterback Jeff Driskel on Wednesday, the day before Driskel tested positive for Covid-19.
According to a source, the four quarterbacks apparently weren’t wearing their masks the whole time they were together as required by the league’s pandemic protocols.
I was thinking more about his winding up of the Telegraph reading masses with Brussels balls in the 1990s, opportunism in the referendum and riling MPs against TMay. Like Howard Kirk, Johnson expects gratitude for solving a problem he largely created. But a bright sort like you knew that, didn't you?
I am not sure Howard Kirk is the best literary analogue of Boris Johnson.
He is dislikeable enough, for sure. I was never convinced that "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in 1979" as the TV adaption would have it. Much more likely, Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4.
For Johnson's canvassing style, we would surely find it hard to beat Bertie Wooster in "Much Obliged, Jeeves", who I recollect used the immortal line
"Do you want to see our foreign policy humped up?"
Wooster's canvassing patter, "steady hand on the helm of the Great Ship of State" is pure Boris Johnson. But Bertie was essentially unambitious, so maybe it is Lord Sidcup?
Certainly, Boris seems to have escaped from the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel. It would be very nice to return him there.
If we're going to insist on literary analogues then there's really only one, who provides a rather better fit than a stunted sociology lecturer. George MacDonald Fraser's antiheroic epitome of every public schoolboy fantasy made flesh, leaping from bed to bed, and honour to honour...
Flashy looked dashing in a pair of 'Cherrypickers' trousers and actually had a rather fine military mind, no doubt as a consequence of all that effort expended in avoiding danger, so not really seeing it. I daresay Flash may have been reduced to hiding in a refrigerator if they'd been available tho..
As the author had served in the British Army in Burman in WW2 I'm not surprised his creation had at lest some of those attributes.
I also find from Wiki that:
'P. G. Wodehouse said of Flashman, "If ever there was a time when I felt that 'watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet' stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman."'
GMF's war memoir Quartered Safe Out Here is outstanding.
Indeed, iot is on my bookshelf and it is what I was thinking of.
Howard Kirk is supposed to be based on sociologist and Radio 4 presenter of 'Thinking Aloud' Laurie Taylor. Taylor has a 'new labour' aura written all over him however the programme last week on gambling 25/11/20 was excellent with interviews with Rebecca Cassidy and Emma Casey both of whom had interesting insights into gambling and anybody who bets on politics is recommended to listen to the programme on BBC sounds.
The fact that Laurie Taylor’s Son, Matthew, headed up Blair’s strategy unit would rather bear that out.
I notice the wife of PC Principal at Eton worked for Blair.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
Does Mr Gove normally write like that? He seemed to be writing for backbench bears of little brain - didn't even tax their neurons with the concept of a timelag between infection and hospitalization.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
How many actual beds did they have left in the hospital, unocupied?
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Not greatly optimistic about New Year tbh. Think we'll be back to square one come January.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Not greatly optimistic about New Year tbh. Think we'll be back to square one come January.
The way things are looking in England at least case numbers will be well down by Christmas and that will again give people a false sense of security and even more likely to go full tilt with their hall pass.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
Mine is about 150% of the first wave, and with staff off like flies, including myself (isolating*) and Mrs Foxy a confirmed case. It is a bit more orderly than the first phase, but stretched very thin out there. Pretty much all non urgent surgery has stopped as inpatient.
Internal emails seem to think that we are getting the pfizer vaccine within weeks, then community staff shortly after. Storage and logistics makes it more problematic for the general public, as will need to travel to immunisation centres. With a bit of luck should be properly immunised by Burns Night.
* I still haven't caught it despite sharing a living room and kitchen with Mrs Foxy. Hard to see how.
If they'd brought in the Tier system a week or two earlier, and been tougher in assigning them (such as putting places in the Tiers we currently are in), we'd very possibly have been able to avoid the soft lockdown we had.
That's something the media commentators and politicians complaining "But how come we're mostly a Tier or two higher than before the lockdown; doesn't that mean it was pointless?" are missing.
The reason we had the lockdown was that we'd not been tough enough before!
Most of us were probably too low. Every fat dot that was above the zero line from left to right wasn't in a tough enough tier - and some of these were already in Tier 3. And even the smaller dots that were high up were going to become fat dots pretty quickly.
So, although Tier 1 can work, it's very much unreliable, which is why very few people are in it now.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Not greatly optimistic about New Year tbh. Think we'll be back to square one come January.
On the twelfth day of Christmas My true love gave to me A bed in a Nightingale Hospital
On HS2, if the current leader of Bradford council becomes West Yorkshire mayor, then I expect she'll be pushing for Northern Powerhouse Rail, and a new station in Bradford, ahead of the vanity project serving Leeds.
I know I'm the only PBer interested in this election, but I'll keep mentioning it when vaguely relevant.
You're not the only one, as a Labour member I voted for my preferences earlier this week.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
Mine is about 150% of the first wave, and with staff off like flies, including myself (isolating*) and Mrs Foxy a confirmed case. It is a bit more orderly than the first phase, but stretched very thin out there. Pretty much all non urgent surgery has stopped as inpatient.
Internal emails seem to think that we are getting the pfizer vaccine within weeks, then community staff shortly after. Storage and logistics makes it more problematic for the general public, as will need to travel to immunisation centres. With a bit of luck should be properly immunised by Burns Night.
* I still haven't caught it despite sharing a living room and kitchen with Mrs Foxy. Hard to see how.
Cross immunity? Have already had it asymptomatically? Not trying hard enough? I shared regular office coffee meetings with a colleague who was ill, but not I’ll enough in the first wave to get a test. Both he and his wife later showed antibodies. My colleague moaned for three weeks about coffee not tasting right. I’m still amazed I didn’t get it off him.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
Indeed. The one thing that should reasonably be argued over is which restrictions have the best cost-to-benefit ratio, but that damn R ratio just cannot be allowed stay above 1 for too long.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Not greatly optimistic about New Year tbh. Think we'll be back to square one come January.
I’m more optimistic. We will see vaccination having an effect, the tiers are stricter than before, and no one does anything in January anyway.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
Mine is about 150% of the first wave, and with staff off like flies, including myself (isolating*) and Mrs Foxy a confirmed case. It is a bit more orderly than the first phase, but stretched very thin out there. Pretty much all non urgent surgery has stopped as inpatient.
Internal emails seem to think that we are getting the pfizer vaccine within weeks, then community staff shortly after. Storage and logistics makes it more problematic for the general public, as will need to travel to immunisation centres. With a bit of luck should be properly immunised by Burns Night.
* I still haven't caught it despite sharing a living room and kitchen with Mrs Foxy. Hard to see how.
Alex dowcett the cyclist tested positive a couple of weeks ago. He was in training for the hour record and said in the preceeding few weeks he had only visited a supermarket a couple of times and that was it in terms of interactions with other people. He lives with his partner in a tiny flat, she hasn't caught it.
I guess perhaps she had it previously and nevet knew. But strange old fellow.is this covid.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
Mine is about 150% of the first wave, and with staff off like flies, including myself (isolating*) and Mrs Foxy a confirmed case. It is a bit more orderly than the first phase, but stretched very thin out there. Pretty much all non urgent surgery has stopped as inpatient.
Internal emails seem to think that we are getting the pfizer vaccine within weeks, then community staff shortly after. Storage and logistics makes it more problematic for the general public, as will need to travel to immunisation centres. With a bit of luck should be properly immunised by Burns Night.
* I still haven't caught it despite sharing a living room and kitchen with Mrs Foxy. Hard to see how.
Cross immunity? Have already had it asymptomatically? Not trying hard enough? I shared regular office coffee meetings with a colleague who was ill, but not I’ll enough in the first wave to get a test. Both he and his wife later showed antibodies. My colleague moaned for three weeks about coffee not tasting right. I’m still amazed I didn’t get it off him.
It is not just me, my neighbour had it, wife not, and I know several other households where only one has it. I was negative for antibodies in July, but not tested again since. I was swabbed negative a week ago, and fine since. Cross resistance, Zinc and vitamin D, or just luck of the devil. Who knows?
One of the hand egg teams don't have a QB for tonights game....
Starter Drew Lock, backup Brett Rypien and practice squad veteran Blake Bortles were deemed high-risk close contacts with No3 quarterback Jeff Driskel on Wednesday, the day before Driskel tested positive for Covid-19.
According to a source, the four quarterbacks apparently weren’t wearing their masks the whole time they were together as required by the league’s pandemic protocols.
Professional sportspeople are having a terrible pandemic.
Lewis Hamilton has been living in a big camper van all year, meeting only with his trainer. Pretty much every other sportsman seems to be behaving like an idiot, with infection rates way above the population average.
If they'd brought in the Tier system a week or two earlier, and been tougher in assigning them (such as putting places in the Tiers we currently are in), we'd very possibly have been able to avoid the soft lockdown we had.
That's something the media commentators and politicians complaining "But how come we're mostly a Tier or two higher than before the lockdown; doesn't that mean it was pointless?" are missing.
The reason we had the lockdown was that we'd not been tough enough before!
Most of us were probably too low. Every fat dot that was above the zero line from left to right wasn't in a tough enough tier - and some of these were already in Tier 3. And even the smaller dots that were high up were going to become fat dots pretty quickly.
So, although Tier 1 can work, it's very much unreliable, which is why very few people are in it now.
In the absence of a proper isolation system I agree with this.
I'm not a fan of the 'If you don't like place X, move to Y' kind of argument, but the obsession some people have with Palestine as the most significant issue that exists (of course people can care about it) really does make you question whether a lot of them would be happier to just live there already.
On HS2, if the current leader of Bradford council becomes West Yorkshire mayor, then I expect she'll be pushing for Northern Powerhouse Rail, and a new station in Bradford, ahead of the vanity project serving Leeds.
I know I'm the only PBer interested in this election, but I'll keep mentioning it when vaguely relevant.
You're not the only one, as a Labour member I voted for my preferences earlier this week.
As a Lib Dem I voted for Stewart Golton.
Just looked him up:
"Vice President of Leeds & District Allotment Gardeners Association."
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
Vital being a very appropriate word given the risks involved...
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
There is a difference between prioritising some things over others for reasons of emotion and mental health and so on, and refusing to accept certain facts even if they are proven beyond a reasonable doubt (obviously this will differ issue to issue).
They might end up at the same outcome, for the same reason, but one is done with eyes open and the other is not.
On HS2, if the current leader of Bradford council becomes West Yorkshire mayor, then I expect she'll be pushing for Northern Powerhouse Rail, and a new station in Bradford, ahead of the vanity project serving Leeds.
I know I'm the only PBer interested in this election, but I'll keep mentioning it when vaguely relevant.
You're not the only one, as a Labour member I voted for my preferences earlier this week.
As a Lib Dem I voted for Stewart Golton.
Just looked him up:
"Vice President of Leeds & District Allotment Gardeners Association."
One of the hand egg teams don't have a QB for tonights game....
Starter Drew Lock, backup Brett Rypien and practice squad veteran Blake Bortles were deemed high-risk close contacts with No3 quarterback Jeff Driskel on Wednesday, the day before Driskel tested positive for Covid-19.
According to a source, the four quarterbacks apparently weren’t wearing their masks the whole time they were together as required by the league’s pandemic protocols.
Professional sportspeople are having a terrible pandemic.
Lewis Hamilton has been living in a big camper van all year, meeting only with his trainer. Pretty much every other sportsman seems to be behaving like an idiot, with infection rates way above the population average.
The hand egg has been a total shit show. The player association offered to the owners that they would be prepared to go with a bubble system, but the owners said daily testings would be sufficient. Every week, teams have players out positive, one team this week is missing 20 players who are positive.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
There is a difference between prioritising some things over others for reasons of emotion and mental health and so on, and refusing to accept certain facts even if they are proven beyond a reasonable doubt (obviously this will differ issue to issue).
They might end up at the same outcome, for the same reason, but one is done with eyes open and the other is not.
The link that I think you are missing, is that admitting certain facts would then make people with such beliefs wrong.
You are talking about over turning someone's internal emotional and psychological view of the world.
In the face of such things, denial is a protective reaction.
There is a an amusing chapter in "On Global Thermonuclear War" by Herman Kahn on exactly this kind of reaction to objective facts.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
Mine is about 150% of the first wave, and with staff off like flies, including myself (isolating*) and Mrs Foxy a confirmed case. It is a bit more orderly than the first phase, but stretched very thin out there. Pretty much all non urgent surgery has stopped as inpatient.
Internal emails seem to think that we are getting the pfizer vaccine within weeks, then community staff shortly after. Storage and logistics makes it more problematic for the general public, as will need to travel to immunisation centres. With a bit of luck should be properly immunised by Burns Night.
* I still haven't caught it despite sharing a living room and kitchen with Mrs Foxy. Hard to see how.
Cross immunity? Have already had it asymptomatically? Not trying hard enough? I shared regular office coffee meetings with a colleague who was ill, but not I’ll enough in the first wave to get a test. Both he and his wife later showed antibodies. My colleague moaned for three weeks about coffee not tasting right. I’m still amazed I didn’t get it off him.
It is not just me, my neighbour had it, wife not, and I know several other households where only one has it. I was negative for antibodies in July, but not tested again since. I was swabbed negative a week ago, and fine since. Cross resistance, Zinc and vitamin D, or just luck of the devil. Who knows?
The attack rate, even for members of the household, is pretty low. I think I saw 10% somewhere. This is the over-dispersion (superspreader) effect: most people with COVID infect zero others. Some infect one or two, but some infect dozens or hundreds, and that's where most of the spread comes from.
We lost all those seats in County Durham because we didn't spend enough time talking about Palestine.
Those weren't scales, they were the chains of the neo-imperialist zionist oppressor which has shady undue influence over the media and politicians, and this is definitely not racist. Or something.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
How many actual beds did they have left in the hospital, unocupied?
Not sure tbh. Even though she doesnt work on a covid ward whenever there was a space they were asked to take one. It's come off the peak during last week thankfully.
Howard Kirk is supposed to be based on sociologist and Radio 4 presenter of 'Thinking Aloud' Laurie Taylor.
So, I was partly right when I wrote "Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4."
What is the evidence for Laurie Taylor?
From my viewing post, virtually every Arts & Humanities Professor in Oxbridge in the 1990s was behaving like Howard Kirk.
'The History Man' is a decade or so earlier, but I'd say there was no serious shortage of role models
The History Man is a great book (indeed, there wasn't much written by Malcolm Bradbury, that wasn't great - and let's not forget he also wrote a brilliant TV series satirising the EEC).
However, as someone who spent three years at an Oxbridge College in the mid-1990s, I didn't see any characters that were like Howard Kirk. Indeed, the humanities professors and teachers I knew had a pretty wide gamut of views.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
The study of human behaviour is a science too. How many psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists have been spoken to alongside the epidemiologists and economists?
I once read a harrowing tale of two deep sea divers in a decompression chamber on a ship about to go down. They had a choice of getting out and possibly suffering a crippling case of the bends, or staying with the ship in the hope they might get found in time before their oxygen ran out. They chose the latter - they were active people and the thought of the lifetime effects of the bends meant they wanted to take their chances in the chamber. They didn’t make it. Was that rational? To a bookish individual unfazed by staying at home no, but to a diver yes. Similarly there will come a point where people say they are not living but existing. Selfish? Yes, but in all societies and all people the communitarian spirit has limits. Those limits differ but it is absurd to call them “stupid”.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
It's the time gap that really confuses people - it's really hard to appreciate that the numbers you see are really from infections two weeks ago.
The thing with sports people acting like idiots re covid. The chances of a super fit athlete in their 20 or 30s dying is basically zero. However, the big worry must be long covid. You may be screwed for at least the whole season, if not ever (as the margins in some sports that are basically pure power output e.g. atheltics is so small) I believe there is a top tennis player complaining of it 6 months after having covid that they just aren't able to play at the same level.
Something like cycling if COVID knocks a few % off your FTP that coule be difference between being in a world tour team or not.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
Indeed. The one thing that should reasonably be argued over is which restrictions have the best cost-to-benefit ratio, but that damn R ratio just cannot be allowed stay above 1 for too long.
I'd hate to think any party will fight the next election behind the slogan "Let's Get Covid Done" but if the present parliament buggers around with Coronavirus the way the previous parliament buggered around with Brexit I can well imagine us being in the throes of a mopping up operation well into 2024.
I'm not a fan of the 'If you don't like place X, move to Y' kind of argument, but the obsession some people have with Palestine as the most significant issue that exists (of course people can care about it) really does make you question whether a lot of them would be happier to just live there already.
I think the point is to identify an injustice a long way away that you can be a prat about at no personal effort or risk, just by going on a protest innit. If they moved to Palestine they would all be activists about racial oppression in the UK.
And there's Raab on r4 just now saying that the government "takes the idea of parliamentary accountability very seriously" as if that was a really admirable choice they had made when they didn't have to.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
How many actual beds did they have left in the hospital, unocupied?
Not sure tbh. Even though she doesnt work on a covid ward whenever there was a space they were asked to take one. It's come off the peak during last week thankfully.
It isn't just an issue of whether or not the NHS is "overwhelmed" by Covid. Every Covid in-patient is consuming resources that could otherwise be used to treat someone else with a different life-threatening condition. What Gove said wasn't an exaggeration but, rather, an understatement.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
The study of human behaviour is a science too. How many psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists have been spoken to alongside the epidemiologists and economists?
I once read a harrowing tale of two deep sea divers in a decompression chamber on a ship about to go down. They had a choice of getting out and possibly suffering a crippling case of the bends, or staying with the ship in the hope they might get found in time before their oxygen ran out. They chose the latter - they were active people and the thought of the lifetime effects of the bends meant they wanted to take their chances in the chamber. They didn’t make it. Was that rational? To a bookish individual unfazed by staying at home no, but to a diver yes. Similarly there will come a point where people say they are not living but existing. Selfish? Yes, but in all societies and all people the communitarian spirit has limits. Those limits differ but it is absurd to call them “stupid”.
Nearly all the cases where you have deco events like that - it was a choice between death and death. Decompress the chamber in time - dead. Go down with the ship - dead probably, with a chance that someone might get an airline down to the chamber.
One of the hand egg teams don't have a QB for tonights game....
Starter Drew Lock, backup Brett Rypien and practice squad veteran Blake Bortles were deemed high-risk close contacts with No3 quarterback Jeff Driskel on Wednesday, the day before Driskel tested positive for Covid-19.
According to a source, the four quarterbacks apparently weren’t wearing their masks the whole time they were together as required by the league’s pandemic protocols.
Professional sportspeople are having a terrible pandemic.
Lewis Hamilton has been living in a big camper van all year, meeting only with his trainer. Pretty much every other sportsman seems to be behaving like an idiot, with infection rates way above the population average.
The hand egg has been a total shit show. The player association offered to the owners that they would be prepared to go with a bubble system, but the owners said daily testings would be sufficient. Every week, teams have players out positive, one team this week is missing 20 players who are positive.
The basketball tried doing a bubble system over the summer, with all the teams in one place, and the players treated it as one big game to get out or to get people in - mostly ‘professional’ young ladies.
It seems to be a mentality problem among competitive people, they don’t comprehend the nature of the problem and the possible result of their behaviour.
One thing i was thinking...although as far as i know the behavioural insight unit at #10 doesn't exist anymore, with the leading lights running their own consultancy. We really should be calling on their expertise to maximise vaccine uptake. They were very quietly a big success during Cameron's time in government.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
It depends whether you believe doctors like Foxy are liars about occupancy in their hospitals or not.
Seems pretty clear - if the upward advance of hospitalisation hadn't stopped, we would have reached and passed the first peak quite rapidly.
My wifes hospital hit almost double the first wave last week (330 v 170). With almost 900 staff absent either sick or isolating. To me they were already overwhelmed.
Mine is about 150% of the first wave, and with staff off like flies, including myself (isolating*) and Mrs Foxy a confirmed case. It is a bit more orderly than the first phase, but stretched very thin out there. Pretty much all non urgent surgery has stopped as inpatient.
Internal emails seem to think that we are getting the pfizer vaccine within weeks, then community staff shortly after. Storage and logistics makes it more problematic for the general public, as will need to travel to immunisation centres. With a bit of luck should be properly immunised by Burns Night.
* I still haven't caught it despite sharing a living room and kitchen with Mrs Foxy. Hard to see how.
Cross immunity? Have already had it asymptomatically? Not trying hard enough? I shared regular office coffee meetings with a colleague who was ill, but not I’ll enough in the first wave to get a test. Both he and his wife later showed antibodies. My colleague moaned for three weeks about coffee not tasting right. I’m still amazed I didn’t get it off him.
It is not just me, my neighbour had it, wife not, and I know several other households where only one has it. I was negative for antibodies in July, but not tested again since. I was swabbed negative a week ago, and fine since. Cross resistance, Zinc and vitamin D, or just luck of the devil. Who knows?
The attack rate, even for members of the household, is pretty low. I think I saw 10% somewhere. This is the over-dispersion (superspreader) effect: most people with COVID infect zero others. Some infect one or two, but some infect dozens or hundreds, and that's where most of the spread comes from.
--AS
Its a weird bug. We knew that from the original British case, who infected half (but only half) of a ski chalet over a week, but then passed it on via a casual pint in a pub after getting home.
Howard Kirk is supposed to be based on sociologist and Radio 4 presenter of 'Thinking Aloud' Laurie Taylor.
So, I was partly right when I wrote "Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4."
What is the evidence for Laurie Taylor?
From my viewing post, virtually every Arts & Humanities Professor in Oxbridge in the 1990s was behaving like Howard Kirk.
'The History Man' is a decade or so earlier, but I'd say there was no serious shortage of role models
The History Man is a great book (indeed, there wasn't much written by Malcolm Bradbury, that wasn't great - and let's not forget he also wrote a brilliant TV series satirising the EEC).
However, as someone who spent three years at an Oxbridge College in the mid-1990s, I didn't see any characters that were like Howard Kirk. Indeed, the humanities professors and teachers I knew had a pretty wide gamut of views.
It was not so much their "wide gamut of views" that I was thinking about ....
Howard Kirk is supposed to be based on sociologist and Radio 4 presenter of 'Thinking Aloud' Laurie Taylor.
So, I was partly right when I wrote "Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4."
What is the evidence for Laurie Taylor?
From my viewing post, virtually every Arts & Humanities Professor in Oxbridge in the 1990s was behaving like Howard Kirk.
'The History Man' is a decade or so earlier, but I'd say there was no serious shortage of role models
The History Man is a great book (indeed, there wasn't much written by Malcolm Bradbury, that wasn't great - and let's not forget he also wrote a brilliant TV series satirising the EEC).
However, as someone who spent three years at an Oxbridge College in the mid-1990s, I didn't see any characters that were like Howard Kirk. Indeed, the humanities professors and teachers I knew had a pretty wide gamut of views.
I had wondered whether the similarity between your username & that of a certain Cambridge bulletin board regular was co-incidental or not.
Its a weird bug. We knew that from the original British case, who infected half (but only half) of a ski chalet over a week, but then passed it on via a casual pint in a pub after getting home.
I cannot see how I wasn't exposed.
What self respecting virus wants to be infected with the Yellow Peril ?!? ....
Its a weird bug. We knew that from the original British case, who infected half (but only half) of a ski chalet over a week, but then passed it on via a casual pint in a pub after getting home.
I cannot see how I wasn't exposed.
What self respecting virus wants to be infected with the Yellow Peril ?!? ....
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
He is a snivelling lying toerag, an obnoxious backstabbing creep and lies as a matter of course.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
He is a snivelling lying toerag, an obnoxious backstabbing creep and lies as a matter of course.
I think you’re a bit unfair there Malc.
To snivelling lying toerags, obnoxious backstabbing creeps and liars.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
He is a snivelling lying toerag, an obnoxious backstabbing creep and lies as a matter of course.
I think you’re a bit unfair there Malc.
To snivelling lying toerags, obnoxious backstabbing creeps and liars.
I can see that you're both rightly distressed at how he treated Boris
Howard Kirk is supposed to be based on sociologist and Radio 4 presenter of 'Thinking Aloud' Laurie Taylor.
So, I was partly right when I wrote "Prof Howard Kirk would have ended up his shagging career as a left-wing Master of an Oxbridge College and a talking head on Radio 4."
What is the evidence for Laurie Taylor?
From my viewing post, virtually every Arts & Humanities Professor in Oxbridge in the 1990s was behaving like Howard Kirk.
'The History Man' is a decade or so earlier, but I'd say there was no serious shortage of role models
The History Man is a great book (indeed, there wasn't much written by Malcolm Bradbury, that wasn't great - and let's not forget he also wrote a brilliant TV series satirising the EEC).
However, as someone who spent three years at an Oxbridge College in the mid-1990s, I didn't see any characters that were like Howard Kirk. Indeed, the humanities professors and teachers I knew had a pretty wide gamut of views.
I had wondered whether the similarity between your username & that of a certain Cambridge bulletin board regular was co-incidental or not.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
He is a snivelling lying toerag, an obnoxious backstabbing creep and lies as a matter of course.
I think you’re a bit unfair there Malc.
To snivelling lying toerags, obnoxious backstabbing creeps and liars.
I can see that you're both rightly distressed at how he treated Boris
That was a point in his favour, if anything...but he is irredeemable.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
He is a snivelling lying toerag, an obnoxious backstabbing creep and lies as a matter of course.
I think you’re a bit unfair there Malc.
To snivelling lying toerags, obnoxious backstabbing creeps and liars.
For sure , I think I could have gone on for about an hour and not been 100% accurate of how bad he really is.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
Is it a lie? I am reasonably certain that without a lockdown or equivalent we will quickly get to a stage where hospitals are seriously overwhelmed, whether or not "every hospital bed" is swamped. Does anyone think otherwise, hoax-believers apart? And if it is a lie what is Gove's real belief and real motivation in telling it?
He is a snivelling lying toerag, an obnoxious backstabbing creep and lies as a matter of course.
I think you’re a bit unfair there Malc.
To snivelling lying toerags, obnoxious backstabbing creeps and liars.
I can see that you're both rightly distressed at how he treated Boris
Two cheeks of the same arse, though Gove is the creepiest
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
We haven’t seen true exponential, though, have we? PB’ers with longer sentences will remember the mathematical modelling posted here by Henrietta and whichever hideaway account Sean was using at the time, projecting billions of global infections by now and millions of UK deaths. But we haven’t seen anything like that.
What we’ve seen is waves of infection that appear to gather speed pretty much regardless of whatever precautions and restrictions are in place at the time, but then level off much earlier than you’d expect from the proportions of people supposedly infected. My completely amateur conclusion is that a lot more people have some sort of innate resistance to this virus than has so far been proven.
Malthouse worth covering for small stakes at 200/1 next PM then? Again with Brexit, you can imagine policing will be prominent in January.
There are three names in the quotation in the header, and my money would be on the middle one flying a kite. Malthouse is already a junior minister in the Home Office so if the Home Office is doing a bad job, why make him Home Secretary?
Kit Malthouse, the policing minister who was Johnson’s deputy mayor for policing in London and is a confidant of the PM, is favourite to take over the job, with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab also in the frame.
Gove finally ruined his chances yesterday with his call for MPs to back the new lockdown because every hospital bed will be swamped otherwise. He's blow it once and for all with backbenchers I reckon.
It's just such a blatant lie. Gove is a liar and far too treacherous.
What is it with people and this denial of how exponential growth works?
Gove was right: with a doubling time of (for the sake of argument) 10 days and a lag between infection and hospital admissions of about two weeks, if you wait for your hospitals to fill up before you impose a lockdown then you are far, far too late: at that point you’ve got roughly another doubling of cases to deal with before the lockdown starts to have any kind of effect.
If instead you don’t lockdown at all, then your health services become completely overwhelmed & non-covid cases start to die needlessly, as is apparently happening in some rural parts of the US right now.
You /have/ to lockdown early, because anything else is too late. That’s the way exponential growth with delayed onset works.
The facts...
1) during the first wave/lockdown, hospitals reached capacity. Everything was maxed out, and that by essentially stopping the NHS doing anything else. 2) the Nightingale hospitals are very much a last minute resort - to be manned by the retired, the students and and airline stewardesses 3) They nearly got pulled into use, none the less. 4) in the recent second wave, we were a few days away from reaching similar levels of hospital occupancy.
Without the Tiers/Lockdown, there was nothing to stop the same situation as 1) occurring followed by the Nightingale's going into operation, followed by.. extreme triage.... a few days later.
What the lockdown skeptics /also/ ignore that in this situation, your available medical staff are not some renewable resource that you can replenish at will. They are human beings subject to ordinary human limits & they /will/ burn out. You cannot run your medical staff on the kinds of shifts people were doing back in April for very long before people start failing on you. Which then compounds the effect on the rest of the staff.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
That there is still such a thing as a lockdown sceptic in parliament is just another illustration of the truly terrifying levels of stupidity among our professional politicians.
It's not about stupidity.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
The study of human behaviour is a science too. How many psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists have been spoken to alongside the epidemiologists and economists?
I once read a harrowing tale of two deep sea divers in a decompression chamber on a ship about to go down. They had a choice of getting out and possibly suffering a crippling case of the bends, or staying with the ship in the hope they might get found in time before their oxygen ran out. They chose the latter - they were active people and the thought of the lifetime effects of the bends meant they wanted to take their chances in the chamber. They didn’t make it. Was that rational? To a bookish individual unfazed by staying at home no, but to a diver yes. Similarly there will come a point where people say they are not living but existing. Selfish? Yes, but in all societies and all people the communitarian spirit has limits. Those limits differ but it is absurd to call them “stupid”.
How do we know about that story if they didn’t make it?
Comments
Equally the whole point of the Wodehouse universe is that even the shits aren't really shits. It is playing Johnson's game to suggest that he fits in there.
Looking around, that appears to be following warnings papers reported the Govt had been given by the scientists:
eg Metro Oct 30
"PM told ‘every hospital bed will be full by December 17’ without more lockdowns
..
They would have no choice but to turn people away, including additional Covid patients, people who have heart attacks, cancer, road accident victims – because there would be no beds to put them in or staff to treat them.
‘There could be a repeat here of the scenes in Lombardy in Italy at the start of the pandemic: the sick put in operating rooms or corridors."
https://metro.co.uk/2020/10/30/pm-told-every-hospital-bed-will-be-full-by-december-17-without-more-lockdowns-13505226/
The issue with the second lockdown-lite (an apt phrase) was that the Tiers were showing some indication of slowing the growth. But, it seemed quite possible that the resultant peak might be too high anyway. To use a popular cliche, slowing the slide to the cliff edge only works if you stop before the edge.
And it's an axiom of operations research that any organisation collapses before you reach 100% loading.
Certainly, scheming enough and interested in sex enough.
Completely trashing the ability of the NHS to treat anyone at all seems like it might something that would be bad for the economy. This is why there are no good choices available to us. Until we can get everyone vaccinated we get to choose from a menu of bad and slightly less bad. As Gove says in his article, there is no simple trade-off between human lives and economic costs to make here. It doesn’t work like that.
The last GMF book I read was his memoir 'The Light's on at Signpost' which I found incredibly disappointing, particularly as 'Quartered Safe Out Here' is possibly the best account of the WWII experience from the British pov, certainly in the Far East theatre. It just seemed a massive, political correctness gone mad moan. If he was still around I'd imagine GMF would have a regular gig with The Speccie with the occasional foray onto Spiked.
Exclusive: Fears grow of mass infection at Newcastle United as another two players test positive for Covid-19.
Two new cases identified take the total number at the club to five and there are growing concerns more will follow over the next 48 hours
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2020/11/29/exclusive-fears-grow-mass-infection-newcastle-united-another/
A sure sign that this is about seeking to challenge genuine concerns through legitimate use of procedures, and not timewasting and attemptes to undermine the vote through abuse of the system.
F1: post-race ramble will either be very concise or missing due to being short on time.
Severely miffed by the Perez situation, but these things happen. Staggered by the Ferrari pace totally vanishing from qualifying.
From case data
From hospitalisation data
Starter Drew Lock, backup Brett Rypien and practice squad veteran Blake Bortles were deemed high-risk close contacts with No3 quarterback Jeff Driskel on Wednesday, the day before Driskel tested positive for Covid-19.
According to a source, the four quarterbacks apparently weren’t wearing their masks the whole time they were together as required by the league’s pandemic protocols.
I have this funny feeling when others were getting banned who she / he doesn't agree with, it was all well done twitter for banning the vile racists.
For a sizeable chunk of people in the world, prioritising facts and emotion stimuli according to a scientific order is antithetical to their experience as human beings. Quite simply, if you put things in the logical, best-outcomes order, then you appear immoral or insane to them.
We have had, here many examples of people saying that they will break rules because human contact is so important to them.
Many people will travel to see their families this Christmas, because it is *vital* to them.
We lost all those seats in County Durham because we didn't spend enough time talking about Palestine.
Internal emails seem to think that we are getting the pfizer vaccine within weeks, then community staff shortly after. Storage and logistics makes it more problematic for the general public, as will need to travel to immunisation centres. With a bit of luck should be properly immunised by Burns Night.
* I still haven't caught it despite sharing a living room and kitchen with Mrs Foxy. Hard to see how.
That's something the media commentators and politicians complaining "But how come we're mostly a Tier or two higher than before the lockdown; doesn't that mean it was pointless?" are missing.
The reason we had the lockdown was that we'd not been tough enough before!
Most of us were probably too low. Every fat dot that was above the zero line from left to right wasn't in a tough enough tier - and some of these were already in Tier 3. And even the smaller dots that were high up were going to become fat dots pretty quickly.
So, although Tier 1 can work, it's very much unreliable, which is why very few people are in it now.
My true love gave to me
A bed in a Nightingale Hospital
I guess perhaps she had it previously and nevet knew. But strange old fellow.is this covid.
Lewis Hamilton has been living in a big camper van all year, meeting only with his trainer. Pretty much every other sportsman seems to be behaving like an idiot, with infection rates way above the population average.
Do they associated all Muslims with er.... certain actions of their co-religionists? Or do they realise that would be racist?
"Vice President of Leeds & District Allotment Gardeners Association."
They might end up at the same outcome, for the same reason, but one is done with eyes open and the other is not.
You are talking about over turning someone's internal emotional and psychological view of the world.
In the face of such things, denial is a protective reaction.
There is a an amusing chapter in "On Global Thermonuclear War" by Herman Kahn on exactly this kind of reaction to objective facts.
--AS
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2020/11/bahrain-post-race-analysis-2020.html
However, as someone who spent three years at an Oxbridge College in the mid-1990s, I didn't see any characters that were like Howard Kirk. Indeed, the humanities professors and teachers I knew had a pretty wide gamut of views.
I once read a harrowing tale of two deep sea divers in a decompression chamber on a ship about to go down. They had a choice of getting out and possibly suffering a crippling case of the bends, or staying with the ship in the hope they might get found in time before their oxygen ran out. They chose the latter - they were active people and the thought of the lifetime effects of the bends meant they wanted to take their chances in the chamber. They didn’t make it. Was that rational? To a bookish individual unfazed by staying at home no, but to a diver yes. Similarly there will come a point where people say they are not living but existing. Selfish? Yes, but in all societies and all people the communitarian spirit has limits. Those limits differ but it is absurd to call them “stupid”.
Something like cycling if COVID knocks a few % off your FTP that coule be difference between being in a world tour team or not.
Who wants to tell him...
And there's Raab on r4 just now saying that the government "takes the idea of parliamentary accountability very seriously" as if that was a really admirable choice they had made when they didn't have to.
Despair.
It seems to be a mentality problem among competitive people, they don’t comprehend the nature of the problem and the possible result of their behaviour.
I cannot see how I wasn't exposed.
So she has compared herself to white supremacists...
Khan surely deserves a little bit of a battle - I can't currently get that enthusiastic about Shaun Bailey. Perhaps the LDs can make it interesting.
Lord knows who this Brian Rose character who's trading at 'contender' odds on BF is.
Edit: It'd be nice if BF at least listed the new LD candidate!
To snivelling lying toerags, obnoxious backstabbing creeps and liars.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/29/nhs-enlist-sensible-celebrities-coronavirus-vaccine-take-up
:-)
What we’ve seen is waves of infection that appear to gather speed pretty much regardless of whatever precautions and restrictions are in place at the time, but then level off much earlier than you’d expect from the proportions of people supposedly infected. My completely amateur conclusion is that a lot more people have some sort of innate resistance to this virus than has so far been proven.