Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
Agreement apparently reached on procurement rules so of course some clueless Leavers on twitter are now moaning .
Procurement is part of every trade deal but the EU hate overwhelms any common sense or logic . It’s always the same story , ignoring that this allows UK companies to be treated fairly in the EU but of course it’s always seen as some EU plot to screw the UK.
As for Farage any deal he’ll scream betrayal over. He needs to just STFU !
On the contrary, he continues to have his uses. He makes the government look moderate, reasonable and sane (well except Williamson, natch). This is not an achievement to be underestimated! Very few could achieve it.
Mayor Pete didn't win but he got a plurality in Iowa, nearly a million votes and impressed everyone he worked with.
Kamala Harris, with the greatest respect, was a disappointment and bowed out before the race even began.
So he's definitely value.
Not sure I agree with this brutal assessment of the Harris campaign.
She had a momentum problem and an expectation problem in that she surged following a very effective attack on Biden in a debate. It was all downhill from there. Certainly, she made tactical errors at that stage and it's her own fault for tacking left at that point and hitting a brick wall of Sanders and Warren.
But where was Cory Booker's surge? Where was Kirsten Gillibrand's surge? Where was Beto O'Rourke's surge? These were all equally credible candidates in a crowded field. The criticism of Harris is that at one point she briefly looked as if she had a good chance... but faded. But people forget that she created the chance. It's like criticising a striker for missing a golden goal-scoring chance that they created - fine, but remember they created the chance.
Buttigieg ran a good campaign - no denying that. But he never really looked like emerging from it as the Presidential candidate (merely as a man whose stock had risen) and always had the benefit of low expectations. It was frankly silly that an openly gay man whose experience was as mayor of a town the size of Gloucester was at the top table - but there he was, doing creditably. Did he ever look very likely to win? No, but he looked like a Winner by coming 2nd or 3rd in some places, whereas that wasn't open to Harris.
Ultimately, she will be very hard to beat if the Biden administration is popular among Democrats and she performs reasonably well. Her 2020 campaign shows she's not perfect, but doesn't point to a fundamental flaw.
The advocates of the Sweden approach said very clearly that it couldn't be judged successful or failed until autumn/winter, when it should be compared with its neighbours (Finland was specifically noted).
In terms of deaths, illness, stress on Health Service, and economic damage, it has clearly failed.
The thing is, for the proponents of it - it has even failed to provide greater freedom for its citizens in the intervening period.
I'm assuming it's probably a good thing but I'm still often amazed by how benevolent I feel toward folk that I loathed in my tempestuous youth. May be a side effect of contrasting them with the absolute ********* and ***** in charge of HMG currently of course.
You should have always loved Norman Fowler the man is a secular saint, always has been.
Thanks to him hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are alive today who would not be.
His approach on the AIDS crisis was brilliant.
Well, you don't tend to see the big picture when you're in your teens/early 20s.
For a while know I've been researching in detail how the current government's approach to dealing with a pandemic contrasted with the Thatcher government's handling of the AIDS epidemic.
A few things stand out on why it was handled better in the 1980s
1) Science led all the way
2) You had a cabinet that was prepared to challenge and overrule the PM
3) You had a PM with a science based background who understood (the dangers of) exponential growth
4) A PM who was privately uncomfortable about making it a non moral led campaign but still sold it to the country and made the country believe in it
The most astonishing thing of all, the victims of this epidemic were generally seen by the media and large swathes of the population as deviants.
If Boris Johnson had been PM then I'm sure we'd have seen references and jokes about tank topped bum boys.
That Welsh data looks terrible. Will be interesting to see how it shakes out by specimen date and if there's been any kind of drop off or not.
an 89-year old relative of mine is in a Welsh hospital and has just contracted covid whilst in there.
Unfortunately, the Welsh hospitals have been epicentres of the disease.
Best wishes for your relative.
Thanks. I wonder why have Wales got this so wrong. It is really weird.
Unfortunately around 20% of severe covid is acquired in hospital. It is one of the problems of massive numbers of covid patients. My Trust has 10 wards full, and complete segregation is difficult as patients may not be diagnosed at admission.
Mayor Pete didn't win but he got a plurality in Iowa, nearly a million votes and impressed everyone he worked with.
Kamala Harris, with the greatest respect, was a disappointment and bowed out before the race even began.
So he's definitely value.
Not sure I agree with this brutal assessment of the Harris campaign.
She had a momentum problem and an expectation problem in that she surged following a very effective attack on Biden in a debate. It was all downhill from there. Certainly, she made tactical errors at that stage and it's her own fault for tacking left at that point and hitting a brick wall of Sanders and Warren.
But where was Cory Booker's surge? Where was Kirsten Gillibrand's surge? Where was Beto O'Rourke's surge? These were all equally credible candidates in a crowded field. The criticism of Harris is that at one point she briefly looked as if she had a good chance... but faded. But people forget that she created the chance. It's like criticising a striker for missing a golden goal-scoring chance that they created - fine, but remember they created the chance.
Buttigieg ran a good campaign - no denying that. But he never really looked like emerging from it as the Presidential candidate (merely as a man whose stock had risen) and always had the benefit of low expectations. It was frankly silly that an openly gay man whose experience was as mayor of a town the size of Gloucester was at the top table - but there he was, doing creditably. Did he ever look very likely to win? No, but he looked like a Winner by coming 2nd or 3rd in some places, whereas that wasn't open to Harris.
Ultimately, she will be very hard to beat if the Biden administration is popular among Democrats and she performs reasonably well. Her 2020 campaign shows she's not perfect, but doesn't point to a fundamental flaw.
For many of the reasons you quote I was quite hopeful about Harris initially. It also seemed to me that she should have had a major advantage by California being much earlier in the primary season given she must already have a state wide machine there and wealthy backers.
But she was boring. She seemed to want the job but have no vision of what sort of US she wanted, what she wanted to change, etc. 4 years as VP should help her to address the vision thing. And if she ends up taking over when Biden keels over she will be nailed on.
That Welsh data looks terrible. Will be interesting to see how it shakes out by specimen date and if there's been any kind of drop off or not.
an 89-year old relative of mine is in a Welsh hospital and has just contracted covid whilst in there.
Unfortunately, the Welsh hospitals have been epicentres of the disease.
Best wishes for your relative.
Thanks. I wonder why have Wales got this so wrong. It is really weird.
Unfortunately around 20% of severe covid is acquired in hospital. It is one of the problems of massive numbers of covid patients. My Trust has 10 wards full, and complete segregation is difficult as patients may not be diagnosed at admission.
Hope your relative pulls through.
Thanks. I still fail to see how shutting pubs in Surrey affects matters one way or the othe, excep to deprive our country of much needed revenues.
Surely piling more resources into the NHS to expand its capacity is the best solution all round, even though its been argued on here this is effectively impossible.
I still suspect the NHS does not want to expand because we might expect more from it.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
Mayor Pete didn't win but he got a plurality in Iowa, nearly a million votes and impressed everyone he worked with.
Kamala Harris, with the greatest respect, was a disappointment and bowed out before the race even began.
So he's definitely value.
Not sure I agree with this brutal assessment of the Harris campaign.
She had a momentum problem and an expectation problem in that she surged following a very effective attack on Biden in a debate. It was all downhill from there. Certainly, she made tactical errors at that stage and it's her own fault for tacking left at that point and hitting a brick wall of Sanders and Warren.
But where was Cory Booker's surge? Where was Kirsten Gillibrand's surge? Where was Beto O'Rourke's surge? These were all equally credible candidates in a crowded field. The criticism of Harris is that at one point she briefly looked as if she had a good chance... but faded. But people forget that she created the chance. It's like criticising a striker for missing a golden goal-scoring chance that they created - fine, but remember they created the chance.
Buttigieg ran a good campaign - no denying that. But he never really looked like emerging from it as the Presidential candidate (merely as a man whose stock had risen) and always had the benefit of low expectations. It was frankly silly that an openly gay man whose experience was as mayor of a town the size of Gloucester was at the top table - but there he was, doing creditably. Did he ever look very likely to win? No, but he looked like a Winner by coming 2nd or 3rd in some places, whereas that wasn't open to Harris.
Ultimately, she will be very hard to beat if the Biden administration is popular among Democrats and she performs reasonably well. Her 2020 campaign shows she's not perfect, but doesn't point to a fundamental flaw.
For many of the reasons you quote I was quite hopeful about Harris initially. It also seemed to me that she should have had a major advantage by California being much earlier in the primary season given she must already have a state wide machine there and wealthy backers.
But she was boring. She seemed to want the job but have no vision of what sort of US she wanted, what she wanted to change, etc. 4 years as VP should help her to address the vision thing. And if she ends up taking over when Biden keels over she will be nailed on.
I do kind of agree. Although I'd also ask "what was Biden's vision?"
A lot of the moderate Democrats were running largely on a "return to sanity" ticket and little beyond that (which worked, so fine, but may not be the route in 2024). Which is part of why Sanders and Warren did pretty well despite a fairly obvious electability problem.
All of them - and that includes Buttigieg as well as Harris - need to think about that moving towards 2024. Otherwise they do risk being outflanked, either by an AOC or by a moderate governor who is thinking about that message in a strategic way.
I'm assuming it's probably a good thing but I'm still often amazed by how benevolent I feel toward folk that I loathed in my tempestuous youth. May be a side effect of contrasting them with the absolute ********* and ***** in charge of HMG currently of course.
You should have always loved Norman Fowler the man is a secular saint, always has been.
Thanks to him hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are alive today who would not be.
His approach on the AIDS crisis was brilliant.
Well, you don't tend to see the big picture when you're in your teens/early 20s.
For a while know I've been researching in detail how the current government's approach to dealing with a pandemic contrasted with the Thatcher government's handling of the AIDS epidemic.
A few things stand out on why it was handled better in the 1980s
1) Science led all the way
2) You had a cabinet that was prepared to challenge and overrule the PM
3) You had a PM with a science based background who understood (the dangers of) exponential growth
4) A PM who was privately uncomfortable about making it a non moral led campaign but still sold it to the country and made the country believe in it
The most astonishing thing of all, the victims of this epidemic were generally seen by the media and large swathes of the population as deviants.
If Boris Johnson had been PM then I'm sure we'd have seen references and jokes about tank topped bum boys.
Yes, it is one of the things Thatcher's government deserves great credit for. On the other hand, there's their response to the Hepatitis C scandal (for which Labour governments were also to blame).
What does the Secretary of Transport actually do and how does Buttigieg build profile in such a role?
The current Secretary of Transport is someone called Chao. No? Me neither.
She's the wife of Mitch McConnell.
So she is, didn't know that. But she hasn't managed to make any waves as Transport Secretary and I can't see Buttigieg doing any better.
I can. Infrastructure spending, and climate change action will be front and centre in the new administration's program. If he proves a competent manager, he'll be pushing at an open door which previously Chao was helping to hold shut.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
What happens when the limits of endurance are breached?
I'm assuming it's probably a good thing but I'm still often amazed by how benevolent I feel toward folk that I loathed in my tempestuous youth. May be a side effect of contrasting them with the absolute ********* and ***** in charge of HMG currently of course.
You should have always loved Norman Fowler the man is a secular saint, always has been.
Thanks to him hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are alive today who would not be.
His approach on the AIDS crisis was brilliant.
Well, you don't tend to see the big picture when you're in your teens/early 20s.
For a while know I've been researching in detail how the current government's approach to dealing with a pandemic contrasted with the Thatcher government's handling of the AIDS epidemic.
A few things stand out on why it was handled better in the 1980s
1) Science led all the way
2) You had a cabinet that was prepared to challenge and overrule the PM
3) You had a PM with a science based background who understood (the dangers of) exponential growth
4) A PM who was privately uncomfortable about making it a non moral led campaign but still sold it to the country and made the country believe in it
The most astonishing thing of all, the victims of this epidemic were generally seen by the media and large swathes of the population as deviants.
If Boris Johnson had been PM then I'm sure we'd have seen references and jokes about tank topped bum boys.
Yes, it is one of the things Thatcher's government deserves great credit for. On the other hand, there's their response to the Hepatitis C scandal (for which Labour governments were also to blame).
Also Section 28 which was a reversion to type, and more in accord with seeing gay people as 'deviants'.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
Mr. Eagles, sorry for the slow response (was afk) but any numbers for Leeds versus Bristol/Somerset?
Some stats.
So last time there was a tier review London had 187 cases per 100k and were in tier 2... this time Leeds has 137 cases per 100k and, guess what... tier 3.
I'm assuming it's probably a good thing but I'm still often amazed by how benevolent I feel toward folk that I loathed in my tempestuous youth. May be a side effect of contrasting them with the absolute ********* and ***** in charge of HMG currently of course.
You should have always loved Norman Fowler the man is a secular saint, always has been.
Thanks to him hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are alive today who would not be.
His approach on the AIDS crisis was brilliant.
Well, you don't tend to see the big picture when you're in your teens/early 20s.
For a while know I've been researching in detail how the current government's approach to dealing with a pandemic contrasted with the Thatcher government's handling of the AIDS epidemic.
A few things stand out on why it was handled better in the 1980s
1) Science led all the way
2) You had a cabinet that was prepared to challenge and overrule the PM
3) You had a PM with a science based background who understood (the dangers of) exponential growth
4) A PM who was privately uncomfortable about making it a non moral led campaign but still sold it to the country and made the country believe in it
The most astonishing thing of all, the victims of this epidemic were generally seen by the media and large swathes of the population as deviants.
If Boris Johnson had been PM then I'm sure we'd have seen references and jokes about tank topped bum boys.
Yes, it is one of the things Thatcher's government deserves great credit for. On the other hand, there's their response to the Hepatitis C scandal (for which Labour governments were also to blame).
Also ozone layer. They seemed to have grownups in the cabinet in those days. Even if ne didn't agree with a lot of their policies. Imagine some of the current incumbents being plonked into that cabinet ...
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
Maybe the home counties are being put into Tier III to stop Londoners jumping on trains to go for a few pints.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk (maybe in a century's time) will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
And then the equivalent of rjk will be saying: why did we not plan for it?
The Western Pacific had planned for it, indeed South Korea wargamed a coronavirus epidemic at the end of last year.
Well done, South Korea. They have handled this well (although partly that was previous mishandled experience with SARS).
But much of the "why we were not prepared" arguments seem to me to be a posteriori thinking.
We don't know whether South Korea will handle the next existential risk well, because we don't know what it is.
Perhaps it will be a Near-Earth asteroid -- a bigger Tunguska Event -- heading for Seoul. Not very likely, but certainly not impossible. Big impact events occur every few centuries.
To be fair, if the asteroid is heading for Seoul, it's hard to think of any scenario where South Korea is going to do better than... well.. anywhere.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
Agreement apparently reached on procurement rules so of course some clueless Leavers on twitter are now moaning .
Procurement is part of every trade deal but the EU hate overwhelms any common sense or logic . It’s always the same story , ignoring that this allows UK companies to be treated fairly in the EU but of course it’s always seen as some EU plot to screw the UK.
As for Farage any deal he’ll scream betrayal over. He needs to just STFU !
The more Farage screams the more likely there will be a vaguely respectable deal. More power to his vocals! If he was quiet it would be no deal nailed on.
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
Depends if you want to go down to species level or not. The modern coelacanth is not the same as the fossil ones even from the Mesozoic AIUI, ditto crocodiles, even the riverine ones which are most traditional in their lifestyle. On that analogy we could be replaced by bonobos and that would be enough for 'humans' to survive.
But that is just being pedantic in the PB tradition.
On topic, I don't think Pete Buttigieg will even run in 2024 (if Biden does indeed stand down after one term).
He'd only be 42, whereas Harris will be 60. Plenty of time for opinions on homosexuality to evolve in the US (and he does have a problem there with the older black electorate in particular). He's catapulted himself onto the national stage and into the public eye. If he does a good job at Transportation (a visible job but a tricky one in terms of getting a good, cross-party infrastructure deal), he has every prospect of being VP or a key role like Secretary of State under Harris.
He's played a blinder this year to go from a mayor of a city which (to put it in context) is a little smaller than Exeter to a national player. He's in no massive hurry - he'd be 50 after two Harris terms or 58 after two Harris terms AND two GOP terms after that if it pans out that way - both totally credible times to be going for it.
A further issue is that, by joining the administration, Buttigieg has tied himself to it. So the best chance for a non-Harris Democrat in 2024 is if the administration is unpopular. But that would strengthen a Governor like Cuomo or Newsom, not the Transportation Secretary, who'd be part of the problem.
I know politics is littered with people who waited when they should have gone for it, and their one chance slipped away - and maybe he'll join that club. But if we're talking about what he's genuinely likely to do, I really think he'll sit it out.
Except not Gavin Newsom. He'd manage to turn California red.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
Maybe the home counties are being put into Tier III to stop Londoners jumping on trains to go for a few pints.
You jest - looking at Malmesbury`s stats yesterday I could see that Bedford and Central Bedfordshire was in trouble, for example.
However, I would prefer a system where any upward movement in tier is matched by a downward tier movement elsewhere.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
I'm slightly surprised how complicated people think vaccinating 5 million people is. The UK manages five times that number in three months with the annual flu vaccine.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
They'll have to be done quickly anyway, else it'll be like painting the Forth Bridge of old - when the first lot need to be reimmunised.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk (maybe in a century's time) will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
And then the equivalent of rjk will be saying: why did we not plan for it?
The Western Pacific had planned for it, indeed South Korea wargamed a coronavirus epidemic at the end of last year.
Well done, South Korea. They have handled this well (although partly that was previous mishandled experience with SARS).
But much of the "why we were not prepared" arguments seem to me to be a posteriori thinking.
We don't know whether South Korea will handle the next existential risk well, because we don't know what it is.
Perhaps it will be a Near-Earth asteroid -- a bigger Tunguska Event -- heading for Seoul. Not very likely, but certainly not impossible. Big impact events occur every few centuries.
To be fair, if the asteroid is heading for Seoul, it's hard to think of any scenario where South Korea is going to do better than... well.. anywhere.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
It depends on the size of the asteroid.
A Tunguska-like event would wipe out a large metropolitan area. Of course, something like a mid-seized Main Belt asteroid or a Centaur would be the end of all of us. Smaller asteroids are much more common.
It seems a Tunguska Event occurs typically ~ 300 years. Not all will be in desolate locations.
I was just trying to illustrate that planning for rare events is difficult. How much should the Government be spending on this? It looks rarer than a pandemic -- but only by a factor of a few, not an order of magnitude. A well-placed Tunguska could kill millions, though, so many more.
(I have been to South Korea, so I know about the skiiers. They're on Ze List -- though after people on pb.com who deny the existence of Wales as a separate nation 😀)
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
TBH I`m not convinced about the warmer weather argument - given how Covid went through Central and South America, for instance.
I'm assuming it's probably a good thing but I'm still often amazed by how benevolent I feel toward folk that I loathed in my tempestuous youth. May be a consequence of contrasting them with the absolute ********* and ***** in charge of HMG currently of course.
I am right alongside you in that rather strange looking boat. John Major looking like a giant of a man. 25 years ago I couldn't stand him. And on that day in April 1992 - well I'd better stop there.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
TBH I`m not convinced about the warmer weather argument - given how Covid went through Central and South America, for instance.
Does anyone know the science on this?
I thought it wasn't that winter is wet but that it is actually dry. The cold air can't hold much moisture so when warmed up indoors it is much dryer in winter than summer (unless you have a humidifier). For example, the dewpoint today is 6C and in thundery weather in summer it can get above 20C.
Your lungs just aren't as good at expelling crud in dry air.
I haven't tried to do any correlation but maybe some places have been worse in their dry season?
There's also the problem of people staying indoors when it is too hot outside.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk (maybe in a century's time) will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
And then the equivalent of rjk will be saying: why did we not plan for it?
The Western Pacific had planned for it, indeed South Korea wargamed a coronavirus epidemic at the end of last year.
Well done, South Korea. They have handled this well (although partly that was previous mishandled experience with SARS).
But much of the "why we were not prepared" arguments seem to me to be a posteriori thinking.
We don't know whether South Korea will handle the next existential risk well, because we don't know what it is.
Perhaps it will be a Near-Earth asteroid -- a bigger Tunguska Event -- heading for Seoul. Not very likely, but certainly not impossible. Big impact events occur every few centuries.
To be fair, if the asteroid is heading for Seoul, it's hard to think of any scenario where South Korea is going to do better than... well.. anywhere.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
It depends on the size of the asteroid.
A Tunguska-like event would wipe out a large metropolitan area. Of course, something like a mid-seized Main Belt asteroid or a Centaur would be the end of all of us. Smaller asteroids are much more common.
It seems a Tunguska Event occurs typically ~ 300 years. Not all will be in desolate locations.
I was just trying to illustrate that planning for rare events is difficult. How much should the Government be spending on this? It looks rarer than a pandemic -- but only by a factor of a few, not an order of magnitude. A well-placed Tunguska could kill millions, though, so many more.
(I have been to South Korea, so I know about the skiiers. They're on Ze List -- though after people on pb.com who deny the existence of Wales as a separate nation 😀)
Surely you do a risk assessment: how likely is it? how easy is it to mitigate the worst impacts?
Humans aren't very good at dealing with things that don't come around that often.
My bet for the next massive natural disaster: the Cascadia subduction zone. Read the article: it's staggering and it's frightening and it could easily happen in the next decade.
Mr. Eagles, sorry for the slow response (was afk) but any numbers for Leeds versus Bristol/Somerset?
Some stats.
So last time there was a tier review London had 187 cases per 100k and were in tier 2... this time Leeds has 137 cases per 100k and, guess what... tier 3.
Bristol 120 cases per 100,000, tier 2,
Waverley 143 cases per 100,000, tier 2,
Leeds 130 cases per 100,000 tier 3.
And what happened to London?
It doesn't look as if any large urban area can keep case rates down under T2 restrictions; there's probably just too many interactions. Keeping the urban north in T3 is probably right, IMO. Liverpool will be back in the club soon enough (especially bordering Wales, as it does).
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk (maybe in a century's time) will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
And then the equivalent of rjk will be saying: why did we not plan for it?
The Western Pacific had planned for it, indeed South Korea wargamed a coronavirus epidemic at the end of last year.
Well done, South Korea. They have handled this well (although partly that was previous mishandled experience with SARS).
But much of the "why we were not prepared" arguments seem to me to be a posteriori thinking.
We don't know whether South Korea will handle the next existential risk well, because we don't know what it is.
Perhaps it will be a Near-Earth asteroid -- a bigger Tunguska Event -- heading for Seoul. Not very likely, but certainly not impossible. Big impact events occur every few centuries.
To be fair, if the asteroid is heading for Seoul, it's hard to think of any scenario where South Korea is going to do better than... well.. anywhere.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
It depends on the size of the asteroid.
A Tunguska-like event would wipe out a large metropolitan area. Of course, something like a mid-seized Main Belt asteroid or a Centaur would be the end of all of us. Smaller asteroids are much more common.
It seems a Tunguska Event occurs typically ~ 300 years. Not all will be in desolate locations.
I was just trying to illustrate that planning for rare events is difficult. How much should the Government be spending on this? It looks rarer than a pandemic -- but only by a factor of a few, not an order of magnitude. A well-placed Tunguska could kill millions, though, so many more.
(I have been to South Korea, so I know about the skiiers. They're on Ze List -- though after people on pb.com who deny the existence of Wales as a separate nation 😀)
There appears to be a c.26m year cycle for mass extinction events, probably linked to the sun orbiting the galactic centre. We're quite a few million years off the next one due.
My bet for the next massive natural disaster: the Cascadia transduction zone. Read the article: it's staggering and it's frightening and it could easily happen in the next decade.
Surely, no real scientist is actually called Dr Goldfinger ...
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
TBH I`m not convinced about the warmer weather argument - given how Covid went through Central and South America, for instance.
Does anyone know the science on this?
I think in the first wave we locked down much longer and harder (relative to the second one) and reduced the infections to hundreds daily (rather than thousands). That, combined with the good weather allowing outside activities, with the enormous number on furlough, allowed an easier summer. Which we seem to have wasted by assuming we were through the worst (clearly we were not). I strongly suspect that the rapid increase since lockdown 2 correlates strongly with epic levels of Christmas shopping, hopefully post Christmas that won't be a big factor. I feel for hospitality as the rules for them to be covid safe are much better than what is seen in many shopping environments.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk (maybe in a century's time) will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
And then the equivalent of rjk will be saying: why did we not plan for it?
The Western Pacific had planned for it, indeed South Korea wargamed a coronavirus epidemic at the end of last year.
Well done, South Korea. They have handled this well (although partly that was previous mishandled experience with SARS).
But much of the "why we were not prepared" arguments seem to me to be a posteriori thinking.
We don't know whether South Korea will handle the next existential risk well, because we don't know what it is.
Perhaps it will be a Near-Earth asteroid -- a bigger Tunguska Event -- heading for Seoul. Not very likely, but certainly not impossible. Big impact events occur every few centuries.
To be fair, if the asteroid is heading for Seoul, it's hard to think of any scenario where South Korea is going to do better than... well.. anywhere.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
It depends on the size of the asteroid.
A Tunguska-like event would wipe out a large metropolitan area. Of course, something like a mid-seized Main Belt asteroid or a Centaur would be the end of all of us. Smaller asteroids are much more common.
It seems a Tunguska Event occurs typically ~ 300 years. Not all will be in desolate locations.
I was just trying to illustrate that planning for rare events is difficult. How much should the Government be spending on this? It looks rarer than a pandemic -- but only by a factor of a few, not an order of magnitude. A well-placed Tunguska could kill millions, though, so many more.
(I have been to South Korea, so I know about the skiiers. They're on Ze List -- though after people on pb.com who deny the existence of Wales as a separate nation 😀)
Most will be in relatively desolate locations though. If events of that size are roughly 1 in 300 years, then those events occurring anywhere over land is already roughly 1 in 1000 years; and then once you take out all the deserts, tundra, steppe, rain forests and other sparsely-populated regions, it's maybe more than two orders of magnitude rarer than a pandemic.
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
TBH I`m not convinced about the warmer weather argument - given how Covid went through Central and South America, for instance.
Does anyone know the science on this?
I think it's very simple: when the weather is improving, people spend more time outside, and when it's worsening they spend more time indoors.
That results in periods when the likelihood of you spreading the virus rises, and periods when it falls.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk (maybe in a century's time) will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
And then the equivalent of rjk will be saying: why did we not plan for it?
The Western Pacific had planned for it, indeed South Korea wargamed a coronavirus epidemic at the end of last year.
Well done, South Korea. They have handled this well (although partly that was previous mishandled experience with SARS).
But much of the "why we were not prepared" arguments seem to me to be a posteriori thinking.
We don't know whether South Korea will handle the next existential risk well, because we don't know what it is.
Perhaps it will be a Near-Earth asteroid -- a bigger Tunguska Event -- heading for Seoul. Not very likely, but certainly not impossible. Big impact events occur every few centuries.
To be fair, if the asteroid is heading for Seoul, it's hard to think of any scenario where South Korea is going to do better than... well.. anywhere.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
It depends on the size of the asteroid.
A Tunguska-like event would wipe out a large metropolitan area. Of course, something like a mid-seized Main Belt asteroid or a Centaur would be the end of all of us. Smaller asteroids are much more common.
It seems a Tunguska Event occurs typically ~ 300 years. Not all will be in desolate locations.
I was just trying to illustrate that planning for rare events is difficult. How much should the Government be spending on this? It looks rarer than a pandemic -- but only by a factor of a few, not an order of magnitude. A well-placed Tunguska could kill millions, though, so many more.
(I have been to South Korea, so I know about the skiiers. They're on Ze List -- though after people on pb.com who deny the existence of Wales as a separate nation 😀)
Surely you do a risk assessment: how likely is it? how easy is it to mitigate the worst impacts?
Humans aren't very good at dealing with things that don't come around that often.
My bet for the next massive natural disaster: the Cascadia subduction zone. Read the article: it's staggering and it's frightening and it could easily happen in the next decade.
I don't think we can seriously blame Johnson for failing to plan for that, though.
This was always Powell's plan, according to some on the right (not me, I hasten to add) because a libel case might allow for forensic examination of these machines.
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
I have a pretty good book - written by a sometime Guardian journalist - about possible doomsdays. It's pretty hard to kill off the entire human race. In most scenarios there would be some survivors, even if civilisation has collapsed.
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to serious money....
And so poorly targeted. The poor people who are missing out an anything compared to those lucky ones who get it but need it less - the self employed being able to claim 80%/70% and now 80% again on an all-or-nothing basis, then you get all even if your business is only very marginally affected.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk (maybe in a century's time) will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
And then the equivalent of rjk will be saying: why did we not plan for it?
The Western Pacific had planned for it, indeed South Korea wargamed a coronavirus epidemic at the end of last year.
Well done, South Korea. They have handled this well (although partly that was previous mishandled experience with SARS).
But much of the "why we were not prepared" arguments seem to me to be a posteriori thinking.
We don't know whether South Korea will handle the next existential risk well, because we don't know what it is.
Perhaps it will be a Near-Earth asteroid -- a bigger Tunguska Event -- heading for Seoul. Not very likely, but certainly not impossible. Big impact events occur every few centuries.
To be fair, if the asteroid is heading for Seoul, it's hard to think of any scenario where South Korea is going to do better than... well.. anywhere.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
It depends on the size of the asteroid.
A Tunguska-like event would wipe out a large metropolitan area. Of course, something like a mid-seized Main Belt asteroid or a Centaur would be the end of all of us. Smaller asteroids are much more common.
It seems a Tunguska Event occurs typically ~ 300 years. Not all will be in desolate locations.
I was just trying to illustrate that planning for rare events is difficult. How much should the Government be spending on this? It looks rarer than a pandemic -- but only by a factor of a few, not an order of magnitude. A well-placed Tunguska could kill millions, though, so many more.
(I have been to South Korea, so I know about the skiiers. They're on Ze List -- though after people on pb.com who deny the existence of Wales as a separate nation 😀)
Most will be in relatively desolate locations though. If events of that size are roughly 1 in 300 years, then those events occurring anywhere over land is already roughly 1 in 1000 years; and then once you take out all the deserts, tundra, steppe, rain forests and other sparsely-populated regions, it's maybe more than two orders of magnitude rarer than a pandemic.
If it fell in the ocean, there would clearly be consequences to nearby population centres, although obviously not as destructive.
Also, 1 in 300 is the wikipedia estimate **just** for Tunguska-sized events. You need to integrate over the entire mass spectrum of objects (which is a power-law).
Still rarer objects are more destructive. And there are many more impacts that are not quite as destructive as Tunguska, but could still wipe out Wakefield. All these need adding up to get the risk.
I would guess it is a classic fat-tailed distribution, where to calibrate the risk accurately, you really need to understand how fat the tail is.
This was always Powell's plan, according to some on the right (not me, I hasten to add) because a libel case might allow for forensic examination of these machines.
The funny bit is, I remember in 2004 the Democrats complaining about how the voting machines (probably including Dominion) were rigged against them.
If I were in the voting machine business (which I'm not), I would personally be concerned with making as much money as possible.
This could be achieved in two ways:
One, have a reputation for having unhackable systems, and therefore secure lots of sales.
Two, offer each party the opportunity to "bid" for extra votes.
More seriously: if there was fraud at the voting machine level, it would be easily discovered by statistical analysis. (1) Did the Democrats perform notably better in places with Dominion voting machines? (2) Were the results in places with Dominion voting machines dramatically different to the polls,
And really, this all falls down - as do all the election conspiracy stuff - with (1). The Democrats did worse in WI/MI/PA than in he rest of the country. It's just that Trump's margin was narrowest there, and they were therefore most likely to flip.
The places with the biggest increases in Biden votes were in the Sunbelt. If you want to look at somewhere and say "Biden's votes seem fishy", I'd start with Texas. How the hell did Biden get 38% more votes than Clinton did in Texas?
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
I have a pretty good book - written by a sometime Guardian journalist - about possible doomsdays. It's pretty hard to kill off the entire human race. In most scenarios there would be some survivors, even if civilisation has collapsed.
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
The SN rate for a large galaxy is one a century.
The last one in the Milky Way was seen by Kepler (Oct 9th 1604).
Well, we just joined the tier 3 club here in North Herts. That's us locked away until about May or June 2021. It's not really a surprise - we're surrounded by rampant outbreaks of the Plague on three sides - but all the same it's still yet another bloody setback.
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
We`ve narrowly missed it, though our neighbours, Milton Keynes and Bedford, have both copped it.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
I continue to be astonished by the over-optimism surrounding how quickly the vaccine can be rolled out and how soon it will get us out of jail. Escape by March or April is not a plausible scenario. It will take a bloody age just to get both shots into health and care workers and the very old - there are something like five million of them, each needing two injections, to be got through before you even get as far as the 75-79 group, the shielders don't even get a look in until the 70-74 group are inoculated, and panic about the collapse of the hospitals is going to continue, realistically, until everybody in phase one - i.e. the clinically vulnerable as well as the extremely vulnerable, the NHS, the care workers, and the entire general population over 50 - have all been immunised twice. I am desperate for my husband to move to the front of the queue for the vaccine but, given that the shielders are stuck back in that fourth segment behind the entirety of Shady Pines, the NHS and everyone over 75, I reckon he'll be waiting until March at the very earliest.
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
TBH I`m not convinced about the warmer weather argument - given how Covid went through Central and South America, for instance.
Does anyone know the science on this?
I think it's very simple: when the weather is improving, people spend more time outside, and when it's worsening they spend more time indoors.
That results in periods when the likelihood of you spreading the virus rises, and periods when it falls.
Also in places like the US sunbelt it is hot weather not cold weather that drives people indoors. Basically, the weather effect should be called an indoors effect.
Liz Truss is definitely on the march in the background. Dry as a bone, successes with trade deals, and playing up to the red wall with her speech today.
Maybe the country will want a fresh start if this nightmare ever ends.
Mr. Eagles, sorry for the slow response (was afk) but any numbers for Leeds versus Bristol/Somerset?
Some stats.
So last time there was a tier review London had 187 cases per 100k and were in tier 2... this time Leeds has 137 cases per 100k and, guess what... tier 3.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
This doesn't make any sense. Obviously any pandemic disease is unknown before it spreads - that's how it is able to evade immunity and existing vaccines. All of the details of precise mechanism of transmission (e.g. aerosolisation), incubation period, severity etc. are also unknown before the pandemic appears, so can have no bearing on the anticipatory measures you take before it happens. You rely on things like PPE precisely because they're not specific to any disease, they rely on simple and universal principles of hygiene.
"It is not possible to plan effectively" is just more low expectations. The government knew that a pandemic was possible, and claimed to have been stockpiling the PPE we needed for exactly this purpose, with footage of people driving forklift trucks around the secret depots containing said PPE only two years ago. Where was it?
You basic point seems to be: we were (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic, so why were we not prepared for a COVID pandemic?
And the answer is that the properties of the two diseases are very different.
It is not possible to plan effectively for very rare, very destructive events. We do not know whether the next risk will be biological, or from space, or from technology, or from the global environment.
Even if it is biological, we do not know whether it will be a pandemic, or an engineered disease, or a deliberate or accidental release from a global weapons program.
It is not possible to prepare for such things.
The last global biological pandemic on this scale happened in 1918, and was flu. The Government was (meant to be) prepared for a flu pandemic.
Presumably the Government will now plan for coronavirus-like disease pandemics. But, the next existential risk (maybe in a century's time) will almost certainly not be a coronavirus pandemic.
And then the equivalent of rjk will be saying: why did we not plan for it?
The Western Pacific had planned for it, indeed South Korea wargamed a coronavirus epidemic at the end of last year.
Well done, South Korea. They have handled this well (although partly that was previous mishandled experience with SARS).
But much of the "why we were not prepared" arguments seem to me to be a posteriori thinking.
We don't know whether South Korea will handle the next existential risk well, because we don't know what it is.
Perhaps it will be a Near-Earth asteroid -- a bigger Tunguska Event -- heading for Seoul. Not very likely, but certainly not impossible. Big impact events occur every few centuries.
To be fair, if the asteroid is heading for Seoul, it's hard to think of any scenario where South Korea is going to do better than... well.. anywhere.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
It depends on the size of the asteroid.
A Tunguska-like event would wipe out a large metropolitan area. Of course, something like a mid-seized Main Belt asteroid or a Centaur would be the end of all of us. Smaller asteroids are much more common.
It seems a Tunguska Event occurs typically ~ 300 years. Not all will be in desolate locations.
I was just trying to illustrate that planning for rare events is difficult. How much should the Government be spending on this? It looks rarer than a pandemic -- but only by a factor of a few, not an order of magnitude. A well-placed Tunguska could kill millions, though, so many more.
(I have been to South Korea, so I know about the skiiers. They're on Ze List -- though after people on pb.com who deny the existence of Wales as a separate nation 😀)
Surely you do a risk assessment: how likely is it? how easy is it to mitigate the worst impacts?
Humans aren't very good at dealing with things that don't come around that often.
My bet for the next massive natural disaster: the Cascadia subduction zone. Read the article: it's staggering and it's frightening and it could easily happen in the next decade.
But it could be in the middle of the US ...
The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes by Conevery Bolton Valencius (Author)
This was always Powell's plan, according to some on the right (not me, I hasten to add) because a libel case might allow for forensic examination of these machines.
The funny bit is, I remember in 2004 the Democrats complaining about how the voting machines (probably including Dominion) were rigged against them.
If I were in the voting machine business (which I'm not), I would personally be concerned with making as much money as possible.
This could be achieved in two ways:
One, have a reputation for having unhackable systems, and therefore secure lots of sales.
Two, offer each party the opportunity to "bid" for extra votes.
More seriously: if there was fraud at the voting machine level, it would be easily discovered by statistical analysis. (1) Did the Democrats perform notably better in places with Dominion voting machines? (2) Were the results in places with Dominion voting machines dramatically different to the polls,
And really, this all falls down - as do all the election conspiracy stuff - with (1). The Democrats did worse in WI/MI/PA than in he rest of the country. It's just that Trump's margin was narrowest there, and they were therefore most likely to flip.
The places with the biggest increases in Biden votes were in the Sunbelt. If you want to look at somewhere and say "Biden's votes seem fishy", I'd start with Texas. How the hell did Biden get 38% more votes than Clinton did in Texas?
It seems to me the trump team have done a reasonable job of showing the dominion machines were hackable, but a far less good job of showing they were hacked.
Its one thing to prove a gun can be used to kill someone, quite another to show person A actually used it to kill person B.
That said, this was an effing p8ss poor election. A Ghanaian colleague was commenting on how their general was done and dusted in forty eight hours, a full count of a country of 28 million.
Calling the US election a third world election is actually an insult to what we call the third world.
Whatever your view of its outcome, America's reputation has taken a big hit.
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
I have a pretty good book - written by a sometime Guardian journalist - about possible doomsdays. It's pretty hard to kill off the entire human race. In most scenarios there would be some survivors, even if civilisation has collapsed.
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
The SN rate for a large galaxy is one a century.
The last one in the Milky Way was seen by Kepler (Oct 9th 1604).
It's overdue.
I believe Supernovas are used by scientists to measure the expansion rate of the universe - they are pretty common. It is also the case that an extinction event for Earth will be the Sun going pop - but I expect humans will by then be long gone to Proxima 2 or Kepler 28.
Off topic "Bluewaters coal-fired power station written off as worthless as renewables rise In Australia, the cost of utility-scale renewables is often lower than the cost of fuel for coal-fired power plants. So, the long-term future for coal-fired power plants is looking fairly grim and banks are responding to that — they don't want to finance coal anymore." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-17/bluewaters-coal-fired-power-station-written-off-books/12990532
Tier decisions are being made across broad economic geographies, based on rates but not rates alone.
It is trivially easy to make that look inconsistent if you muddle up the rates you are comparing between city-regions, metropolitan districts, counties, and rural districts - just cherry pick the highest district rate in a low tier county area and the lowest district rate in a high tier county area.
Or in clickbait terms "You can prove two opposites simultaneously with this one weird trick".
Liz Truss is definitely on the march in the background. Dry as a bone, successes with trade deals, and playing up to the red wall with her speech today.
Maybe the country will want a fresh start if this nightmare ever ends.
I`ve a few quid on her . But I can`t really see her being one of the two MPs that go on to be voted on by the membership.
Off topic "Bluewaters coal-fired power station written off as worthless as renewables rise In Australia, the cost of utility-scale renewables is often lower than the cost of fuel for coal-fired power plants. So, the long-term future for coal-fired power plants is looking fairly grim and banks are responding to that — they don't want to finance coal anymore." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-17/bluewaters-coal-fired-power-station-written-off-books/12990532
Its funny though.
A new mine is opening up in the UK.
Why?
To produce coking coal to make steel for all the wind turbines.
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
I have a pretty good book - written by a sometime Guardian journalist - about possible doomsdays. It's pretty hard to kill off the entire human race. In most scenarios there would be some survivors, even if civilisation has collapsed.
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
The SN rate for a large galaxy is one a century.
The last one in the Milky Way was seen by Kepler (Oct 9th 1604).
Not bad at all. As I watched it there was just one thing on my mind - who would get the starring honour of the big Bono moment? And what a good choice! Who else?
Liz Truss is definitely on the march in the background. Dry as a bone, successes with trade deals, and playing up to the red wall with her speech today.
Maybe the country will want a fresh start if this nightmare ever ends.
I`ve a few quid on her . But I can`t really see her being one of the two MPs that go on to be voted on by the membership.
Right now, she's pushing all the right buttons for me. And showing leadership.
I'm assuming it's probably a good thing but I'm still often amazed by how benevolent I feel toward folk that I loathed in my tempestuous youth. May be a side effect of contrasting them with the absolute ********* and ***** in charge of HMG currently of course.
You should have always loved Norman Fowler the man is a secular saint, always has been.
Thanks to him hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are alive today who would not be.
His approach on the AIDS crisis was brilliant.
Well, you don't tend to see the big picture when you're in your teens/early 20s.
For a while know I've been researching in detail how the current government's approach to dealing with a pandemic contrasted with the Thatcher government's handling of the AIDS epidemic.
A few things stand out on why it was handled better in the 1980s
1) Science led all the way
2) You had a cabinet that was prepared to challenge and overrule the PM
3) You had a PM with a science based background who understood (the dangers of) exponential growth
4) A PM who was privately uncomfortable about making it a non moral led campaign but still sold it to the country and made the country believe in it
The most astonishing thing of all, the victims of this epidemic were generally seen by the media and large swathes of the population as deviants.
If Boris Johnson had been PM then I'm sure we'd have seen references and jokes about tank topped bum boys.
Yes, it is one of the things Thatcher's government deserves great credit for. On the other hand, there's their response to the Hepatitis C scandal (for which Labour governments were also to blame).
Also Section 28 which was a reversion to type, and more in accord with seeing gay people as 'deviants'.
That would be the Thatcher who was one of 99 MPs (almost none of them Tory) who voted for the Wolfenden report in June 1960?
So which was the "type"? A Tory woman who voted in favour of homosexual law reform nearly two decades before becoming PM, and supported a health campaign that saved tens of thousands of gay lives? Or does that not fit "the narrative"?
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
I have a pretty good book - written by a sometime Guardian journalist - about possible doomsdays. It's pretty hard to kill off the entire human race. In most scenarios there would be some survivors, even if civilisation has collapsed.
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
The SN rate for a large galaxy is one a century.
The last one in the Milky Way was seen by Kepler (Oct 9th 1604).
It's overdue.
I believe Supernovas are used by scientists to measure the expansion rate of the universe - they are pretty common. It is also the case that an extinction event for Earth will be the Sun going pop - but I expect humans will by then be long gone to Proxima 2 or Kepler 28.
The sun won't go pop - it's not big enough to become a supernova. What it will do is gradually become more and more luminous until life becomes impossible on Earth.
It's interesting to note that the sun was only 70% of its current luminosity when the solar system formed. As its luminosity has increased, though, the CO2 content of the Earth's atmosphere has gradually fallen (with a few hiccups) due to geological and biological processes. This has conspired to keep the Earth's temperature within a range congenial to life for most of its history. That's another of those remarkably fortuitous circumstances that has allowed humans to evolve.
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
I have a pretty good book - written by a sometime Guardian journalist - about possible doomsdays. It's pretty hard to kill off the entire human race. In most scenarios there would be some survivors, even if civilisation has collapsed.
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
The SN rate for a large galaxy is one a century.
The last one in the Milky Way was seen by Kepler (Oct 9th 1604).
It's overdue.
I believe Supernovas are used by scientists to measure the expansion rate of the universe - they are pretty common. It is also the case that an extinction event for Earth will be the Sun going pop - but I expect humans will by then be long gone to Proxima 2 or Kepler 28.
Liz Truss is definitely on the march in the background. Dry as a bone, successes with trade deals, and playing up to the red wall with her speech today.
Maybe the country will want a fresh start if this nightmare ever ends.
I`ve a few quid on her . But I can`t really see her being one of the two MPs that go on to be voted on by the membership.
Maybe, but if we work on the basis that by next summer voters will be totally sick of the sight of all of the current crew, I can't think of a better candidate.
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
I have a pretty good book - written by a sometime Guardian journalist - about possible doomsdays. It's pretty hard to kill off the entire human race. In most scenarios there would be some survivors, even if civilisation has collapsed.
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
The SN rate for a large galaxy is one a century.
The last one in the Milky Way was seen by Kepler (Oct 9th 1604).
It's overdue.
I believe Supernovas are used by scientists to measure the expansion rate of the universe - they are pretty common. It is also the case that an extinction event for Earth will be the Sun going pop - but I expect humans will by then be long gone to Proxima 2 or Kepler 28.
The sun won't go pop - it's not big enough to become a supernova. What it will do is gradually become more and more luminous until life becomes impossible on Earth.
It's interesting to note that the sun was only 70% of its current luminosity when the solar system formed. As its luminosity has increased, though, the CO2 content of the Earth's atmosphere has gradually fallen (with a few hiccups) due to geological and biological processes. This has conspired to keep the Earth's temperature within a range congenial to life for most of its history. That's another of those remarkably fortuitous circumstances that has allowed humans to evolve.
Else we'd be giant coal forest trees? Much better level of politeness on Twitter (or Twigger) too.
Sure, several Asian countries were better prepared for the pandemic -- but that is at the cost of severe restrictions on civil liberties that those countries are willing to accept. It is not really fair to compare South Korea or PR China with us, because there is no way those restrictions could be implemented here at the present moment.
I called some of my Beijing buddies the other day, and the level of restrictions in place even in Beijing (where there is no local transmission) is still terrifying. You sign in by smartphone wherever you go. The Government knows where you are at all time.
However, I was talking more generally about rare, destructive events, not just biological threats. We do not know whether the next threat will be a pandemic. It could e.g, come from space. Rare impact events are rare -- but not very rare on century timescales.
And, there are diseases for which vaccines cannot be developed. Humans are very ingenious. And some humans are very bad.
I am sure a bad, but ingenious, human can create a disease for which it is not true that "the tools developed to deal with this one are equally applicable to any future pandemic."
Rapid sequencing, rapid mass testing, isolation of infected individuals, and vaccines ought to be applicable to any infection. And certainly the first three.
To kill all of humanity with a pandemic, what do I need to do?
(And something will one day kill all of humanity, just as something killed the dinosaurs).
I need to make the disease MORE fatal than COVID, and I need to make it MORE infectious. But, I need to ensure delayed onset, so that the pathogen does not kill the human host before the host infects more and more people.
And now the question is: could a biotechnologist create such a disease ?
Nature may take some time to create such a killer disease, but with human help ...
You say something will but there are animals that exist today that also existed in the age of dinosaurs are there not?
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
I have a pretty good book - written by a sometime Guardian journalist - about possible doomsdays. It's pretty hard to kill off the entire human race. In most scenarios there would be some survivors, even if civilisation has collapsed.
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
The SN rate for a large galaxy is one a century.
The last one in the Milky Way was seen by Kepler (Oct 9th 1604).
It's overdue.
I believe Supernovas are used by scientists to measure the expansion rate of the universe - they are pretty common. It is also the case that an extinction event for Earth will be the Sun going pop - but I expect humans will by then be long gone to Proxima 2 or Kepler 28.
...But will still be negotiating Brexit.
One of my theories is that there's a direct link between how many people think Brexit was right/wrong and how much we're still talking about it.
If I'm right, I expect the gap to close as we acclimatise next year - provided the talks actually end.
Mr. Eagles, sorry for the slow response (was afk) but any numbers for Leeds versus Bristol/Somerset?
Some stats.
So last time there was a tier review London had 187 cases per 100k and were in tier 2... this time Leeds has 137 cases per 100k and, guess what... tier 3.
Bristol 120 cases per 100,000, tier 2,
Waverley 143 cases per 100,000, tier 2,
Leeds 130 cases per 100,000 tier 3.
Gateshead has 94 cases per 100,000 - Tier 3
Having just been past the Metro centre, I doubt that will last long.
So which was the "type"? A Tory woman who voted in favour of homosexual law reform nearly two decades before becoming PM, and supported a health campaign that saved tens of thousands of gay lives? Or does that not fit "the narrative"?
It was of course Margaret Thatcher who forced Scotland to accept the legalisation of homosexuality, which until 1980 it had resisted.
But of course in the mythology it was Mrs Thatcher who was the bigot. After all, we couldn't have the self-image of Scotland polluted by facts, could we?
Off topic "Bluewaters coal-fired power station written off as worthless as renewables rise In Australia, the cost of utility-scale renewables is often lower than the cost of fuel for coal-fired power plants. So, the long-term future for coal-fired power plants is looking fairly grim and banks are responding to that — they don't want to finance coal anymore." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-17/bluewaters-coal-fired-power-station-written-off-books/12990532
Its funny though.
A new mine is opening up in the UK.
Why?
To produce coking coal to make steel for all the wind turbines.
Someone's got to keep those puffin numbers down.
Probably still a net gain for the environment. Luckily lots of people are thinking of more sustainable ways of producing stuff rather than carping from the sidelines. Even Trump could only slow down by a small amount the move away from coal.
Comments
In any form of reasonable timescale humanity is likely to survive, it's more likely to as you suggest be destroyed by itself than by nature.
She had a momentum problem and an expectation problem in that she surged following a very effective attack on Biden in a debate. It was all downhill from there. Certainly, she made tactical errors at that stage and it's her own fault for tacking left at that point and hitting a brick wall of Sanders and Warren.
But where was Cory Booker's surge? Where was Kirsten Gillibrand's surge? Where was Beto O'Rourke's surge? These were all equally credible candidates in a crowded field. The criticism of Harris is that at one point she briefly looked as if she had a good chance... but faded. But people forget that she created the chance. It's like criticising a striker for missing a golden goal-scoring chance that they created - fine, but remember they created the chance.
Buttigieg ran a good campaign - no denying that. But he never really looked like emerging from it as the Presidential candidate (merely as a man whose stock had risen) and always had the benefit of low expectations. It was frankly silly that an openly gay man whose experience was as mayor of a town the size of Gloucester was at the top table - but there he was, doing creditably. Did he ever look very likely to win? No, but he looked like a Winner by coming 2nd or 3rd in some places, whereas that wasn't open to Harris.
Ultimately, she will be very hard to beat if the Biden administration is popular among Democrats and she performs reasonably well. Her 2020 campaign shows she's not perfect, but doesn't point to a fundamental flaw.
In terms of deaths, illness, stress on Health Service, and economic damage, it has clearly failed.
The thing is, for the proponents of it - it has even failed to provide greater freedom for its citizens in the intervening period.
And will continue to do so.
A few things stand out on why it was handled better in the 1980s
1) Science led all the way
2) You had a cabinet that was prepared to challenge and overrule the PM
3) You had a PM with a science based background who understood (the dangers of) exponential growth
4) A PM who was privately uncomfortable about making it a non moral led campaign but still sold it to the country and made the country believe in it
The most astonishing thing of all, the victims of this epidemic were generally seen by the media and large swathes of the population as deviants.
If Boris Johnson had been PM then I'm sure we'd have seen references and jokes about tank topped bum boys.
Hope your relative pulls through.
But she was boring. She seemed to want the job but have no vision of what sort of US she wanted, what she wanted to change, etc. 4 years as VP should help her to address the vision thing. And if she ends up taking over when Biden keels over she will be nailed on.
Not unqualified for the post, but a bit crap.
Surely piling more resources into the NHS to expand its capacity is the best solution all round, even though its been argued on here this is effectively impossible.
I still suspect the NHS does not want to expand because we might expect more from it.
Edit to add:
38% of Swedish households are comprised of a single adult, against (at the other extreme) 18% in Spain.
Fewer than 1% of Swedish households are "intergenerational" against more than 10% in Spain and Italy.
Wondering if 'region' is a significant predictor of tier...
My first reaction to that was "Fuck the bastard Government, let's get on the train to Cambridge on Saturday." We won't do it, but I bet a lot of people will. Many will reason that the restrictions are useless so there's no point in obeying them, and they may well have a point. The cause of suppression is hopeless. The disease is too contagious. You might just as well try to suppress the common cold. It's clear that the only means that are effective against it are warm weather and vaccination; otherwise, you're just talking about marginal gains.
The combination of the Christmas free-for-all and the new variant will deal the final coup de grace to the tier system. Lockdown 3.0 is coming, and it'll last all the way until next Summer. People who are worried about getting Covid or passing it on to vulnerable family members will do their largely ineffectual best to manage the risk - I fall into that category, though then again I'm forced to go out to work which means that anything I can do in that regard is of relatively little value - but I find it hard to blame those who aren't in that situation for simply giving up. Almost everyone is being ground down by the pandemic, and if things are bad enough for long enough then we'll all reach the limits of our endurance eventually. It's simply that some people get there faster than others.
A lot of the moderate Democrats were running largely on a "return to sanity" ticket and little beyond that (which worked, so fine, but may not be the route in 2024). Which is part of why Sanders and Warren did pretty well despite a fairly obvious electability problem.
All of them - and that includes Buttigieg as well as Harris - need to think about that moving towards 2024. Otherwise they do risk being outflanked, either by an AOC or by a moderate governor who is thinking about that message in a strategic way.
Infrastructure spending, and climate change action will be front and centre in the new administration's program. If he proves a competent manager, he'll be pushing at an open door which previously Chao was helping to hold shut.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the vulnerable are vaccinated - by the end of January for first jab and by the end of February for the second jab?
Therefore, by March things should - should - relax as pressure is lifted from health services and the fear of transmission to vulnerable people recedes. But I fear that the lockdown-boosters, inc some in government and the media, will not relent from a risk-averse view of things, to the further detriment of us all, and the devolved parliaments will continue to monkey around no doubt.
Overall, I `m hopeful. I`m much happier than I was in the spring.
So last time there was a tier review London had 187 cases per 100k and were in tier 2... this time Leeds has 137 cases per 100k and, guess what... tier 3.
Bristol 120 cases per 100,000, tier 2,
Waverley 143 cases per 100,000, tier 2,
Leeds 130 cases per 100,000 tier 3.
By the way, I don't know if you know this, but there's really good skiing in South Korea.
But that is just being pedantic in the PB tradition.
However, I would prefer a system where any upward movement in tier is matched by a downward tier movement elsewhere.
Until the tumbrils roll again...
https://twitter.com/AmbidexterMan/status/1339440524126793730?s=19
The only reason that we are likely to move from total lockdown to something marginally less fucking awful at some point after Easter is warmer, drier weather. The real challenge is getting enough of the population lanced to get out of this unending misery of incarceration, isolation, widespread socio-economic implosion and grotty face masks by next Autumn.
The pork barrel stuff was just a delightful bonus.
Vaccine availability, not sticking needles in people, is the big issue.
I thought Walton Goggins was very good in Justified, but elevating him to the HoL ... bit of a stretch.
And in Evgeny's own words:
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/08/20/sweeney-investigates-what-changed-to-make-evgeny-lebedev-no-longer-a-security-risk/
"...Is it not remarkable that the son of a KGB agent and a first-generation immigrant to this country has become such an assimilated and contributing member of British society? What a success for our system. Don’t you think?”
https://twitter.com/HuffPostUK/status/1339553626965090306?s=19
A Tunguska-like event would wipe out a large metropolitan area. Of course, something like a mid-seized Main Belt asteroid or a Centaur would be the end of all of us. Smaller asteroids are much more common.
It seems a Tunguska Event occurs typically ~ 300 years. Not all will be in desolate locations.
I was just trying to illustrate that planning for rare events is difficult. How much should the Government be spending on this? It looks rarer than a pandemic -- but only by a factor of a few, not an order of magnitude. A well-placed Tunguska could kill millions, though, so many more.
(I have been to South Korea, so I know about the skiiers. They're on Ze List -- though after people on pb.com who deny the existence of Wales as a separate nation 😀)
Does anyone know the science on this?
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/11/07/my-tip-for-the-us-election-2024-pete-buttigieg-at-50-1/
Your lungs just aren't as good at expelling crud in dry air.
I haven't tried to do any correlation but maybe some places have been worse in their dry season?
There's also the problem of people staying indoors when it is too hot outside.
Humans aren't very good at dealing with things that don't come around that often.
My bet for the next massive natural disaster: the Cascadia subduction zone. Read the article: it's staggering and it's frightening and it could easily happen in the next decade.
It doesn't look as if any large urban area can keep case rates down under T2 restrictions; there's probably just too many interactions. Keeping the urban north in T3 is probably right, IMO. Liverpool will be back in the club soon enough (especially bordering Wales, as it does).
That results in periods when the likelihood of you spreading the virus rises, and periods when it falls.
https://twitter.com/PoliticsJOE_UK/status/1339525764560134145
What you are more likely to see human extinction with is from an external cause of excessive intensity - something like a supernova going off too close by, or itinerant aliens with locust-like operating procedures.
A pathogen or virus can't do it. There would be survivors.
Those numbers all look much of a muchness. On that basis, it seems foolish that Leeds and Bristol/Somerset are not in the same category.
Also, 1 in 300 is the wikipedia estimate **just** for Tunguska-sized events. You need to integrate over the entire mass spectrum of objects (which is a power-law).
Still rarer objects are more destructive. And there are many more impacts that are not quite as destructive as Tunguska, but could still wipe out Wakefield. All these need adding up to get the risk.
I would guess it is a classic fat-tailed distribution, where to calibrate the risk accurately, you really need to understand how fat the tail is.
If I were in the voting machine business (which I'm not), I would personally be concerned with making as much money as possible.
This could be achieved in two ways:
One, have a reputation for having unhackable systems, and therefore secure lots of sales.
Two, offer each party the opportunity to "bid" for extra votes.
More seriously: if there was fraud at the voting machine level, it would be easily discovered by statistical analysis. (1) Did the Democrats perform notably better in places with Dominion voting machines? (2) Were the results in places with Dominion voting machines dramatically different to the polls,
And really, this all falls down - as do all the election conspiracy stuff - with (1). The Democrats did worse in WI/MI/PA than in he rest of the country. It's just that Trump's margin was narrowest there, and they were therefore most likely to flip.
The places with the biggest increases in Biden votes were in the Sunbelt. If you want to look at somewhere and say "Biden's votes seem fishy", I'd start with Texas. How the hell did Biden get 38% more votes than Clinton did in Texas?
The last one in the Milky Way was seen by Kepler (Oct 9th 1604).
It's overdue.
Maybe the country will want a fresh start if this nightmare ever ends.
The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes
by Conevery Bolton Valencius (Author)
Its one thing to prove a gun can be used to kill someone, quite another to show person A actually used it to kill person B.
That said, this was an effing p8ss poor election. A Ghanaian colleague was commenting on how their general was done and dusted in forty eight hours, a full count of a country of 28 million.
Calling the US election a third world election is actually an insult to what we call the third world.
Whatever your view of its outcome, America's reputation has taken a big hit.
"Bluewaters coal-fired power station written off as worthless as renewables rise
In Australia, the cost of utility-scale renewables is often lower than the cost of fuel for coal-fired power plants.
So, the long-term future for coal-fired power plants is looking fairly grim and banks are responding to that — they don't want to finance coal anymore."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-17/bluewaters-coal-fired-power-station-written-off-books/12990532
It is trivially easy to make that look inconsistent if you muddle up the rates you are comparing between city-regions, metropolitan districts, counties, and rural districts - just cherry pick the highest district rate in a low tier county area and the lowest district rate in a high tier county area.
Or in clickbait terms "You can prove two opposites simultaneously with this one weird trick".
A new mine is opening up in the UK.
Why?
To produce coking coal to make steel for all the wind turbines.
Someone's got to keep those puffin numbers down.
I think you'd enjoy it.
https://twitter.com/apbohn/status/1339258464841965572
But, she hasn't yet held a Great Office of State.
So which was the "type"? A Tory woman who voted in favour of homosexual law reform nearly two decades before becoming PM, and supported a health campaign that saved tens of thousands of gay lives? Or does that not fit "the narrative"?
It's interesting to note that the sun was only 70% of its current luminosity when the solar system formed. As its luminosity has increased, though, the CO2 content of the Earth's atmosphere has gradually fallen (with a few hiccups) due to geological and biological processes. This has conspired to keep the Earth's temperature within a range congenial to life for most of its history. That's another of those remarkably fortuitous circumstances that has allowed humans to evolve.
Needs to add gravitas.
If I'm right, I expect the gap to close as we acclimatise next year - provided the talks actually end.
But of course in the mythology it was Mrs Thatcher who was the bigot. After all, we couldn't have the self-image of Scotland polluted by facts, could we?
Luckily lots of people are thinking of more sustainable ways of producing stuff rather than carping from the sidelines. Even Trump could only slow down by a small amount the move away from coal.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2013/06/18/177892/eco-friendly-steelmaking/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk5-8DM0OvA
https://electionmaps.uk/covid19-tier-map