Are people so completely incapable of behaving themselves, that we are going to end up with evening curfews and police on the streets arresting anyone who leaves their home?
No, because we can already see the pathetic supine reaction of our police to the nascent manslaughter caused by these superspreader gatherings in public areas. It's almost as though they are endorsing them by their inaction. And the idiots know that and are encouraged to go further.
Yet even if the police don't have the resources to do mass arrests, surely the budget could stretch to disposing of a few tear gas canisters?
You don't get it.
No democratic country has the power to enforce that kind of obedience.
China can because potential protestors know that if they escalate, the government will escalate with them, until it gets to belt fed machine guns and tanks.
France demonstrates on a regular basis what happens when the riot police is sent it to start/end a street battle.
Further - I predict once this is over, a campaign to remove "the unjust fines on ordinary working people" - the 10K ones for holding parties....
You don't get it.
I consider that, in a democratic country, citizens have a right to expect the laws of that land to be upheld, most especially so when flouting of them amounts to implicit manslaughter. Not manslaughter of the young healthy cretins doing the partying, in the selfish knowledge that there is minimal risk to themselves, but the elderly and vulnerable people who will be exposed to the virus that they spread.
Where the police are unable or unwilling to do that, because of the scale of the crowds involved, I do expect them to resort to other measures to clear those crowds.
Right now, use of tear gas or water cannon to break up such crowds in order to uphold the law would be entirely proportionate if that is what it takes.
Your effort to equate that with "belt fed machine guns and tanks" is risible.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
My sympathy. I had a conversation with my brother about one of his friends who is in the same position. My best advice was to try to plant just a seed of doubt and not make it a debate or contest. The change in position can only come from the person themselves, as they will reject it from anyone else. Just as they would reject anything that seems like a loss to them. So I suggested not making a big deal of it but just saying "I think someone's having you on, mate". Maybe they'll start to wonder?
Doesn't it also make you ask what false beliefs we ourselves hold? It does me.
--AS
Spot on. We are all deluded in some way and to some extent. Scientific training helps us to get a handle on our delusions, but is no cure-all.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
We are all constructing our own views of the world, you of yours, mine of mine, they or theirs. The truth is many sided, and none of us has a monopoly on it.
But without getting all Platonic, surely there are some underlying facts that should lead all reasonable people to the same very general conclusion whatever our political, social or religious outlook. And no matter what our views, presenting and promoting false figures when the real ones are so easily available and verifiable does not seem to be simply a 'different world view'.
Luckyguys philosophy fails the basic "punch in the face" test that all postmodern sophistry fails.
'There is no universal truth cries' the postmodernist. He still tries to avoid the fist thrown at him because that shit hurts. A rejection of universal truth that does not simultaneously also reject any physical danger is a pile of inconsistent wank. And those that due actually follow through to having a consistent set of beliefs are dead because if you step out in front of a speeding car you die, relative belief system or not.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Are people so completely incapable of behaving themselves, that we are going to end up with evening curfews and police on the streets arresting anyone who leaves their home?
No, because we can already see the pathetic supine reaction of our police to the nascent manslaughter caused by these superspreader gatherings in public areas. It's almost as though they are endorsing them by their inaction. And the idiots know that and are encouraged to go further.
Yet even if the police don't have the resources to do mass arrests, surely the budget could stretch to disposing of a few tear gas canisters?
You don't get it.
No democratic country has the power to enforce that kind of obedience.
China can because potential protestors know that if they escalate, the government will escalate with them, until it gets to belt fed machine guns and tanks.
France demonstrates on a regular basis what happens when the riot police is sent it to start/end a street battle.
Further - I predict once this is over, a campaign to remove "the unjust fines on ordinary working people" - the 10K ones for holding parties....
You don't get it.
I consider that, in a democratic country, citizens have a right to expect the laws of that land to be upheld, most especially so when flouting of them amounts to implicit manslaughter. Not manslaughter of the young healthy cretins doing the partying, in the selfish knowledge that there is minimal risk to themselves, but the elderly and vulnerable people who will be exposed to the virus that they spread.
Where the police are unable or unwilling to do that, because of the scale of the crowds involved, I do expect them to resort to other measures to clear those crowds.
Right now, use of tear gas or water cannon to break up such crowds in order to uphold the law would be entirely proportionate if that is what it takes.
Your effort to equate that with "belt fed machine guns and tanks" is risible.
You are missing the point about escalation - the police throw tear gas. What does that achieve? That makes a hole in the crowd for a bit. Then what?
Water canon were removed from the armoury of the state, quite deliberately. They were said to be a step too far.
The policing systems of democratic countries can deal with some large riots. Dealing with hundreds of smaller mass disobedience events is quite simply beyond what they can do. Or anyone can do. Bar shooting.
My point with regard to China, is that there, one police officer can tell a crowd to disburse. Because they know that if he is challenged, the escalation will end with their compliance. Or death.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
Herman Kahn talks about the following interesting phenomenon - a potential problem is so big that it requires the expenditure of billions, massive changes in society.
The response of many "sensible" people is to avoid the reality at all costs - the harder he pressed on an issue, the more insane the response.
He describes a meeting where a senior official in the Treasury Dept - a clever, thoughtful man - invented more and more wild and ridiculous accusations and invented "facts" to deal with what he, Khan was saying. After the meeting, others present partied the line - including "facts" that were demonstrably untrue.
That's the thing though. For many (most?) people, being part of the group is more important than objective truth, so they find ways to doubt or ignore the truth if necessary to keep their status. There is little that can be done to convince someone of the error of their ways when their social belonging depends on adherence to the party/social/religious line.
I did read that the best way to coax someone from a delusion is to befriend them and let them explain their point of view while gently probing inconsistencies as they arise. Try to give them as little to lose as possible while letting them discover for themselves the irrationality of their belief as they try to explain it. Let them do the talking and slowly convince themselves. I'm not saying it's easy though.
Yes - As Kahn describes it, membership of the Reasonable People group was what they clung to.
You are describing the methodology used by Prevent in your second paragraph, incidentally.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
US Senate override of Trump's veto of defense bill
"Question: On Overriding the Veto (Shall the Bill H.R. 6395 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?"
Yea = 81 (Rep = Nay = 13 (Rep = 7, Dem = 5, Ind =1) not voting = 6 (Rep = 5, Dem = 1)
Senators not voting (Reps = 5, Dems = 1) Gardner (R-CO) Graham (R-SC) Jones (D-AL) Loeffler (R-GA) Perdue (R-GA) Sasse (R-NE)
Puzzling. Why did 5 Dems vote to support Trumps veto?
Believe they were holding out for $2k stimulus checks; note that most if not all are from progressive wing.
Conversely, the Republican nays are mostly ardent (at least in public) pro-Trumpsky (for example Cruz & Hawley) and/or small-l libertarians (Lee, Paul)
Personally find the no-shows the most interesting group. Loeffler & Perdue are campaigning for their political lives AND also eager to fence straddle on this IF they can get away with it (we'll soon know). Several others (Graham & Jones for example) are likely also marching across Georgia.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Wait. You don't think the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels over the past 250 years has had any effect on global temperature levels?
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
In some cases, yes it may be a comfort blanket. In some cases it may be about self-regard ("I'm the only one who can see...") or just trying to fit in with people they look up to.
But I think we *do* need to find a way to fix this, or at least alleviate it. Because it isn't just about COVID, it's also other vaccinations, election tampering, immigration, and who knows what next. The direction of travel is brutal. Society can surely tolerate a number of people who simply don't share reality with the rest of us, but not too many, and it already feels uncomfortably many.
--AS
Isnt religion a conspiracy theory that meets most of those criteria?
That's an interesting point. I think the difference is that most non-extremist religion is pretty harmless (nowadays). Malmesbury above points out that COVID denialism is similar to the self-radicalisation that extremists perform.
But I take the point that society *can* tolerate citizens who don't share the same reality as each other, as long as the points of difference in belief doesn't lead to harm.
I also take luckyguy's point that nobody has a monopoly on truth. That's why I don't think that policing what's posted online can really work as a defense against conspiracy theories. It doesn't take much to see how that could be abused. But while a clear truth can be difficult to determine, clear untruths can be quite apparent.
--AS
Well the idea that everything in our complex and scary universe was created and is being influenced by some all powerful being who lays down detailed rules as to how we all should behave seems to me like the biggest conspiracy of all time.
It would be diverting the thread, but the suggestion that believing such stuff is “pretty harmless” is debateable.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, I think there is a lot of truth there. People really struggle to understand random bad events. Hence the perpetual question when I am giving a diagnosis with a grim prognosis: "why?"
When I worked in Malawi, there was an answer. "Someone in the village is a witch, and did this", but in allopathic medicine, we have no answer.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
To me, your conviction on this seems quite bizarre. Your contention that climate change is natural rather than man made implies that you consider that either a) humans are not changing the composition of the atmosphere or b) that the composition of the atmosphere does not affect climate. Both of these possibilities seem highly unlikely to me.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
If the spread is mostly by 10-14 year olds, one wonders why we don’t vaccinate all of them as a priority, to stop them taking it home to their families.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
Because the spread isn't mostly from them.
And I don't believe the vaccine has been tried and authorised on children.
Fair enough.
One of the theories circulating about the mutant virus is that its greater infectivity arises from being more easily caught and spread by school age children. Currently without much evidence.
The second wave of the ‘Spanish’ Flu had a different profile of age-susceptibility.
More on this, just last week the European CDC published a paper headed by the following disclaimer:
This report does not consider the epidemiology of COVID-19 in relation to new variants of concern for SARS-CoV-2, such as one recently observed in the United Kingdom (VOC 202012/01), for which robust evidence on the potential impact in school settings is not yet available.
• The United Kingdom has released a statement that, on preliminary analysis, this variant appears to be more transmissible. There are media reports that the new variant may be more able to infect children, but this is not yet confirmed, and detailed data are awaited.
• Should these initial reports about increased transmissibility of VOC 20212/01 in children prove to be accurate, this could have implications for the effectiveness of intervention measures in school settings, and of potential school closures, in countries where there are high rates of circulation of this variant.
Update to government guidance on vaccine administration includes mix & match as a possibility, which is ... questionable.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/948757/Greenbook_chapter_14a_v4.pdf ... Although no data for co-administration of COVID-19 vaccine with other vaccines exists, in the absence of such data first principles would suggest that interference between inactivated vaccines with different antigenic content is likely to be limited (see Chapter 11). Based on experience with other vaccines any potential interference is most likely to result in a slightly attenuated immune response to one of the vaccines. There is no evidence of any safety concerns, although it may make the attribution of any adverse events more difficult. Because of the absence of data on co-administration with COVID-19 vaccines, it should not be routine to offer appointments to give this vaccine at the same time as other vaccines. Based on current information about the first COVID-19 vaccines being deployed, scheduling should ideally be separated by an interval of at least 7 days to avoid incorrect attribution of potential adverse events. As both of the early COVID-19 vaccines are considered inactivated (including the non- replicating adenovirus vaccine), where individuals in an eligible cohort present having received another inactivated or live vaccine, COVID-19 vaccination should still be considered. The same applies for other live and inactivated vaccines where COVID-19 vaccination has been received first or where a patient presents requiring two vaccines. In most cases, vaccination should proceed to avoid any further delay in protection and to avoid the risk of the patient not returning for a later appointment. In such circumstances, patients should be informed about the likely timing of potential adverse events relating to each vaccine....
In theory this should be OK, but that really is in theory, and without much, if anything, in the way of supporting data.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, I think there is a lot of truth there. People really struggle to understand random bad events. Hence the perpetual question when I am giving a diagnosis with a grim prognosis: "why?"
When I worked in Malawi, there was an answer. "Someone in the village is a witch, and did this", but in allopathic medicine, we have no answer.
Did you follow scientific method on witches in Malawi?
Are people so completely incapable of behaving themselves, that we are going to end up with evening curfews and police on the streets arresting anyone who leaves their home?
No, because we can already see the pathetic supine reaction of our police to the nascent manslaughter caused by these superspreader gatherings in public areas. It's almost as though they are endorsing them by their inaction. And the idiots know that and are encouraged to go further.
Yet even if the police don't have the resources to do mass arrests, surely the budget could stretch to disposing of a few tear gas canisters?
You don't get it.
No democratic country has the power to enforce that kind of obedience.
China can because potential protestors know that if they escalate, the government will escalate with them, until it gets to belt fed machine guns and tanks.
France demonstrates on a regular basis what happens when the riot police is sent it to start/end a street battle.
Further - I predict once this is over, a campaign to remove "the unjust fines on ordinary working people" - the 10K ones for holding parties....
You don't get it.
I consider that, in a democratic country, citizens have a right to expect the laws of that land to be upheld, most especially so when flouting of them amounts to implicit manslaughter. Not manslaughter of the young healthy cretins doing the partying, in the selfish knowledge that there is minimal risk to themselves, but the elderly and vulnerable people who will be exposed to the virus that they spread.
Where the police are unable or unwilling to do that, because of the scale of the crowds involved, I do expect them to resort to other measures to clear those crowds.
Right now, use of tear gas or water cannon to break up such crowds in order to uphold the law would be entirely proportionate if that is what it takes.
Your effort to equate that with "belt fed machine guns and tanks" is risible.
I've talked with my Chinese colleagues about the situation there - they are totally non-political in such discussions, as we work for a charity and anyway it'd not be sensible. They confirm that the pandemic appears to be effectively over and people are mingling normally, with the exception that when the occasional case pops up, usually because someone's been abroad, all known contact and the entire district around the patient are closed down with nobody allowed in or out for two weeks. My understanding is that people there think that's a fair exchange - normal life 95% of the time, temporary restrictions if needed. Would people feel that differently here?
Is that unthinkable here if the pandemic declines to become the exception rather than universal? Isn't that pretty much what Track and Trace was supposed to do, except that that tried to find each individual contact rather than whole districts?
Because it's not obvious that we will otherwise really get on top of it. Say we all get vaccinated and are immune 70% of the time. If we start behaving normally we'll perhaps catch the bug all the same, just 70% later than we would have done, so we go on being socially distanced forever? What sort of life is that?
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
In some cases, yes it may be a comfort blanket. In some cases it may be about self-regard ("I'm the only one who can see...") or just trying to fit in with people they look up to.
But I think we *do* need to find a way to fix this, or at least alleviate it. Because it isn't just about COVID, it's also other vaccinations, election tampering, immigration, and who knows what next. The direction of travel is brutal. Society can surely tolerate a number of people who simply don't share reality with the rest of us, but not too many, and it already feels uncomfortably many.
--AS
Isnt religion a conspiracy theory that meets most of those criteria?
That's an interesting point. I think the difference is that most non-extremist religion is pretty harmless (nowadays). Malmesbury above points out that COVID denialism is similar to the self-radicalisation that extremists perform.
But I take the point that society *can* tolerate citizens who don't share the same reality as each other, as long as the points of difference in belief doesn't lead to harm.
I also take luckyguy's point that nobody has a monopoly on truth. That's why I don't think that policing what's posted online can really work as a defense against conspiracy theories. It doesn't take much to see how that could be abused. But while a clear truth can be difficult to determine, clear untruths can be quite apparent.
--AS
Well the idea that everything in our complex and scary universe was created and is being influenced by some all powerful being who lays down detailed rules as to how we all should behave seems to me like the biggest conspiracy of all time.
It would be diverting the thread, but the suggestion that believing such stuff is “pretty harmless” is debateable.
It certainly hasn't been harmless for millions of people over the last 2000 years.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
OK, but the 1 does count? lol
Not to mention the 689, which is about three times lower than the proceeding days.
Re: US Senate override of Trumpky's veto of defense bill (incidentally the FIRST time Congress has overturned one of the Donald's vetoes, note that there were also some VERY interesting voting patterns re: US House roll call vote on final passage of the COVID stimulus package.
Among both Dems and Reps, clear pattern of more radical members (either left or right) voting nay, while (relatively) more moderate ones voting aye.
For example, among the US House delegation from Washington State, out of seven Democrats, only one - Pramila Jayapal of Seattle, clearly the most progressive - voted nay.
On the other hand, among the three House Republicans from WA, who are all (by current US GOP standards anyway), two of them voted FOR the measure > Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Spokane), top ranking woman in House GOP leadership; and > Dan Newhouse (Yakima), originally elected with help of Dem voters in WA "top two" primary system (no D ran) While one voted AGAINST > Jaime Herrera Beutler (Vancouver, WA) who is a protege of McMorris Rogers
Question is, WHY did JHB vote nay?
My own guess, is that a) the GOP leadership did NOT need her vote to pass the measure; and b) voting against the final bill is good politics for her, on two levels" 1. It propitiates hard-core Trumpsky supporters; 2. Even more importantly, it appeals the blue collar FORMER Democratic voters who are THE key swing voters in her district.
Looking forward, NOTE that WA State will NOT gain a new US House seat in 2021 (unlike 2011) and while district lines are unlikely to see major alterations, population shifts mean that Herrera Beutler's district is likely to loose a bit of GOP turf in Eastern WA.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Wait. You don't think the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels over the past 250 years has had any effect on global temperature levels?
I don't think (or rather I don't know) it has had the effects claimed. The whole basis of the climate change hypothesis is feedback mechanisms. The basic effects of CO2 are well known and were actually first studied and articulated by my own Great Great Great? Uncle John Tyndall. I have a collection of his original notes on the subject. The basic science is - well undeniable.
But that is not what is up for debate. The debate is on what the reaction of the atmosphere and biosphere is to this and what feedback mechanisms come into play. The catastrophists (and I don't use that term in a derogatory sense at all) believe that the overriding effect is positive feedback which accentuates climate change. The non catastrophists believe that negative feedback mechanisms dampen the effects.
The real issue for me is that to make the catastrophist case, some scientists have chosen to try and undermine some of the very basic scientific positions that my fields of geology and archaeology hold to be well established - particularly periods in the recent past (by which I mean since the last glaciation) where we have had a warmer climate. They have completely failed to do this which therefore still leaves the question as to the effects of natural climate variability on our current warming.
As I said for me this is a purely hypothetical debate as I also like the move to decarbonisation whatever the reasons. I see it in the same vein as Fred Hoyle's preference for a steady state theory of the universe compared to the Big Bang theory. It is a matter of scientific interest to me not political activism. As such it needs no conspiracy theory to attempt to undermine those who I disagree with.
It also means that as more evidence becomes available I am open to changing my views. It is changing the past based on no sound evidence I have a problem with.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
OK, but the 1 does count? lol
Not to mention the 689, which is about three times lower than the proceeding days.
I suggest you look on the phw website for your data.
That's not what the advice says, which states quite explicitly that it should not be routine.
It shouldn't be at all. The Gov't needs to administer vaccines as per the trials.This whole idea of entertaining one vaccination followed by a huge gap then potentially a different vaccination sounds taking half a course of antibiotics followed by a different half some time later. Looks like a fast track to creating some sort of mutant viral resistant covid to me. We've probably done enough damage to the world by keeping Heathrow open for all and sundry throughout th pandemic.
US Senate override of Trump's veto of defense bill
"Question: On Overriding the Veto (Shall the Bill H.R. 6395 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?"
Yea = 81 (Rep = Nay = 13 (Rep = 7, Dem = 5, Ind =1) not voting = 6 (Rep = 5, Dem = 1)
Senators not voting (Reps = 5, Dems = 1) Gardner (R-CO) Graham (R-SC) Jones (D-AL) Loeffler (R-GA) Perdue (R-GA) Sasse (R-NE)
Puzzling. Why did 5 Dems vote to support Trumps veto?
Believe they were holding out for $2k stimulus checks; note that most if not all are from progressive wing.
Conversely, the Republican nays are mostly ardent (at least in public) pro-Trumpsky (for example Cruz & Hawley) and/or small-l libertarians (Lee, Paul)
Personally find the no-shows the most interesting group. Loeffler & Perdue are campaigning for their political lives AND also eager to fence straddle on this IF they can get away with it (we'll soon know). Several others (Graham & Jones for example) are likely also marching across Georgia.
Glee club attendees at Lib Dem conference will know the tune.
Back in the good old days (late 1970s) bands across the US used to regularly greet then-President Jimmy Carter by striking up "Marching Through Georgia" which is equivalent to playing a stirring rendition of "Croppies Lie Down" for guests from the Falls Road or Bogside.
NOTE that in 21st century GA, the only folks likely to be irritated by this song are a) older, mostly rural Whites and b) racists and related wackjobs. Blacks on other hand much more positive (though for many it is totally unknown) while blow-ins up in Atlanta are mostly clueless on this topic.,
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
To me, your conviction on this seems quite bizarre. Your contention that climate change is natural rather than man made implies that you consider that either a) humans are not changing the composition of the atmosphere or b) that the composition of the atmosphere does not affect climate. Both of these possibilities seem highly unlikely to me.
I have just provided an explanation of what I think. Hopefully that at least answers your question even if you don't agree with me.
Update to government guidance on vaccine administration includes mix & match as a possibility, which is ... questionable.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/948757/Greenbook_chapter_14a_v4.pdf ... Although no data for co-administration of COVID-19 vaccine with other vaccines exists, in the absence of such data first principles would suggest that interference between inactivated vaccines with different antigenic content is likely to be limited (see Chapter 11). Based on experience with other vaccines any potential interference is most likely to result in a slightly attenuated immune response to one of the vaccines. There is no evidence of any safety concerns, although it may make the attribution of any adverse events more difficult. Because of the absence of data on co-administration with COVID-19 vaccines, it should not be routine to offer appointments to give this vaccine at the same time as other vaccines. Based on current information about the first COVID-19 vaccines being deployed, scheduling should ideally be separated by an interval of at least 7 days to avoid incorrect attribution of potential adverse events. As both of the early COVID-19 vaccines are considered inactivated (including the non- replicating adenovirus vaccine), where individuals in an eligible cohort present having received another inactivated or live vaccine, COVID-19 vaccination should still be considered. The same applies for other live and inactivated vaccines where COVID-19 vaccination has been received first or where a patient presents requiring two vaccines. In most cases, vaccination should proceed to avoid any further delay in protection and to avoid the risk of the patient not returning for a later appointment. In such circumstances, patients should be informed about the likely timing of potential adverse events relating to each vaccine....
In theory this should be OK, but that really is in theory, and without much, if anything, in the way of supporting data.
Something to this effect was in the green book in December when the Pfizer vaccine was first approved (they anticipated that AZN was going to be approved, so discussed mixed dosing). I thought it was a bit odd then, but I guess in an emergency we just need to do the best we can.
I've been thinking for a while that the current vaccination round is really only a stopgap before next autumn, or the one after, when we'll hope to have a smoother rollout of whatever is cheapest and easiest (and safest).
When I first started reading about this, probably mid December 2019, it all sounded like another false alarm, or at worst another SARS outbreak (there have been a couple in China related to labs). Boy was I wrong, and this despite everything still isn't "the big one".
If only we'd stopped flights from China, Italy and elswhere arriving in the UK during the first few months of 2020. I still don't know what the reason was for not doing so.
Antivaxxers need to broken into two broad categories, the spreaders and the worriers.
As some of you know my father was a paediatrician, he's spent the last twenty reassuring people that the MMR jab is fine, because lets face it, if you're a parent and your hear a vaccine might cause your kids to suffer from autism and other bad things of course you're going to start asking questions.
So reassure those people, and ruthlessly go after [moderated] like Andrew Wakefield who have blood on their hands.
So many conspiracy theories and antivax stuff can be ended with a few facts.
During the first wave of Covid-19 I had a friend of a friend who was convinced that 5G was responsible for it, I sent them a simple chart showing places like Iran, which had no 5G, doing really badly, thanks to a mate who does planning applications for the BT Group/EE and he is used to stuff like this.
That's why Wera Hobhouse can get fucked, and the Lib Dems can get bent if they want my vote, every second Sir Ed Davey keeps her as Justice Spokesman he's effectively fuelling lots of conspiracy theories.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
There were a lower number of tests administered over the Christmas period than in the weeks prior. From December 21-27, 61,222 tests were conducted across Wales. This compares to 88,121 tests in the week from December 14-20.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Wait. You don't think the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels over the past 250 years has had any effect on global temperature levels?
I don't think (or rather I don't know) it has had the effects claimed. The whole basis of the climate change hypothesis is feedback mechanisms. The basic effects of CO2 are well known and were actually first studied and articulated by my own Great Great Great? Uncle John Tyndall. I have a collection of his original notes on the subject. The basic science is - well undeniable.
But that is not what is up for debate. The debate is on what the reaction of the atmosphere and biosphere is to this and what feedback mechanisms come into play. The catastrophists (and I don't use that term in a derogatory sense at all) believe that the overriding effect is positive feedback which accentuates climate change. The non catastrophists believe that negative feedback mechanisms dampen the effects.
The real issue for me is that to make the catastrophist case, some scientists have chosen to try and undermine some of the very basic scientific positions that my fields of geology and archaeology hold to be well established - particularly periods in the recent past (by which I mean since the last glaciation) where we have had a warmer climate. They have completely failed to do this which therefore still leaves the question as to the effects of natural climate variability on our current warming.
As I said for me this is a purely hypothetical debate as I also like the move to decarbonisation whatever the reasons. I see it in the same vein as Fred Hoyle's preference for a steady state theory of the universe compared to the Big Bang theory. It is a matter of scientific interest to me not political activism. As such it needs no conspiracy theory to attempt to undermine those who I disagree with.
It also means that as more evidence becomes available I am open to changing my views. It is changing the past based on no sound evidence I have a problem with.
Well it’s undeniable that the planet has experienced significant climatic variation from the norm (or mean) in the past, and rather than spiralling out of control, has ‘righted itself’ in the way you describe.
But human input represents an external input to this system, with which past experience offers no guarantee that these feedback mechanisms can cope.
There is also the tiny matter of timescale: the climatic variations you are looking at have taken place over much longer timescales and much more slowly than the accelerating impact of human-generated emissions.
Antivaxxers need to broken into two broad categories, the spreaders and the worriers.
As some of you my father was a paediatrician, he's spent the last twenty reassuring people that the MMR jab is fine, because lets face it, if you're a parent and your hear a vaccine might cause your kids to suffer from autism and other bad things of course you're going to start asking questions.
So reassure those people, and ruthlessly go after [moderated] like Andrew Wakefield who have blood on their hands.
So many conspiracy theories and antivax stuff can be ended with a few facts.
During the first wave of Covid-19 I had a friend of a friend who was convinced that 5G was responsible for it, I sent them a simple chart showing places like Iran, which had no 5G, doing really badly, thanks to a mate who does planning applications for the BT Group/EE and he is used to stuff like this.
That's why Wera Hobhouse can get fucked, and the Lib Dems can get bent if they want my vote, every second Sir Ed Davey keeps her as Justice Spokesman he's effectively fuelling lots of conspiracy theories.
Has Hobhouse come out with antivax stuff ? Haven't noticed it myself..
If only we'd stopped flights from China, Italy and elswhere arriving in the UK during the first few months of 2020. I still don't know what the reason was for not doing so.
"It's the economy, stupid."
So said our shit-for-brains leaders. Most especially The Donald and Bojo, the COVID Kids.
Do we know anything about the duration of immunity given by the vaccines? The trials have been running for 6+ months, so presumably some early adopters are now falling ill if the duration is limited...or, delightfully, not? Do we know?
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
There were a lower number of tests administered over the Christmas period than in the weeks prior. From December 21-27, 61,222 tests were conducted across Wales. This compares to 88,121 tests in the week from December 14-20.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
All very true, but the same points regarding reduced testing apply to the other nations. If cases in Wales aren't really falling, they're rising even faster than reported elsewhere.
Antivaxxers need to broken into two broad categories, the spreaders and the worriers.
As some of you my father was a paediatrician, he's spent the last twenty reassuring people that the MMR jab is fine, because lets face it, if you're a parent and your hear a vaccine might cause your kids to suffer from autism and other bad things of course you're going to start asking questions.
So reassure those people, and ruthlessly go after [moderated] like Andrew Wakefield who have blood on their hands.
So many conspiracy theories and antivax stuff can be ended with a few facts.
During the first wave of Covid-19 I had a friend of a friend who was convinced that 5G was responsible for it, I sent them a simple chart showing places like Iran, which had no 5G, doing really badly, thanks to a mate who does planning applications for the BT Group/EE and he is used to stuff like this.
That's why Wera Hobhouse can get fucked, and the Lib Dems can get bent if they want my vote, every second Sir Ed Davey keeps her as Justice Spokesman he's effectively fuelling lots of conspiracy theories.
Has Hobhouse come out with antivax stuff ? Haven't noticed it myself..
No she's gone 5G shouldn't go up because it might cause health problems despite there being no evidence and herself not an expert on how mobiles work. She's pandering to the loons.
In a submission to the council about the planned mast, Bath's MP said she was concerned about "the threat to human health, to tree health and to wildlife and biodiversity".
Asked by the BBC to detail her concerns about health, Ms Hobhouse said she had spent time weighing up the available evidence and conceded that all the official guidance was that it was safe.
But she said that "given the widespread concern and conversations I have had with Bath residents who claim to be extra vulnerable, I believe it may be worth applying a precautionary principle on where masts are located whilst further studies are being undertaken".
Do we know anything about the duration of immunity given by the vaccines? The trials have been running for 6+ months, so presumably some early adopters are now falling ill if the duration is limited...or, delightfully, not? Do we know?
You'd expect it to vary by age and general health I think ?
Good health, no pre-existing, under 50 ? One course of AZN and done for 10 years.
Over 80, pre-existing ? 6 months maybe.
One of the vaccinations should be p3 trialled on kids (Perhaps 10+ ?) and then rolled out - that should I think produce a long lasting immunity in schools - which are obviously a major vector.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
There were a lower number of tests administered over the Christmas period than in the weeks prior. From December 21-27, 61,222 tests were conducted across Wales. This compares to 88,121 tests in the week from December 14-20.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
All very true, but the same points regarding reduced testing apply to the other nations. If cases in Wales aren't really falling, they're rising even faster than reported elsewhere.
What is the percentage of tests coming back positive in England or Scotland -- do you have that data to hand?
Looking at the 7 day average, or the last 24 hours, using data from
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
There were a lower number of tests administered over the Christmas period than in the weeks prior. From December 21-27, 61,222 tests were conducted across Wales. This compares to 88,121 tests in the week from December 14-20.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
All very true, but the same points regarding reduced testing apply to the other nations. If cases in Wales aren't really falling, they're rising even faster than reported elsewhere.
According to ONS, Wales has only a small percentage of cockney covid, and we locked down a week before England, so I'm not surprised our figures are at least not shooting skywards like London etc.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
There were a lower number of tests administered over the Christmas period than in the weeks prior. From December 21-27, 61,222 tests were conducted across Wales. This compares to 88,121 tests in the week from December 14-20.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
All very true, but the same points regarding reduced testing apply to the other nations. If cases in Wales aren't really falling, they're rising even faster than reported elsewhere.
What is the percentage of tests coming back positive in England or Scotland -- do you have that data to hand?
Looking at the 7 day average, or the last 24 hours, using data from
it seems the positivity rate in England is 12 per cent.
If that is right, why is it so different from Wales?
You would expect positivity rates to rise as test numbers fall because if you are testing fewer people you are probably concentrating on the ones most likely to test positive.
If only we'd stopped flights from China, Italy and elswhere arriving in the UK during the first few months of 2020. I still don't know what the reason was for not doing so.
"It's the economy, stupid."
So said our shit-for-brains leaders. Most especially The Donald and Bojo, the COVID Kids.
Though they're willing to shut down the domestic economy to keep the international travel flowing.
Given the seemingly universal tolerance among UK politicians, plus the media, for the lack of restrictions of international travel there seems to be some weird groupthink in action.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, I think there is a lot of truth there. People really struggle to understand random bad events. Hence the perpetual question when I am giving a diagnosis with a grim prognosis: "why?"
When I worked in Malawi, there was an answer. "Someone in the village is a witch, and did this", but in allopathic medicine, we have no answer.
Did you follow scientific method on witches in Malawi?
To be honest, that was when things got really weird. I expected a 17th Century New England type problem, but the reality was far more surprising.
The background was that a local notable was washing his clothes, when a crocodile came out of the water, and pulled the fellow in, never to be seen again. We were interested, because we were going snorkeling the next day in the same lake. Lake Malawi has several hundred unique species, and is fresh water.
We were told by the villagers not to worry, they had caught the woman who did it. She was a witch, had a grudge against this person, had magically transformed into a crocodile and had killed him. We clearly looked a bit sceptical, but the villagers reassured us that the woman had confessed. What more evidence did we need?
That was when the surprising bit started. The villagers performed an exorcism, drove out the evil spirits that had inhabited the witch, thereby curing her, and she could continue life in the village unmolested. Basically, they saw witchcraft as a curable condition with no long term adverse effects, and could happen to anyone. They also managed to catch and kill the crocodile culprit a few days later, which didn't seem to contradict the truth of all the other events.
And yes, we did go snorkeling...
It was 15 years ago, but I still wonder about it all. Certainly in some other parts of Africa being marked as a witch is very dangerous indeed.
We could prevent 90% of Covid-19 deaths if we vaccinate people over 65 according to the data on this page.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54908177 "The average age of people who have died with Covid is above 80 with more than nine in 10 of the deaths among the over 65s, according to Office for National Statistics analyses of the pandemic."
There are about 12 million people in this category according to this document.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
There were a lower number of tests administered over the Christmas period than in the weeks prior. From December 21-27, 61,222 tests were conducted across Wales. This compares to 88,121 tests in the week from December 14-20.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
All very true, but the same points regarding reduced testing apply to the other nations. If cases in Wales aren't really falling, they're rising even faster than reported elsewhere.
What is the percentage of tests coming back positive in England or Scotland -- do you have that data to hand?
Looking at the 7 day average, or the last 24 hours, using data from
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
There were a lower number of tests administered over the Christmas period than in the weeks prior. From December 21-27, 61,222 tests were conducted across Wales. This compares to 88,121 tests in the week from December 14-20.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
All very true, but the same points regarding reduced testing apply to the other nations. If cases in Wales aren't really falling, they're rising even faster than reported elsewhere.
What is the percentage of tests coming back positive in England or Scotland -- do you have that data to hand?
Looking at the 7 day average, or the last 24 hours, using data from
it seems the positivity rate in England is 12 per cent.
If that is right, why is it so different from Wales?
You would expect positivity rates to rise as test numbers fall because if you are testing fewer people you are probably concentrating on the ones most likely to test positive.
If the positivity rate is 30 per cent in Wales and is 12(*) per cent in England, it suggests that England is doing more extensive testing and will be picking up more cases of people with mild COVID symptoms.
I am just not sure you can compare case numbers in England with numbers in Wales if there is a big difference in the positivity rate (as seems to be the case over Xmas).
If only we'd stopped flights from China, Italy and elswhere arriving in the UK during the first few months of 2020. I still don't know what the reason was for not doing so.
See the WHO advice on the subject at the time.
Also note that the US's measures, which were controversial enough, failed totally - passengers simply rerouted, and anyway you can't simply strand your own nationals overseas.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
If the spread is mostly by 10-14 year olds, one wonders why we don’t vaccinate all of them as a priority, to stop them taking it home to their families.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
As far as I know the vaccines have not been passed as safe or even tested on anyone under 18. I think it would be reasonable for parents to be wary of subjecting their children to a vaccine until this has been done. Better that the adults in close contact with those children get the vaccine as soon as possible.
The Pfizer one is being tested on 13-18 year olds currently.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
If the spread is mostly by 10-14 year olds, one wonders why we don’t vaccinate all of them as a priority, to stop them taking it home to their families.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
As far as I know the vaccines have not been passed as safe or even tested on anyone under 18. I think it would be reasonable for parents to be wary of subjecting their children to a vaccine until this has been done. Better that the adults in close contact with those children get the vaccine as soon as possible.
The Pfizer one is being tested on 13-18 year olds currently.
Cheers Rob hadn't seen that. I would have no problem with my kids having it in that case.
If only we'd stopped flights from China, Italy and elswhere arriving in the UK during the first few months of 2020. I still don't know what the reason was for not doing so.
See the WHO advice on the subject at the time.
Also note that the US's measures failed totally.
It is easy in retrospect. I think initially people were expecting it to behave like SARS. That is more severe, but also harder to spread and asymptomatic spread not a major factor.
Similarly our plans were for pandemic flu, that is highly infective, main problem is secondary bacterial pneumonia, and lasts a few days rather than weeks.
We were all planning for a different disease initially.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
what do you mean all zeros. It was only today that wasn't reported. (and Xmas day obviously). Boxing Days figures caught them all up.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
See the table Malmesbury posted.
The Last 0 doesn't count, they all have them. The second to last is new years day. The rest are not 0.
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
There were a lower number of tests administered over the Christmas period than in the weeks prior. From December 21-27, 61,222 tests were conducted across Wales. This compares to 88,121 tests in the week from December 14-20.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
All very true, but the same points regarding reduced testing apply to the other nations. If cases in Wales aren't really falling, they're rising even faster than reported elsewhere.
What is the percentage of tests coming back positive in England or Scotland -- do you have that data to hand?
Looking at the 7 day average, or the last 24 hours, using data from
Positivity per nation - the earlier extreme was caused by the hiccup in Welsh reporting
overall positivity
To anyone who wants the spreadsheet of data which I build from https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk - PM me and I can give you access to the Google Drive collection of spreadsheets for each day.
Are people so completely incapable of behaving themselves, that we are going to end up with evening curfews and police on the streets arresting anyone who leaves their home?
No, because we can already see the pathetic supine reaction of our police to the nascent manslaughter caused by these superspreader gatherings in public areas. It's almost as though they are endorsing them by their inaction. And the idiots know that and are encouraged to go further.
Yet even if the police don't have the resources to do mass arrests, surely the budget could stretch to disposing of a few tear gas canisters?
You don't get it.
No democratic country has the power to enforce that kind of obedience.
China can because potential protestors know that if they escalate, the government will escalate with them, until it gets to belt fed machine guns and tanks.
France demonstrates on a regular basis what happens when the riot police is sent it to start/end a street battle.
Further - I predict once this is over, a campaign to remove "the unjust fines on ordinary working people" - the 10K ones for holding parties....
You don't get it.
I consider that, in a democratic country, citizens have a right to expect the laws of that land to be upheld, most especially so when flouting of them amounts to implicit manslaughter. Not manslaughter of the young healthy cretins doing the partying, in the selfish knowledge that there is minimal risk to themselves, but the elderly and vulnerable people who will be exposed to the virus that they spread.
Where the police are unable or unwilling to do that, because of the scale of the crowds involved, I do expect them to resort to other measures to clear those crowds.
Right now, use of tear gas or water cannon to break up such crowds in order to uphold the law would be entirely proportionate if that is what it takes.
Your effort to equate that with "belt fed machine guns and tanks" is risible.
I've talked with my Chinese colleagues about the situation there - they are totally non-political in such discussions, as we work for a charity and anyway it'd not be sensible. They confirm that the pandemic appears to be effectively over and people are mingling normally, with the exception that when the occasional case pops up, usually because someone's been abroad, all known contact and the entire district around the patient are closed down with nobody allowed in or out for two weeks. My understanding is that people there think that's a fair exchange - normal life 95% of the time, temporary restrictions if needed. Would people feel that differently here?
Is that unthinkable here if the pandemic declines to become the exception rather than universal? Isn't that pretty much what Track and Trace was supposed to do, except that that tried to find each individual contact rather than whole districts?
Because it's not obvious that we will otherwise really get on top of it. Say we all get vaccinated and are immune 70% of the time. If we start behaving normally we'll perhaps catch the bug all the same, just 70% later than we would have done, so we go on being socially distanced forever? What sort of life is that?
I believe an individual is immune or not, not that there is a new “test” each time they come into contact with covid
Hence once we are immunised then only 30% of the adult population less those who have contracted and recovered are susceptible. Meaning it is harder for the virus to propagate
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Wait. You don't think the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels over the past 250 years has had any effect on global temperature levels?
I don't think (or rather I don't know) it has had the effects claimed. The whole basis of the climate change hypothesis is feedback mechanisms. The basic effects of CO2 are well known and were actually first studied and articulated by my own Great Great Great? Uncle John Tyndall. I have a collection of his original notes on the subject. The basic science is - well undeniable.
But that is not what is up for debate. The debate is on what the reaction of the atmosphere and biosphere is to this and what feedback mechanisms come into play. The catastrophists (and I don't use that term in a derogatory sense at all) believe that the overriding effect is positive feedback which accentuates climate change. The non catastrophists believe that negative feedback mechanisms dampen the effects.
The real issue for me is that to make the catastrophist case, some scientists have chosen to try and undermine some of the very basic scientific positions that my fields of geology and archaeology hold to be well established - particularly periods in the recent past (by which I mean since the last glaciation) where we have had a warmer climate. They have completely failed to do this which therefore still leaves the question as to the effects of natural climate variability on our current warming.
As I said for me this is a purely hypothetical debate as I also like the move to decarbonisation whatever the reasons. I see it in the same vein as Fred Hoyle's preference for a steady state theory of the universe compared to the Big Bang theory. It is a matter of scientific interest to me not political activism. As such it needs no conspiracy theory to attempt to undermine those who I disagree with.
It also means that as more evidence becomes available I am open to changing my views. It is changing the past based on no sound evidence I have a problem with.
Well it’s undeniable that the planet has experienced significant climatic variation from the norm (or mean) in the past, and rather than spiralling out of control, has ‘righted itself’ in the way you describe.
But human input represents an external input to this system, with which past experience offers no guarantee that these feedback mechanisms can cope.
There is also the tiny matter of timescale: the climatic variations you are looking at have taken place over much longer timescales and much more slowly than the accelerating impact of human-generated emissions.
Yep to your second paragraph which is why I have no objections to what is being done. As I said it is an inevitable next step anyway. So much of our modern existence relies on hydrocarbons in a non-combustible way (synthetic products, lubricants etc) that we should have stopped burning them as soon as other options became viable.
On the second point the evidence is not there for that claim. Quite the opposite in fact. One point that got lost in all the arguments over the last decade is that it is now believed we move into and out of glacial periods in a much shorter time period than previously thought. The entry into the Younger Dryas which was the last glacial period is now thought to have occurred in as little as 50 years and be the equivalent of a 10 degree drop in temperatures in those 5 decades. The exit was a little slower but again is the equivalent of about 1 degree per decade. These changes are fast.
Of course this doesn't destroy catastrophism as an argument but it certainly makes it a little more wobbly when some climatologists try to ignore or discredit these records.
We could prevent 90% of Covid-19 deaths if we vaccinate people over 65 according to the data on this page.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54908177 "The average age of people who have died with Covid is above 80 with more than nine in 10 of the deaths among the over 65s, according to Office for National Statistics analyses of the pandemic."
There are about 12 million people in this category according to this document.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, I think there is a lot of truth there. People really struggle to understand random bad events. Hence the perpetual question when I am giving a diagnosis with a grim prognosis: "why?"
When I worked in Malawi, there was an answer. "Someone in the village is a witch, and did this", but in allopathic medicine, we have no answer.
Did you follow scientific method on witches in Malawi?
To be honest, that was when things got really weird. I expected a 17th Century New England type problem, but the reality was far more surprising.
The background was that a local notable was washing his clothes, when a crocodile came out of the water, and pulled the fellow in, never to be seen again. We were interested, because we were going snorkeling the next day in the same lake. Lake Malawi has several hundred unique species, and is fresh water.
We were told by the villagers not to worry, they had caught the woman who did it. She was a witch, had a grudge against this person, had magically transformed into a crocodile and had killed him. We clearly looked a bit sceptical, but the villagers reassured us that the woman had confessed. What more evidence did we need?
That was when the surprising bit started. The villagers performed an exorcism, drove out the evil spirits that had inhabited the witch, thereby curing her, and she could continue life in the village unmolested. Basically, they saw witchcraft as a curable condition with no long term adverse effects, and could happen to anyone. They also managed to catch and kill the crocodile culprit a few days later, which didn't seem to contradict the truth of all the other events.
And yes, we did go snorkeling...
It was 15 years ago, but I still wonder about it all. Certainly in some other parts of Africa being marked as a witch is very dangerous indeed.
The parallels with the anti-vax and anti-mask crowd write themselves, don't they?
Do we know anything about the duration of immunity given by the vaccines? The trials have been running for 6+ months, so presumably some early adopters are now falling ill if the duration is limited...or, delightfully, not? Do we know?
We certainly won't know if the trials involved two doses at 3 week intervals, but the actual practice is a 12 week gap.
A question for the "lockdown harder" types - what exactly are you hoping for?
The legal situation for the majority of the country which is in teir 4 is pretty much identical to the first lockdown, other than schools. Almost all non-essential public facing businesses are closed.
I presume that you want schools/unis closed - this now looks inevitable.
What other measures are left in the arsenal - because I can't see there are many? Possibly closing all non-essential businesses which require physical staff attendance (e.g. construction, large chunks of manufacturing) but that's going to come at a colossal cost.
It's all well and good going "lockdown harder", but short of welding people into their houses, what options remain?
What are the chances of the London and local elections going ahead in May?
Dunno. Let's ask Johnson. Whatever his answer then the opposite.
Surely we are preparing for all postal? We have 4 months still. Aren't we?
My guess is that a Greater London all-postal vote could well make the shambolic 2020 Primary in New York City look like a model of organization.
Because in The Smoke, GLA elections are largely run (in particular, postal voting) by 32 boroughs, whereas in the Big Apple the electoral process is much more centralized under NYC Board of Elections.
Note that NYC had little previous experience with mass- let alone all-postal voting, and it showed. In the primary, hey laid a HUGE egg. Not (only) because of innate idiocy within entrenched neo-Tammany bureaucracy, but largely due to woeful lack of adequate preparation resulting from failure to appreciate the organizational & logistical challenges.
Note that in 2004 in King County, WA the pressure of a high-turnout, closely fought election was GREATLY exacerbated by widespread flaws & failures with the county's election system, due to BIG increase in postal voting while having to manage a LARGE poll voting system, the latter staffed predominately by community volunteers (though DID get $10 or thereabouts for working a 12-hour day).
William Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine and Defense secretary under former President Clinton, blasted GOP lawmakers challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in a Thursday interview in which he suggested the formation of a new political party.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, I think there is a lot of truth there. People really struggle to understand random bad events. Hence the perpetual question when I am giving a diagnosis with a grim prognosis: "why?"
When I worked in Malawi, there was an answer. "Someone in the village is a witch, and did this", but in allopathic medicine, we have no answer.
Did you follow scientific method on witches in Malawi?
To be honest, that was when things got really weird. I expected a 17th Century New England type problem, but the reality was far more surprising.
The background was that a local notable was washing his clothes, when a crocodile came out of the water, and pulled the fellow in, never to be seen again. We were interested, because we were going snorkeling the next day in the same lake. Lake Malawi has several hundred unique species, and is fresh water.
We were told by the villagers not to worry, they had caught the woman who did it. She was a witch, had a grudge against this person, had magically transformed into a crocodile and had killed him. We clearly looked a bit sceptical, but the villagers reassured us that the woman had confessed. What more evidence did we need?
That was when the surprising bit started. The villagers performed an exorcism, drove out the evil spirits that had inhabited the witch, thereby curing her, and she could continue life in the village unmolested. Basically, they saw witchcraft as a curable condition with no long term adverse effects, and could happen to anyone. They also managed to catch and kill the crocodile culprit a few days later, which didn't seem to contradict the truth of all the other events.
And yes, we did go snorkeling...
It was 15 years ago, but I still wonder about it all. Certainly in some other parts of Africa being marked as a witch is very dangerous indeed.
The parallels with the anti-vax and anti-mask crowd write themselves, don't they?
And the anti-vax crowd are the crocodile in this analogy, right?
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, I think there is a lot of truth there. People really struggle to understand random bad events. Hence the perpetual question when I am giving a diagnosis with a grim prognosis: "why?"
When I worked in Malawi, there was an answer. "Someone in the village is a witch, and did this", but in allopathic medicine, we have no answer.
Did you follow scientific method on witches in Malawi?
To be honest, that was when things got really weird. I expected a 17th Century New England type problem, but the reality was far more surprising.
The background was that a local notable was washing his clothes, when a crocodile came out of the water, and pulled the fellow in, never to be seen again. We were interested, because we were going snorkeling the next day in the same lake. Lake Malawi has several hundred unique species, and is fresh water.
We were told by the villagers not to worry, they had caught the woman who did it. She was a witch, had a grudge against this person, had magically transformed into a crocodile and had killed him. We clearly looked a bit sceptical, but the villagers reassured us that the woman had confessed. What more evidence did we need?
That was when the surprising bit started. The villagers performed an exorcism, drove out the evil spirits that had inhabited the witch, thereby curing her, and she could continue life in the village unmolested. Basically, they saw witchcraft as a curable condition with no long term adverse effects, and could happen to anyone. They also managed to catch and kill the crocodile culprit a few days later, which didn't seem to contradict the truth of all the other events.
And yes, we did go snorkeling...
It was 15 years ago, but I still wonder about it all. Certainly in some other parts of Africa being marked as a witch is very dangerous indeed.
The parallels with the anti-vax and anti-mask crowd write themselves, don't they?
And the anti-vax crowd are the crocodile in this analogy, right?
Can we just feed the anti-vaxers to crocodiles and call it a wash?
This is what our Doctors have been complaining about.
But it is ok because all for CMOs have signed it off and they know better than Pfizer.
The advice says that it shouldn’t be *harmful* to mix a match. Which is probably right given the different MoA.
But you wouldn’t get the efficacy boost (maybe it would be additive?) so not much point in doing this
I am not very surprised by this plan (although I was not sure that they would do it), or by the reaction to it.
The real unknowns are still there, whether the virus will mutate again, to become resistant to the vaccines. This is more likely to happen if the vaccine roll-out happens very fast, before people have caught the virus.
I think if the virus mutates into a form that is resistant to the vaccines and less infectious than the new variant then the epidemic could become very protracted, otherwise it will probably be declining in the UK by the middle of this year. The NHS is not really organised for this type of emergency. It tends to assume that there is plenty of time and resources normally, so that individual patients are the priority. The NHS does not find it easy to adapt to the new priorities.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
We are all constructing our own views of the world, you of yours, mine of mine, they or theirs. The truth is many sided, and none of us has a monopoly on it.
But without getting all Platonic, surely there are some underlying facts that should lead all reasonable people to the same very general conclusion whatever our political, social or religious outlook. And no matter what our views, presenting and promoting false figures when the real ones are so easily available and verifiable does not seem to be simply a 'different world view'.
Luckyguys philosophy fails the basic "punch in the face" test that all postmodern sophistry fails.
'There is no universal truth cries' the postmodernist. He still tries to avoid the fist thrown at him because that shit hurts. A rejection of universal truth that does not simultaneously also reject any physical danger is a pile of inconsistent wank. And those that due actually follow through to having a consistent set of beliefs are dead because if you step out in front of a speeding car you die, relative belief system or not.
Of course there is objective truth - however, it is multifaceted, and we only view it from our perspective. You can have a thundering argument with someone and you can both have a perspective on the truth that is real and valid. You are just looking at the same thing, but different parts, and from different angles.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Wait. You don't think the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels over the past 250 years has had any effect on global temperature levels?
I don't think (or rather I don't know) it has had the effects claimed. The whole basis of the climate change hypothesis is feedback mechanisms. The basic effects of CO2 are well known and were actually first studied and articulated by my own Great Great Great? Uncle John Tyndall. I have a collection of his original notes on the subject. The basic science is - well undeniable.
But that is not what is up for debate. The debate is on what the reaction of the atmosphere and biosphere is to this and what feedback mechanisms come into play. The catastrophists (and I don't use that term in a derogatory sense at all) believe that the overriding effect is positive feedback which accentuates climate change. The non catastrophists believe that negative feedback mechanisms dampen the effects.
The real issue for me is that to make the catastrophist case, some scientists have chosen to try and undermine some of the very basic scientific positions that my fields of geology and archaeology hold to be well established - particularly periods in the recent past (by which I mean since the last glaciation) where we have had a warmer climate. They have completely failed to do this which therefore still leaves the question as to the effects of natural climate variability on our current warming.
As I said for me this is a purely hypothetical debate as I also like the move to decarbonisation whatever the reasons. I see it in the same vein as Fred Hoyle's preference for a steady state theory of the universe compared to the Big Bang theory. It is a matter of scientific interest to me not political activism. As such it needs no conspiracy theory to attempt to undermine those who I disagree with.
It also means that as more evidence becomes available I am open to changing my views. It is changing the past based on no sound evidence I have a problem with.
Well it’s undeniable that the planet has experienced significant climatic variation from the norm (or mean) in the past, and rather than spiralling out of control, has ‘righted itself’ in the way you describe.
But human input represents an external input to this system, with which past experience offers no guarantee that these feedback mechanisms can cope.
There is also the tiny matter of timescale: the climatic variations you are looking at have taken place over much longer timescales and much more slowly than the accelerating impact of human-generated emissions.
Yep to your second paragraph which is why I have no objections to what is being done. As I said it is an inevitable next step anyway. So much of our modern existence relies on hydrocarbons in a non-combustible way (synthetic products, lubricants etc) that we should have stopped burning them as soon as other options became viable.
On the second point the evidence is not there for that claim. Quite the opposite in fact. One point that got lost in all the arguments over the last decade is that it is now believed we move into and out of glacial periods in a much shorter time period than previously thought. The entry into the Younger Dryas which was the last glacial period is now thought to have occurred in as little as 50 years and be the equivalent of a 10 degree drop in temperatures in those 5 decades. The exit was a little slower but again is the equivalent of about 1 degree per decade. These changes are fast.
Of course this doesn't destroy catastrophism as an argument but it certainly makes it a little more wobbly when some climatologists try to ignore or discredit these records.
I know someone involved in insect and pollen studies and he always says that some of the cold periods at the end of the ice age ended 'on the first Sunday in Lent'. He reckons it may have taken only a few years for a change of several degrees in some cases.
Whilst I don't discount man made climate change at all - the basic physics makes sense even if I don't entirely trust the computer modelling - the idea that it is faster than any natural change and that it will wipe out species that survived much greater changes only very recently seems alarmist.
Still, burning stuff that we can't replace isn't a good long term plan.
I believe an individual is immune or not, not that there is a new “test” each time they come into contact with covid
Hence once we are immunised then only 30% of the adult population less those who have contracted and recovered are susceptible. Meaning it is harder for the virus to propagate
That's very helpful - I got a slightly different, tentative answer when I asked here the other day. What is the basis for your understanding - is there a link?
What would be great in that case would be if one could find out whether it had "taken" or not.
William Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine and Defense secretary under former President Clinton, blasted GOP lawmakers challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in a Thursday interview in which he suggested the formation of a new political party.
The Hill blog
"If Pence is arrested" indeed! It is just THIS kind of wishy-washy indecision that is preventing President Trump from Making America Great Again!
Clearly this "Lin Wood" character is him/her/its-self a foul TRAITOR well-deserving of the obvious penalty - lock 'm up!
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Wait. You don't think the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels over the past 250 years has had any effect on global temperature levels?
I don't think (or rather I don't know) it has had the effects claimed. The whole basis of the climate change hypothesis is feedback mechanisms. The basic effects of CO2 are well known and were actually first studied and articulated by my own Great Great Great? Uncle John Tyndall. I have a collection of his original notes on the subject. The basic science is - well undeniable.
But that is not what is up for debate. The debate is on what the reaction of the atmosphere and biosphere is to this and what feedback mechanisms come into play. The catastrophists (and I don't use that term in a derogatory sense at all) believe that the overriding effect is positive feedback which accentuates climate change. The non catastrophists believe that negative feedback mechanisms dampen the effects.
The real issue for me is that to make the catastrophist case, some scientists have chosen to try and undermine some of the very basic scientific positions that my fields of geology and archaeology hold to be well established - particularly periods in the recent past (by which I mean since the last glaciation) where we have had a warmer climate. They have completely failed to do this which therefore still leaves the question as to the effects of natural climate variability on our current warming.
As I said for me this is a purely hypothetical debate as I also like the move to decarbonisation whatever the reasons. I see it in the same vein as Fred Hoyle's preference for a steady state theory of the universe compared to the Big Bang theory. It is a matter of scientific interest to me not political activism. As such it needs no conspiracy theory to attempt to undermine those who I disagree with.
It also means that as more evidence becomes available I am open to changing my views. It is changing the past based on no sound evidence I have a problem with.
Well it’s undeniable that the planet has experienced significant climatic variation from the norm (or mean) in the past, and rather than spiralling out of control, has ‘righted itself’ in the way you describe.
But human input represents an external input to this system, with which past experience offers no guarantee that these feedback mechanisms can cope.
There is also the tiny matter of timescale: the climatic variations you are looking at have taken place over much longer timescales and much more slowly than the accelerating impact of human-generated emissions.
Yep to your second paragraph which is why I have no objections to what is being done. As I said it is an inevitable next step anyway. So much of our modern existence relies on hydrocarbons in a non-combustible way (synthetic products, lubricants etc) that we should have stopped burning them as soon as other options became viable.
On the second point the evidence is not there for that claim. Quite the opposite in fact. One point that got lost in all the arguments over the last decade is that it is now believed we move into and out of glacial periods in a much shorter time period than previously thought. The entry into the Younger Dryas which was the last glacial period is now thought to have occurred in as little as 50 years and be the equivalent of a 10 degree drop in temperatures in those 5 decades. The exit was a little slower but again is the equivalent of about 1 degree per decade. These changes are fast.
Of course this doesn't destroy catastrophism as an argument but it certainly makes it a little more wobbly when some climatologists try to ignore or discredit these records.
I know someone involved in insect and pollen studies and he always says that some of the cold periods at the end of the ice age ended 'on the first Sunday in Lent'. He reckons it may have taken only a few years for a change of several degrees in some cases.
Whilst I don't discount man made climate change at all - the basic physics makes sense even if I don't entirely trust the computer modelling - the idea that it is faster than any natural change and that it will wipe out species that survived much greater changes only very recently seems alarmist.
Still, burning stuff that we can't replace isn't a good long term plan.
Apparently, there are non-standard fossil fuels such as oil sands and methane hydrates in the ocean, that are equivalent to 3,000 years of global energy consumption, and which can be extracted if we choose to make the required technological advances. These fossil fuels produce CO2 when they are burnt.
3,000 years’ worth of global CO2 emissions all released into the atmosphere at once would make CO2 a major constituent of air, possibly greater than oxygen in proportion, and would lead to massive global warming.
Shortage of fossil fuels is not our problem long-term, after COVID. Our problem is excessive energy demand, and a shortage of sustainable energy sources. Technology can help by increasing energy efficiency, and developing new energy sources, such as geothermal energy and solar power.
One can debate how much global warming has taken place already due to the burning of fossil fuels, but there is no doubt that if we carry on burning all the carbon on the planet, we will eventually get a lot of global warming.
SONGS OF THE SPECIAL RUNOFF ELECTION STATES - GEORGIA
The Devil Went Down to Georgia by Charlie Daniels et al
The Devil went down to Georgia He was lookin' for a soul to steal He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind And he was willin' to make a deal
When he came across this young man Sawin' on a fiddle and playin' it hot And the Devil jumped upon a hickory stump And said Boy let me tell you what
I guess you didn't know it but I'm a fiddle player, too And if you'd care to take a dare I'll make a bet with you Now you play pretty good fiddle boy but give the Devil his due I'll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul 'Cause I think I'm better than you
The boy said my name is Johnny and it might be a sin But I'll take your bet you're gonna regret 'Cause I am the best that's ever been
Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard 'Cause Hell's broke loose in Georgia and the Devil deals the cards And if you win you get this shiny fiddle made of gold But if you lose the devil gets your soul
The Devil opened up his case and he said I'll start this show And fire flew from his fingertips as he rosined up his bow As he pulled the bow across the strings it made a evil hiss Then a band of demons joined in and it sounded somethin' like this <>><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
When the Devil had finished Johnny said, Well, you're pretty good old son But sit down in that chair right there And let me show you how it's done
And he played "Fire on the Mountain" run boys run The Devil's in the "House of the Risin' Sun" "Chicken in the bread pan" peckin' out dough "Granny does your dog bite?" No child no &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
The Devil bowed his head because he knew that he'd been beat And he laid that golden fiddle on the ground at Johnny's feet Johnny said Devil just come on back if you ever wanna try again I done told you once you son of a bitch I'm the best that's ever been
And he played "Fire on the Mountain" run boys run The Devil's in the "House of the Risin' Sun" "Chicken in the bread pan" peckin' out dough "Granny does your dog bite?" No child no
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
Nope. I have never said there was a conspiracy or a hoax. I have said they are wrong and base that on the fact that it is my own specific area of expertise. There are plenty of other earth scientists who believe the same thing.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Wait. You don't think the CO2 we have pumped into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels over the past 250 years has had any effect on global temperature levels?
I don't think (or rather I don't know) it has had the effects claimed. The whole basis of the climate change hypothesis is feedback mechanisms. The basic effects of CO2 are well known and were actually first studied and articulated by my own Great Great Great? Uncle John Tyndall. I have a collection of his original notes on the subject. The basic science is - well undeniable.
But that is not what is up for debate. The debate is on what the reaction of the atmosphere and biosphere is to this and what feedback mechanisms come into play. The catastrophists (and I don't use that term in a derogatory sense at all) believe that the overriding effect is positive feedback which accentuates climate change. The non catastrophists believe that negative feedback mechanisms dampen the effects.
The real issue for me is that to make the catastrophist case, some scientists have chosen to try and undermine some of the very basic scientific positions that my fields of geology and archaeology hold to be well established - particularly periods in the recent past (by which I mean since the last glaciation) where we have had a warmer climate. They have completely failed to do this which therefore still leaves the question as to the effects of natural climate variability on our current warming.
As I said for me this is a purely hypothetical debate as I also like the move to decarbonisation whatever the reasons. I see it in the same vein as Fred Hoyle's preference for a steady state theory of the universe compared to the Big Bang theory. It is a matter of scientific interest to me not political activism. As such it needs no conspiracy theory to attempt to undermine those who I disagree with.
It also means that as more evidence becomes available I am open to changing my views. It is changing the past based on no sound evidence I have a problem with.
Well it’s undeniable that the planet has experienced significant climatic variation from the norm (or mean) in the past, and rather than spiralling out of control, has ‘righted itself’ in the way you describe.
But human input represents an external input to this system, with which past experience offers no guarantee that these feedback mechanisms can cope.
There is also the tiny matter of timescale: the climatic variations you are looking at have taken place over much longer timescales and much more slowly than the accelerating impact of human-generated emissions.
Yep to your second paragraph which is why I have no objections to what is being done. As I said it is an inevitable next step anyway. So much of our modern existence relies on hydrocarbons in a non-combustible way (synthetic products, lubricants etc) that we should have stopped burning them as soon as other options became viable.
On the second point the evidence is not there for that claim. Quite the opposite in fact. One point that got lost in all the arguments over the last decade is that it is now believed we move into and out of glacial periods in a much shorter time period than previously thought. The entry into the Younger Dryas which was the last glacial period is now thought to have occurred in as little as 50 years and be the equivalent of a 10 degree drop in temperatures in those 5 decades. The exit was a little slower but again is the equivalent of about 1 degree per decade. These changes are fast.
Of course this doesn't destroy catastrophism as an argument but it certainly makes it a little more wobbly when some climatologists try to ignore or discredit these records.
I think you may be confusing local and global temperatures. While climate oscillations and one-off events could cause the temperature changes you describe on a local level, it is implausible in the extreme that the global mean temperatures could have changed by 10 degrees in 5 decades. The difference in the global mean temperature between the depths of the ice age and the current interglacial is only about 6 Celsius!
Comments
I consider that, in a democratic country, citizens have a right to expect the laws of that land to be upheld, most especially so when flouting of them amounts to implicit manslaughter. Not manslaughter of the young healthy cretins doing the partying, in the selfish knowledge that there is minimal risk to themselves, but the elderly and vulnerable people who will be exposed to the virus that they spread.
Where the police are unable or unwilling to do that, because of the scale of the crowds involved, I do expect them to resort to other measures to clear those crowds.
Right now, use of tear gas or water cannon to break up such crowds in order to uphold the law would be entirely proportionate if that is what it takes.
Your effort to equate that with "belt fed machine guns and tanks" is risible.
FYI the reduction has been happening over a few days now.
'There is no universal truth cries' the postmodernist. He still tries to avoid the fist thrown at him because that shit hurts. A rejection of universal truth that does not simultaneously also reject any physical danger is a pile of inconsistent wank. And those that due actually follow through to having a consistent set of beliefs are dead because if you step out in front of a speeding car you die, relative belief system or not.
The important difference is that I actually don't mind the outcomes of them being wrong. The use of fossil fuels is - for reasons completely unconnected to climate change - a bloody stupid idea in my opinion. It is the waste of a valuable and diminishing resource. Given we have perfectly good and viable alternatives I see no point in arguing the hypotheticals as anything other than an interesting debate when the consequences of me being right and you being wrong are still actually good.
So I am happy to continue to argue that climate change is natural rather than man made but really don't mind the actions being taken as they would have to be done sooner or later anyway for reasons completely unconnected to that particular argument.
The point at which I would start to get somewhat vociferous is if any of the geo-engineering plans start to get taken seriously.
Top response not only provides the ingredients but also how it works, presumably the anti-vaxxers don't have access to Google
https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/covid-19-what-ingredients-oxfordastrazeneca-19538759
Water canon were removed from the armoury of the state, quite deliberately. They were said to be a step too far.
The policing systems of democratic countries can deal with some large riots. Dealing with hundreds of smaller mass disobedience events is quite simply beyond what they can do. Or anyone can do. Bar shooting.
My point with regard to China, is that there, one police officer can tell a crowd to disburse. Because they know that if he is challenged, the escalation will end with their compliance. Or death.
You are describing the methodology used by Prevent in your second paragraph, incidentally.
Glee club attendees at Lib Dem conference will know the tune.
When I worked in Malawi, there was an answer. "Someone in the village is a witch, and did this", but in allopathic medicine, we have no answer.
This report does not consider the epidemiology of COVID-19 in relation to new variants of concern for SARS-CoV-2, such as one recently observed in the United Kingdom (VOC 202012/01), for which robust evidence on the potential impact in school settings is not yet available.
• The United Kingdom has released a statement that, on preliminary analysis, this variant appears to be more transmissible. There are media reports that the new variant may be more able to infect children, but this is not yet confirmed, and detailed data are awaited.
• Should these initial reports about increased transmissibility of VOC 20212/01 in children prove to be accurate, this could have implications for the effectiveness of intervention measures in school settings, and of potential school closures, in countries where there are high rates of circulation of this variant.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/948757/Greenbook_chapter_14a_v4.pdf
... Although no data for co-administration of COVID-19 vaccine with other vaccines exists, in the absence of such data first principles would suggest that interference between inactivated vaccines with different antigenic content is likely to be limited (see Chapter 11). Based on experience with other vaccines any potential interference is most likely to result in a slightly attenuated immune response to one of the vaccines. There is no evidence of any safety concerns, although it may make the attribution of any adverse events more difficult.
Because of the absence of data on co-administration with COVID-19 vaccines, it should not be routine to offer appointments to give this vaccine at the same time as other vaccines. Based on current information about the first COVID-19 vaccines being deployed, scheduling should ideally be separated by an interval of at least 7 days to avoid incorrect attribution of potential adverse events.
As both of the early COVID-19 vaccines are considered inactivated (including the non- replicating adenovirus vaccine), where individuals in an eligible cohort present having received another inactivated or live vaccine, COVID-19 vaccination should still be considered. The same applies for other live and inactivated vaccines where COVID-19 vaccination has been received first or where a patient presents requiring two vaccines. In most cases, vaccination should proceed to avoid any further delay in protection and to avoid the risk of the patient not returning for a later appointment. In such circumstances, patients should be informed about the likely timing of potential adverse events relating to each vaccine....
In theory this should be OK, but that really is in theory, and without much, if anything, in the way of supporting data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp_l5ntikaU
Is that unthinkable here if the pandemic declines to become the exception rather than universal? Isn't that pretty much what Track and Trace was supposed to do, except that that tried to find each individual contact rather than whole districts?
Because it's not obvious that we will otherwise really get on top of it. Say we all get vaccinated and are immune 70% of the time. If we start behaving normally we'll perhaps catch the bug all the same, just 70% later than we would have done, so we go on being socially distanced forever? What sort of life is that?
I repeat, the reduction has been happening since 14th December according to the specimen date charts on the website. I accept that the new variant hasn't really took off here.
https://twitter.com/arthistorynews/status/1345137365325651974?s=21
Not to mention the 689, which is about three times lower than the proceeding days.
Among both Dems and Reps, clear pattern of more radical members (either left or right) voting nay, while (relatively) more moderate ones voting aye.
For example, among the US House delegation from Washington State, out of seven Democrats, only one - Pramila Jayapal of Seattle, clearly the most progressive - voted nay.
On the other hand, among the three House Republicans from WA, who are all (by current US GOP standards anyway), two of them voted FOR the measure
> Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Spokane), top ranking woman in House GOP leadership; and
> Dan Newhouse (Yakima), originally elected with help of Dem voters in WA "top two" primary system (no D ran)
While one voted AGAINST
> Jaime Herrera Beutler (Vancouver, WA) who is a protege of McMorris Rogers
Question is, WHY did JHB vote nay?
My own guess, is that a) the GOP leadership did NOT need her vote to pass the measure; and b) voting against the final bill is good politics for her, on two levels"
1. It propitiates hard-core Trumpsky supporters;
2. Even more importantly, it appeals the blue collar FORMER Democratic voters who are THE key swing voters in her district.
Looking forward, NOTE that WA State will NOT gain a new US House seat in 2021 (unlike 2011) and while district lines are unlikely to see major alterations, population shifts mean that Herrera Beutler's district is likely to loose a bit of GOP turf in Eastern WA.
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1345121388718391296
And really, if they want a "sputtering vaccine rollout", they should be looking elsewhere.
https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1211963961266061312
But it is ok because all for CMOs have signed it off and they know better than Pfizer.
But that is not what is up for debate. The debate is on what the reaction of the atmosphere and biosphere is to this and what feedback mechanisms come into play. The catastrophists (and I don't use that term in a derogatory sense at all) believe that the overriding effect is positive feedback which accentuates climate change. The non catastrophists believe that negative feedback mechanisms dampen the effects.
The real issue for me is that to make the catastrophist case, some scientists have chosen to try and undermine some of the very basic scientific positions that my fields of geology and archaeology hold to be well established - particularly periods in the recent past (by which I mean since the last glaciation) where we have had a warmer climate. They have completely failed to do this which therefore still leaves the question as to the effects of natural climate variability on our current warming.
As I said for me this is a purely hypothetical debate as I also like the move to decarbonisation whatever the reasons. I see it in the same vein as Fred Hoyle's preference for a steady state theory of the universe compared to the Big Bang theory. It is a matter of scientific interest to me not political activism. As such it needs no conspiracy theory to attempt to undermine those who I disagree with.
It also means that as more evidence becomes available I am open to changing my views. It is changing the past based on no sound evidence I have a problem with.
Looks like a fast track to creating some sort of mutant viral resistant covid to me.
We've probably done enough damage to the world by keeping Heathrow open for all and sundry throughout th pandemic.
NOTE that in 21st century GA, the only folks likely to be irritated by this song are a) older, mostly rural Whites and b) racists and related wackjobs. Blacks on other hand much more positive (though for many it is totally unknown) while blow-ins up in Atlanta are mostly clueless on this topic.,
I've been thinking for a while that the current vaccination round is really only a stopgap before next autumn, or the one after, when we'll hope to have a smoother rollout of whatever is cheapest and easiest (and safest).
--AS
As some of you know my father was a paediatrician, he's spent the last twenty reassuring people that the MMR jab is fine, because lets face it, if you're a parent and your hear a vaccine might cause your kids to suffer from autism and other bad things of course you're going to start asking questions.
So reassure those people, and ruthlessly go after [moderated] like Andrew Wakefield who have blood on their hands.
So many conspiracy theories and antivax stuff can be ended with a few facts.
During the first wave of Covid-19 I had a friend of a friend who was convinced that 5G was responsible for it, I sent them a simple chart showing places like Iran, which had no 5G, doing really badly, thanks to a mate who does planning applications for the BT Group/EE and he is used to stuff like this.
That's why Wera Hobhouse can get fucked, and the Lib Dems can get bent if they want my vote, every second Sir Ed Davey keeps her as Justice Spokesman he's effectively fuelling lots of conspiracy theories.
The percentage of those test coming back positive has been increasing -- hitting over 30 per cent from Dec 25-28th (the highest ever positive rate in Wales). This in itself strongly suggests the true level of the virus in Wales is higher than the headline figure suggests.
Do you really think it is coincidence that there were fewer tests but the highest ever positivity rate, on Christmas Day?
There is no sign that the number of people testing positive for coronavirus on admission to hospital is falling. Public Health Wales state that of 4,476 people admitted to all hospital wards in Wales during the week ending December 27, 208 people, or 5%, tested positive on admission. The percentage has grown every week since November 22.
I would really hesitate to conclude anything from data over the Xmas periods because of disruption. There are plenty of warning signals in the data.
But human input represents an external input to this system, with which past experience offers no guarantee that these feedback mechanisms can cope.
There is also the tiny matter of timescale: the climatic variations you are looking at have taken place over much longer timescales and much more slowly than the accelerating impact of human-generated emissions.
So said our shit-for-brains leaders. Most especially The Donald and Bojo, the COVID Kids.
In a submission to the council about the planned mast, Bath's MP said she was concerned about "the threat to human health, to tree health and to wildlife and biodiversity".
Asked by the BBC to detail her concerns about health, Ms Hobhouse said she had spent time weighing up the available evidence and conceded that all the official guidance was that it was safe.
But she said that "given the widespread concern and conversations I have had with Bath residents who claim to be extra vulnerable, I believe it may be worth applying a precautionary principle on where masts are located whilst further studies are being undertaken".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55399513
The Venn Diagram of 5G conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers would be just one circle.
Good health, no pre-existing, under 50 ?
One course of AZN and done for 10 years.
Over 80, pre-existing ?
6 months maybe.
One of the vaccinations should be p3 trialled on kids (Perhaps 10+ ?) and then rolled out - that should I think produce a long lasting immunity in schools - which are obviously a major vector.
Looking at the 7 day average, or the last 24 hours, using data from
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk
it seems the positivity rate in England is 12 per cent.
If that is right, why is it so different from Wales?
Given the seemingly universal tolerance among UK politicians, plus the media, for the lack of restrictions of international travel there seems to be some weird groupthink in action.
Its worthy of academic research IMO.
The background was that a local notable was washing his clothes, when a crocodile came out of the water, and pulled the fellow in, never to be seen again. We were interested, because we were going snorkeling the next day in the same lake. Lake Malawi has several hundred unique species, and is fresh water.
We were told by the villagers not to worry, they had caught the woman who did it. She was a witch, had a grudge against this person, had magically transformed into a crocodile and had killed him. We clearly looked a bit sceptical, but the villagers reassured us that the woman had confessed. What more evidence did we need?
That was when the surprising bit started. The villagers performed an exorcism, drove out the evil spirits that had inhabited the witch, thereby curing her, and she could continue life in the village unmolested. Basically, they saw witchcraft as a curable condition with no long term adverse effects, and could happen to anyone. They also managed to catch and kill the crocodile culprit a few days later, which didn't seem to contradict the truth of all the other events.
And yes, we did go snorkeling...
It was 15 years ago, but I still wonder about it all. Certainly in some other parts of Africa being marked as a witch is very dangerous indeed.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54908177
"The average age of people who have died with Covid is above 80 with more than nine in 10 of the deaths among the over 65s, according to Office for National Statistics analyses of the pandemic."
There are about 12 million people in this category according to this document.
https://www.ageuk.org.uk/globalassets/age-uk/documents/reports-and-publications/later_life_uk_factsheet.pdf
some of us have laid the snot out of Brian Roseit's vital for democracy.https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing?areaType=nation&areaName=Wales
I am just not sure you can compare case numbers in England with numbers in Wales if there is a big difference in the positivity rate (as seems to be the case over Xmas).
(*) This figures needs checking.
Also note that the US's measures, which were controversial enough, failed totally - passengers simply rerouted, and anyway you can't simply strand your own nationals overseas.
Similarly our plans were for pandemic flu, that is highly infective, main problem is secondary bacterial pneumonia, and lasts a few days rather than weeks.
We were all planning for a different disease initially.
overall positivity
To anyone who wants the spreadsheet of data which I build from https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk - PM me and I can give you access to the Google Drive collection of spreadsheets for each day.
Hence once we are immunised then only 30% of the adult population less those who have contracted and recovered are susceptible. Meaning it is harder for the virus to propagate
We have 4 months still.
Aren't we?
But you wouldn’t get the efficacy boost (maybe it would be additive?) so not much point in doing this
On the second point the evidence is not there for that claim. Quite the opposite in fact. One point that got lost in all the arguments over the last decade is that it is now believed we move into and out of glacial periods in a much shorter time period than previously thought. The entry into the Younger Dryas which was the last glacial period is now thought to have occurred in as little as 50 years and be the equivalent of a 10 degree drop in temperatures in those 5 decades. The exit was a little slower but again is the equivalent of about 1 degree per decade. These changes are fast.
Of course this doesn't destroy catastrophism as an argument but it certainly makes it a little more wobbly when some climatologists try to ignore or discredit these records.
| Age | Deaths | Hospitalisations | Percent of Population | Number in population |
| 85 years and over | 41.75% | 23.20% | 2.47% | 1,647,271 |
| 75 to 84 years | 32.82% | 25.75% | 6.05% | 4,040,624 |
| 65 to 74 years | 15.14% | 17.91% | 10.01% | 6,687,066 |
| 45 to 64 years | 9.24% | 21.74% | 25.79% | 17,224,230 |
| 15 to 44 years | 1.03% | 9.84% | 37.78% | 25,236,635 |
| 1 to 14 years | 0.01% | 1.50% | 16.82% | 11,238,100 |
| Under 1 year | 0.00% | 0.05% | 1.08% | 722,881 |
The first row tells you why the government is so keen to get the jabs done
https://twitter.com/LLinWood/status/1345067881319587840
The legal situation for the majority of the country which is in teir 4 is pretty much identical to the first lockdown, other than schools. Almost all non-essential public facing businesses are closed.
I presume that you want schools/unis closed - this now looks inevitable.
What other measures are left in the arsenal - because I can't see there are many? Possibly closing all non-essential businesses which require physical staff attendance (e.g. construction, large chunks of manufacturing) but that's going to come at a colossal cost.
It's all well and good going "lockdown harder", but short of welding people into their houses, what options remain?
Because in The Smoke, GLA elections are largely run (in particular, postal voting) by 32 boroughs, whereas in the Big Apple the electoral process is much more centralized under NYC Board of Elections.
Note that NYC had little previous experience with mass- let alone all-postal voting, and it showed. In the primary, hey laid a HUGE egg. Not (only) because of innate idiocy within entrenched neo-Tammany bureaucracy, but largely due to woeful lack of adequate preparation resulting from failure to appreciate the organizational & logistical challenges.
Note that in 2004 in King County, WA the pressure of a high-turnout, closely fought election was GREATLY exacerbated by widespread flaws & failures with the county's election system, due to BIG increase in postal voting while having to manage a LARGE poll voting system, the latter staffed predominately by community volunteers (though DID get $10 or thereabouts for working a 12-hour day).
The Hill blog
The man is a complete f*cking loon. Everything on there is "lock them up".
The real unknowns are still there, whether the virus will mutate again, to become resistant to the vaccines. This is more likely to happen if the vaccine roll-out happens very fast, before people have caught the virus.
I think if the virus mutates into a form that is resistant to the vaccines and less infectious than the new variant then the epidemic could become very protracted, otherwise it will probably be declining in the UK by the middle of this year. The NHS is not really organised for this type of emergency. It tends to assume that there is plenty of time and resources normally, so that individual patients are the priority. The NHS does not find it easy to adapt to the new priorities.
Whilst I don't discount man made climate change at all - the basic physics makes sense even if I don't entirely trust the computer modelling - the idea that it is faster than any natural change and that it will wipe out species that survived much greater changes only very recently seems alarmist.
Still, burning stuff that we can't replace isn't a good long term plan.
What would be great in that case would be if one could find out whether it had "taken" or not.
Clearly this "Lin Wood" character is him/her/its-self a foul TRAITOR well-deserving of the obvious penalty - lock 'm up!
3,000 years’ worth of global CO2 emissions all released into the atmosphere at once would make CO2 a major constituent of air, possibly greater than oxygen in proportion, and would lead to massive global warming.
Shortage of fossil fuels is not our problem long-term, after COVID. Our problem is excessive energy demand, and a shortage of sustainable energy sources. Technology can help by increasing energy efficiency, and developing new energy sources, such as geothermal energy and solar power.
One can debate how much global warming has taken place already due to the burning of fossil fuels, but there is no doubt that if we carry on burning all the carbon on the planet, we will eventually get a lot of global warming.
The Devil Went Down to Georgia
by Charlie Daniels et al
The Devil went down to Georgia
He was lookin' for a soul to steal
He was in a bind 'cause he was way behind
And he was willin' to make a deal
When he came across this young man
Sawin' on a fiddle and playin' it hot
And the Devil jumped upon a hickory stump
And said Boy let me tell you what
I guess you didn't know it but I'm a fiddle player, too
And if you'd care to take a dare I'll make a bet with you
Now you play pretty good fiddle boy but give the Devil his due
I'll bet a fiddle of gold against your soul
'Cause I think I'm better than you
The boy said my name is Johnny and it might be a sin
But I'll take your bet you're gonna regret
'Cause I am the best that's ever been
Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard
'Cause Hell's broke loose in Georgia and the Devil deals the cards
And if you win you get this shiny fiddle made of gold
But if you lose the devil gets your soul
The Devil opened up his case and he said I'll start this show
And fire flew from his fingertips as he rosined up his bow
As he pulled the bow across the strings it made a evil hiss
Then a band of demons joined in and it sounded somethin' like this
<>><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
When the Devil had finished
Johnny said, Well, you're pretty good old son
But sit down in that chair right there
And let me show you how it's done
And he played "Fire on the Mountain" run boys run
The Devil's in the "House of the Risin' Sun"
"Chicken in the bread pan" peckin' out dough
"Granny does your dog bite?" No child no
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
The Devil bowed his head because he knew that he'd been beat
And he laid that golden fiddle on the ground at Johnny's feet
Johnny said Devil just come on back if you ever wanna try again
I done told you once you son of a bitch
I'm the best that's ever been
And he played "Fire on the Mountain" run boys run
The Devil's in the "House of the Risin' Sun"
"Chicken in the bread pan" peckin' out dough
"Granny does your dog bite?" No child no