I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
I'm sorry to hear that mate and I agree with basically all of what you're saying.
This lockdown has been the worst and if it hadn't been for our house move I think it would have been a lot worse because I'd have had nothing outside of work to set my mind to. Now that it's done both my wife and I are definitely struggling. We're not people who can simply sit in front of the TV and stay there for hours on end and we have pretty active social lives in normal times.
I really miss just being able to message a mate and head to the pub or brewery bar on a Saturday afternoon. I miss being able to meet my wife at 11pm somewhere in the square mile on Thursday or Friday after work drinks and then head for a late dinner and stay out even later for drinks.
The idea that some NHS bod thinks that we need to keep social distancing indefinitely is completely depressing. I'm grateful that MPs like Steve Baker exist to ensure that boot of normal life is kept on the PM's neck and rule by scientist isn't really on the cards.
Its a bit rich that people whose argument you have spent the last year pouring scorn on are suddenly being relied on to get you out of a dreadful situation.
Email your own MP. Email your councillors.
Cut some mouthy anti-lockdown sceptic organisation a small cheque.
You will feel better. Trust me.
I haven't poured any scorn on people who say lockdown isn't a good long term solution. In fact I've been doing the opposite. Being against it as a long term solution doesn't mean it isn't effective at bringing cases down in the short term. In fact I've constantly been saying that without a longer term system in place lockdowns are basically not a really useful way of dealing with this and just pile misery onto people.
Ultimately, I take issue with people who say lockdown doesn't work, it obviously does one only needs to look at our current data to see that. In fact with vaccines we finally have a way out of this shit of lockdown, not lockdown then more lockdown. You can go back across all of my posts and I've been very consistent in this view, lockdown is a mechanism for reducing cases in the short term while other systems should be put in place (border controls, isolation, quarantine) to ensure cases don't explode again after unlocking. They aren't an end state as some people want them to be.
If anything I'd have more in common with Steve Baker than Matt Hancock with the added proviso that we need proper border controls and a fully open internal economy with no social distancing. I couldn't give a fuck if people can't travel in and out for the next 6-8 months.
And that is wholly legitimate.
But you see the issue. Your "I couldn't give a fuck if people can't travel in and out for the next 6-8 months" is someone else's "I couldn't give a fuck if bars and restaurants and clubs are closed for the next 6-8 months".
ie it is important that at every step of the way the government's actions are questioned. Not just when they either align with, or cross our own boundaries.
That is what eg @contrarian has done and I hope I have tried to explain my reasoning for my views. Which are yes of course lockdowns work (as we all have said - no clients, no problems). But they are a huge impingement on our freedoms, they should be questioned at every stage, and they have become, sadly, a policy tool which is now out of the box and, if you listen to Chris Hopson of the NHS on the matter, will not be put back for some time to come.
Potentially if we control the borders then everything else can get to normal.
Control pubs and it can't necessarily.
That's a critical difference. Plus the argument to not control the borders (besides jobs which apply to every sector) is typically "I need a break". That's true, everyone does. There's plenty of locales domestically to take a break in during a global pandemic.
Maybe. But what are we controlling against? Covid? New variants? New diseases?
These could emerge at any time. So it is open-ended.
If it's your bog-standard Covid (and attendant variants) then we are vaccinated aren't we?
As I have long said India would be less affected than the West by Covid as it has an average life expectancy of only 69 compared to over 80 in most of the West and the death rate from Covid is highest amongst over 70s and especially over 80s
I don't think the age differences are sufficient to explain the disparity, though (and average age is a misleading number). Look at the approximate numbers for percentage of population over the age of 80: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.80UP.MA.5Y
One factor will be internal movement. My guess is that the US has more people moving around across relatively large distances than India - this will have an effect on the relative speed of transmission and on local containment.
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
I'm sorry to hear that mate and I agree with basically all of what you're saying.
This lockdown has been the worst and if it hadn't been for our house move I think it would have been a lot worse because I'd have had nothing outside of work to set my mind to. Now that it's done both my wife and I are definitely struggling. We're not people who can simply sit in front of the TV and stay there for hours on end and we have pretty active social lives in normal times.
I really miss just being able to message a mate and head to the pub or brewery bar on a Saturday afternoon. I miss being able to meet my wife at 11pm somewhere in the square mile on Thursday or Friday after work drinks and then head for a late dinner and stay out even later for drinks.
The idea that some NHS bod thinks that we need to keep social distancing indefinitely is completely depressing. I'm grateful that MPs like Steve Baker exist to ensure that boot of normal life is kept on the PM's neck and rule by scientist isn't really on the cards.
Its a bit rich that people whose argument you have spent the last year pouring scorn on are suddenly being relied on to get you out of a dreadful situation.
Email your own MP. Email your councillors.
Cut some mouthy anti-lockdown sceptic organisation a small cheque.
You will feel better. Trust me.
I haven't poured any scorn on people who say lockdown isn't a good long term solution. In fact I've been doing the opposite. Being against it as a long term solution doesn't mean it isn't effective at bringing cases down in the short term. In fact I've constantly been saying that without a longer term system in place lockdowns are basically not a really useful way of dealing with this and just pile misery onto people.
Ultimately, I take issue with people who say lockdown doesn't work, it obviously does one only needs to look at our current data to see that. In fact with vaccines we finally have a way out of this shit of lockdown, not lockdown then more lockdown. You can go back across all of my posts and I've been very consistent in this view, lockdown is a mechanism for reducing cases in the short term while other systems should be put in place (border controls, isolation, quarantine) to ensure cases don't explode again after unlocking. They aren't an end state as some people want them to be.
If anything I'd have more in common with Steve Baker than Matt Hancock with the added proviso that we need proper border controls and a fully open internal economy with no social distancing. I couldn't give a fuck if people can't travel in and out for the next 6-8 months.
And that is wholly legitimate.
But you see the issue. Your "I couldn't give a fuck if people can't travel in and out for the next 6-8 months" is someone else's "I couldn't give a fuck if bars and restaurants and clubs are closed for the next 6-8 months".
ie it is important that at every step of the way the government's actions are questioned. Not just when they either align with, or cross our own boundaries.
That is what eg @contrarian has done and I hope I have tried to explain my reasoning for my views. Which are yes of course lockdowns work (as we all have said - no clients, no problems). But they are a huge impingement on our freedoms, they should be questioned at every stage, and they have become, sadly, a policy tool which is now out of the box and, if you listen to Chris Hopson of the NHS on the matter, will not be put back for some time to come.
I have no issue with anyone questioning policies, in fact I'd hope that people are free to do so. As I said the only issue I have is denial that lockdowns work in getting cases and therefore hospitalisations down. They obviously do and saying they don't as some seem to want to say just strikes me as deliberately ignoring evidence. My criticism of them (and yours I think) is that while I accept that lockdowns work in reducing cases, they can't be used as a solution to this because once lockdown is gone cases shot back up and you just end up in lockdown again.
Completely agree that the public policy types aren't going to want to let go of the measures they have and once again I find myself (I'm sure you do too) siding with Steve Baker (a wonderful experience for you, I'm sure) and blocking this dystopian future where NHS bods mouth of to the media that "we could have prevented these 20,000 flu deaths with a lockdown" in 2025 is absolutely a priority.
As I said, the scientists and public health people think they know what's best for us and now have the tools to impose it. We must absolutely take those away from them at the soonest possible opportunity and put them back in their box. We can't have rule by SAGE and scientists briefing the media independently suggesting that we can conquer death by having lockdowns.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
First, if you regularly get through that much fuel, you are a fairly extreme outlier (if perhaps far from unique). Second, you're ignoring the continuing rapid improvement in battery capacity, cost, changing speed and durability. It won't be very many years until it's completely uneconomic to make ICE powered vehicles.
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
I'm sorry to hear that mate and I agree with basically all of what you're saying.
This lockdown has been the worst and if it hadn't been for our house move I think it would have been a lot worse because I'd have had nothing outside of work to set my mind to. Now that it's done both my wife and I are definitely struggling. We're not people who can simply sit in front of the TV and stay there for hours on end and we have pretty active social lives in normal times.
I really miss just being able to message a mate and head to the pub or brewery bar on a Saturday afternoon. I miss being able to meet my wife at 11pm somewhere in the square mile on Thursday or Friday after work drinks and then head for a late dinner and stay out even later for drinks.
The idea that some NHS bod thinks that we need to keep social distancing indefinitely is completely depressing. I'm grateful that MPs like Steve Baker exist to ensure that boot of normal life is kept on the PM's neck and rule by scientist isn't really on the cards.
Its a bit rich that people whose argument you have spent the last year pouring scorn on are suddenly being relied on to get you out of a dreadful situation.
Email your own MP. Email your councillors.
Cut some mouthy anti-lockdown sceptic organisation a small cheque.
You will feel better. Trust me.
I haven't poured any scorn on people who say lockdown isn't a good long term solution. In fact I've been doing the opposite. Being against it as a long term solution doesn't mean it isn't effective at bringing cases down in the short term. In fact I've constantly been saying that without a longer term system in place lockdowns are basically not a really useful way of dealing with this and just pile misery onto people.
Ultimately, I take issue with people who say lockdown doesn't work, it obviously does one only needs to look at our current data to see that. In fact with vaccines we finally have a way out of this shit of lockdown, not lockdown then more lockdown. You can go back across all of my posts and I've been very consistent in this view, lockdown is a mechanism for reducing cases in the short term while other systems should be put in place (border controls, isolation, quarantine) to ensure cases don't explode again after unlocking. They aren't an end state as some people want them to be.
If anything I'd have more in common with Steve Baker than Matt Hancock with the added proviso that we need proper border controls and a fully open internal economy with no social distancing. I couldn't give a fuck if people can't travel in and out for the next 6-8 months.
And that is wholly legitimate.
But you see the issue. Your "I couldn't give a fuck if people can't travel in and out for the next 6-8 months" is someone else's "I couldn't give a fuck if bars and restaurants and clubs are closed for the next 6-8 months".
ie it is important that at every step of the way the government's actions are questioned. Not just when they either align with, or cross our own boundaries.
That is what eg @contrarian has done and I hope I have tried to explain my reasoning for my views. Which are yes of course lockdowns work (as we all have said - no clients, no problems). But they are a huge impingement on our freedoms, they should be questioned at every stage, and they have become, sadly, a policy tool which is now out of the box and, if you listen to Chris Hopson of the NHS on the matter, will not be put back for some time to come.
I have no issue with anyone questioning policies, in fact I'd hope that people are free to do so. As I said the only issue I have is denial that lockdowns work in getting cases and therefore hospitalisations down. They obviously do and saying they don't as some seem to want to say just strikes me as deliberately ignoring evidence. My criticism of them (and yours I think) is that while I accept that lockdowns work in reducing cases, they can't be used as a solution to this because once lockdown is gone cases shot back up and you just end up in lockdown again.
Completely agree that the public policy types aren't going to want to let go of the measures they have and once again I find myself (I'm sure you do too) siding with Steve Baker (a wonderful experience for you, I'm sure) and blocking this dystopian future where NHS bods mouth of to the media that "we could have prevented these 20,000 flu deaths with a lockdown" in 2025 is absolutely a priority.
As I said, the scientists and public health people think they know what's best for us and now have the tools to impose it. We must absolutely take those away from them at the soonest possible opportunity and put them back in their box. We can't have rule by SAGE and scientists briefing the media independently suggesting that we can conquer death by having lockdowns.
Intriguing uptick in new cases on Zoe app yesterday, and places like Lancaster recently and Hull showing the kind of gradual increase that preceded its explosion of new cases in November... this may not be over yet, let’s hope they’re just noise within the downward trend... on a brighter note, got the jab yesterday and no side effects so going off to climb Ingleborough peak to enjoy views of the Irish Sea and the Lakes...
I'm keeping a close eye on Calderdale, which dropped rather quicker than the rest of West Yorkshire and then has stalled and reversed.
Looking closely that was at around +49% on cases for w/c 9/2 compared to w/c 2/2 (Wednesday-Tuesday).
It turns out that at least half of this spike is due to snow on Tuesday 2/2. 26 positive tests occurred on that snow day (in the denominator) and 92 on the Wednesday (in the numerator), against a weekly figure of 473 (67 per day) over the last 7 days.
Rates do seem to be genuinely going up on the figures coming through, but is making those figures and the increases/decreases much more variable from day to day than would otherwise be the case.
I think all 5 areas in West Yorkshire have seen the cases measure turn red for a few days at times during this current lockdown, often weather related, but the longer term trends have remained slowly downwards for all areas.
To describe the events of 1688 as an invasion is a bit of an over simplification. In particular the new queen, reigning jointly, just happened to be the daughter of the abdicating/fleeing king.
From many English perspectives it was the overthrowing of an attempted tyranny...
Does that make Rees Mogg's comment any less foolish ?
One thing I wonder about is whether children especially will be left with any mental scarring like OCD, agoraphobia or germophobia from this past year.
Don't know how others with children are finding it but my six year old now is almost religiously trying to follow the rules. Whenever she washes her hands she sings out loud Happy Birthday To Me twice as she washes her hands.
On the one hand it's good to be healthy, on the other hand I don't want it to become too much for her. Striking the right balance is tough.
We have one child, a son 15 months old, who has never really got to play with other kids or see anyone much outside of the close family. When he did, in the late summer, he loved it. I do worry if he will be part of the Covid generation who missed out on playtime and social interaction. Maybe most kids his age mostly see parents and grandparents anyway though? And he has had more one on one time with his family than most I guess
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
I think a 2nd hand electric car market will develop. They're just too new and not widespread enough at the moment for it to be so.
Undoubtedly - but the combination of range being the most expensive bit, and it naturally degrading means that the cheapest second hand cars will have very poor ranges. Currently the cheapest second hand cars are just scruffy, old and generally smaller, none of which matters much to a not very car proud end user. A lack of range is a different sort of problem entirely, and the net result will be that poorer people won't be able to do long journeys without frequent stops to recharge. This seems a fundamentally unfair state of affairs compared to now.
Original Tesla roadsters apparently retained something like 80-85% of range after 100K miles.
The big change is in the price of batteries. The price is coming down every year, despite capacities going up. $100/KWh is the current pricing (ish). So $10,000 to replace a 100kWh pack today. Probably half that in 5 years.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
And yet we've got scientists already briefing against the government easing of lockdown based on case numbers. Anyone who has been researching this know that case numbers are no longer going to be a critical measure after the vaccines have been administered to a majority of the public. They are already shifting the goalposts from hospitals to cases.
Ultimately we can't conquer death, and I think the government has got to learn to live with a few bad headlines of a few thousand unvaccinated people dying of this every year.
To describe the events of 1688 as an invasion is a bit of an over simplification. In particular the new queen, reigning jointly, just happened to be the daughter of the abdicating/fleeing king.
From many English perspectives it was the overthrowing of an attempted tyranny...
Does that make Rees Mogg's comment any less foolish ?
Especially, as I suggested upthread, from a Catholic.
As I have long said India would be less affected than the West by Covid as it has an average life expectancy of only 69 compared to over 80 in most of the West and the death rate from Covid is highest amongst over 70s and especially over 80s
I don't think the age differences are sufficient to explain the disparity, though (and average age is a misleading number). Look at the approximate numbers for percentage of population over the age of 80: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.80UP.MA.5Y
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
First, if you regularly get through that much fuel, you are a fairly extreme outlier (if perhaps far from unique). Second, you're ignoring the continuing rapid improvement in battery capacity, cost, changing speed and durability. It won't be very many years until it's completely uneconomic to make ICE powered vehicles.
The issue is that an older petrol car may be slightly inefficient but that just means you visit a petrol station slightly more often.
An older electric car means that the battery range is no longer 200 miles but 100 miles or worse.
And that isn't something that you can fix with 5 minutes and £30, it requires sitting still for 2+ hours as it recharges
Now better battery management is going to reduce that problem but that's a longer term solution for a problem that will appear very rapidly sometime between 2027 to 2035 as none ICE cars become the exception.
One thing I wonder about is whether children especially will be left with any mental scarring like OCD, agoraphobia or germophobia from this past year.
Don't know how others with children are finding it but my six year old now is almost religiously trying to follow the rules. Whenever she washes her hands she sings out loud Happy Birthday To Me twice as she washes her hands.
On the one hand it's good to be healthy, on the other hand I don't want it to become too much for her. Striking the right balance is tough.
We have one child, a son 15 months old, who has never really got to play with other kids or see anyone much outside of the close family. When he did, in the late summer, he loved it. I do worry if he will be part of the Covid generation who missed out on playtime and social interaction. Maybe most kids his age mostly see parents and grandparents anyway though? And he has had more one on one time with his family than most I guess
One of the regular requests on our town's Facebook page is from new mothers for 'Mother and Baby or similar groups. While there's obviously a strong support for the mother element the children, even tiny ones, socialise as well.
On topic, I guess this hinges on what your definition of "lockdown" means? Some seem to think it applies for as long as maskwearing, social distancing and a rule of 6 apply.
My definition is it ends when you're told you no longer must "stay at home", and can travel for social, domestic and leisure purposes as well as business ones.
Looking at the Mail definitions in the thread header that looks like either April or May to me, and not as late as July.
Yep.
The mystery of India is continuing to cause head scratching amongst scientists. One theory is that mask wearing is responsible.
There's obviously by now lots of evidence that a good mask prevents a lot of airborne virus transmission as well as the more obvious droplet one.
I mention this because the Gov't could sell this pretty strongly: put up with mask wearing for a while in indoor public venues as the price we pay for ending of almost all other restrictions.
If that was the offer almost everyone in the country would take it. Except Laurence Fox, obvs.
That is an interesting thought. I would love to know what people who have to wear masks nearly all the time think. Did they just get used to them? I do not like wearing them, but it doesn't cause me any issues because I appreciate the benefits of doing so and I am fortunate that I don't have to do it very much. Bars and restaurants are obviously impossible and a packed bar must be a top spreading environment. I can't see it working at a pop concert either.
I've lived in Asia and used to wear one out there. I honestly barely notice I'm wearing it now. It's just like putting on knickers, a blouse or a dress. Well, okay, that's a slight exaggeration but it's not a particularly big deal for me anymore.
I meant to say 'aerosol' transmission in my earlier post rather than merely airborne.
I think we'll get to the point when they're not really necessary but they should probably be the last thing to be dropped. It's a very small price to pay if all other restrictions are lifted.
He had the reputation of being the Adour expert sans pareil in the RAF. Our paths almost certainly crossed when I was on 4FTS but I think he was less of a remarkable nutter then so I don't remember him.
Intriguing uptick in new cases on Zoe app yesterday, and places like Lancaster recently and Hull showing the kind of gradual increase that preceded its explosion of new cases in November... this may not be over yet, let’s hope they’re just noise within the downward trend... on a brighter note, got the jab yesterday and no side effects so going off to climb Ingleborough peak to enjoy views of the Irish Sea and the Lakes...
I'm keeping a close eye on Calderdale, which dropped rather quicker than the rest of West Yorkshire and then has stalled and reversed.
Looking closely that was at around +49% on cases for w/c 9/2 compared to w/c 2/2 (Wednesday-Tuesday).
It turns out that at least half of this spike is due to snow on Tuesday 2/2. 26 positive tests occurred on that snow day (in the denominator) and 92 on the Wednesday (in the numerator), against a weekly figure of 473 (67 per day) over the last 7 days.
Rates do seem to be genuinely going up on the figures coming through, but is making those figures and the increases/decreases much more variable from day to day than would otherwise be the case.
I think all 5 areas in West Yorkshire have seen the cases measure turn red for a few days at times during this current lockdown, often weather related, but the longer term trends have remained slowly downwards for all areas.
For the Zoe App, a lot depends on self-reporting of symptoms, and the snow and cold wether may have impacted that. My wife had a common cold this weekend.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
100% zero-emissions capable, all-electric or plug-in hybrid, by 2024.
Interesting. I'm going to probably need to get a new car once/if I rejoin the land of employment in the summer. I'm starting to wonder whether I should invest (using this term very loosely) in an electric car. I have an electric charging port that came with the house that has never been used...
If your not "into" cars (ie you don't own a bore scope and a corner balancing rig) then have a look at the Hyundai Ioniq. Hyundai have the best build quality in the industry.
Good to be reminded that there’s more to football than millionaires breaking lockdown and has-beens spouting inanities for money on the telly. Perhaps Lou can get a spot in Marcus’s first cabinet..
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
100% zero-emissions capable, all-electric or plug-in hybrid, by 2024.
Interesting. I'm going to probably need to get a new car once/if I rejoin the land of employment in the summer. I'm starting to wonder whether I should invest (using this term very loosely) in an electric car. I have an electric charging port that came with the house that has never been used...
If your not "into" cars (ie you don't own a bore scope and a corner balancing rig) then have a look at the Hyundai Ioniq. Hyundai have the best build quality in the industry.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
100% zero-emissions capable, all-electric or plug-in hybrid, by 2024.
Interesting. I'm going to probably need to get a new car once/if I rejoin the land of employment in the summer. I'm starting to wonder whether I should invest (using this term very loosely) in an electric car. I have an electric charging port that came with the house that has never been used...
If your not "into" cars (ie you don't own a bore scope and a corner balancing rig) then have a look at the Hyundai Ioniq. Hyundai have the best build quality in the industry.
It's ugly AF though
You sit inside it.
Might see the reflection in a shop window or something
To describe the events of 1688 as an invasion is a bit of an over simplification. In particular the new queen, reigning jointly, just happened to be the daughter of the abdicating/fleeing king.
From many English perspectives it was the overthrowing of an attempted tyranny...
Does that make Rees Mogg's comment any less foolish ?
From a RC point of view, as JRM has, I suppose his loyalty to England and loyalty to the RC church has had the odd strain or two over the years since 1534. By 1685 we were over the hanging, drawing and quartering stage for religious offences though (unlike in Scotland where Thomas Akenhead was executed for his religious views in 1697).
Anyway, he makes no comment. He quotes Dryden. Here's some more. If the cap fits.....
A man so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long, But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon,
Good to be reminded that there’s more to football than millionaires breaking lockdown and has-beens spouting inanities for money on the telly. Perhaps Lou can get a spot in Marcus’s first cabinet..
To describe the events of 1688 as an invasion is a bit of an over simplification. In particular the new queen, reigning jointly, just happened to be the daughter of the abdicating/fleeing king.
From many English perspectives it was the overthrowing of an attempted tyranny...
Does that make Rees Mogg's comment any less foolish ?
Especially, as I suggested upthread, from a Catholic.
People getting bored with lockdown and the Kent variant making its way through the wider population?
It will be interesting to see if a rise in cases feeds through to a rise in hospitalisations. If it doesn't then it's an even more compelling reason to downgrade case statistics in the lockdown factors.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
I think a 2nd hand electric car market will develop. They're just too new and not widespread enough at the moment for it to be so.
Undoubtedly - but the combination of range being the most expensive bit, and it naturally degrading means that the cheapest second hand cars will have very poor ranges. Currently the cheapest second hand cars are just scruffy, old and generally smaller, none of which matters much to a not very car proud end user. A lack of range is a different sort of problem entirely, and the net result will be that poorer people won't be able to do long journeys without frequent stops to recharge. This seems a fundamentally unfair state of affairs compared to now.
Original Tesla roadsters apparently retained something like 80-85% of range after 100K miles.
The big change is in the price of batteries. The price is coming down every year, despite capacities going up. $100/KWh is the current pricing (ish). So $10,000 to replace a 100kWh pack today. Probably half that in 5 years.
The current cost to manufacturer isn't the same price that is charged to people buying an OEM replacement part (you only have to see dealer prices for spares to see that).
As part of my dream that involves getting a Jag Mk2 and converting it to electric the current purchase price of a 5kWh battery is about £1000.
Which means replacing a battery pack is going to be about £10k and probably beyond the reach of anyone who is playing bangermonics.
The idea of immunity in India discussed earlier is an interesting one. I did a job in Egypt with a crew of 40 Egyptians and ten from the UK. All those from the UK were given strict instuctions not to drink Nile water only bottled.
Owing to a mix up someone in catering filled bottles with tap water (normal practice but not when working with foreigners). The mistake wasn't discovered until seven had drunk from the bottles. All seven were seriously ill and couldn't function for the next two days. One more serious than that. I wonder whether some nations are just hardier than others.
If one good thing can come out of all of this, I do hope it will be taking mental health seriously rather than paying lip service. Poor mental health isn't a sign of weakness any more than cancer is. And equally can happen to anyone. And indeed does happen to everyone occasionally. The grit your teeth and battle through alone attitude is not a beneficial one. Oh, and about that extra money for the NHS. We need huge investment in talking therapy for one. Access to which is patchy to say the least unless you can afford it. Or are willing to use a minimally trained volunteer. We need more fully trained practitioners.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
First, if you regularly get through that much fuel, you are a fairly extreme outlier (if perhaps far from unique). Second, you're ignoring the continuing rapid improvement in battery capacity, cost, changing speed and durability. It won't be very many years until it's completely uneconomic to make ICE powered vehicles.
The issue is that an older petrol car may be slightly inefficient but that just means you visit a petrol station slightly more often.
An older electric car means that the battery range is no longer 200 miles but 100 miles or worse.
And that isn't something that you can fix with 5 minutes and £30, it requires sitting still for 2+ hours as it recharges
Now better battery management is going to reduce that problem but that's a longer term solution for a problem that will appear very rapidly sometime between 2027 to 2035 as none ICE cars become the exception.
That might have been true for the early generations of electric vehicles, but the ones they are building now are good for far longer. Chinese CATL, for example, are claiming their new cells are good for 2m km (and those are the LIP chemistry cells for the cheaper models).
Buying pre-2020 models second hand is going to be something of a lottery, but standards are improving very rapidly. And as has been pointed out, there will be an awful lot of second hand ICE models on the market for the rest of the decade.
It will be a bit messy, but strangely enough we're just about at the point where the market will sort it out.
To describe the events of 1688 as an invasion is a bit of an over simplification. In particular the new queen, reigning jointly, just happened to be the daughter of the abdicating/fleeing king.
From many English perspectives it was the overthrowing of an attempted tyranny...
Does that make Rees Mogg's comment any less foolish ?
Especially, as I suggested upthread, from a Catholic.
That's a LOL.
A lot of politicians invited them to come...
My family, so far as I can tell, would have been Chapel, so were probably pleased. Overall.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
Eventually it would, yes.
Because it would gradually reduce the proportion of people exposed who are susceptible to catching the virus.
The idea of immunity in India discussed earlier is an interesting one. I did a job in Egypt with a crew of 40 Egyptians and ten from the UK. All those from the UK were given strict instuctions not to drink Nile water only bottled.
Owing to a mix up someone in catering filled bottles with tap water (normal practice but not when working with foreigners). The mistake wasn't discovered until seven had drunk from the bottles. All seven were seriously ill and couldn't function for the next two days. One more serious than that. I wonder whether some nations are just hardier than others.
Some years ago I went on a Test-cricket-watching trip to India, and while we were watching one of the games In Mumbhai were were advised NOT to buy the 'tiffin boxes' available from stalls around the ground. However, I did. Somosa, other bits and salad. I didn't eat the salad but I did the rest and I was fine. Other people, more careful, had days confined to the toilet.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
100% zero-emissions capable, all-electric or plug-in hybrid, by 2024.
Interesting. I'm going to probably need to get a new car once/if I rejoin the land of employment in the summer. I'm starting to wonder whether I should invest (using this term very loosely) in an electric car. I have an electric charging port that came with the house that has never been used...
If your not "into" cars (ie you don't own a bore scope and a corner balancing rig) then have a look at the Hyundai Ioniq. Hyundai have the best build quality in the industry.
It's ugly AF though
You sit inside it.
Might see the reflection in a shop window or something
And you can forget about Saturday night cruises down the local strip...
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
First, if you regularly get through that much fuel, you are a fairly extreme outlier (if perhaps far from unique). Second, you're ignoring the continuing rapid improvement in battery capacity, cost, changing speed and durability. It won't be very many years until it's completely uneconomic to make ICE powered vehicles.
The issue is that an older petrol car may be slightly inefficient but that just means you visit a petrol station slightly more often.
An older electric car means that the battery range is no longer 200 miles but 100 miles or worse.
And that isn't something that you can fix with 5 minutes and £30, it requires sitting still for 2+ hours as it recharges
Now better battery management is going to reduce that problem but that's a longer term solution for a problem that will appear very rapidly sometime between 2027 to 2035 as none ICE cars become the exception.
That might have been true for the early generations of electric vehicles, but the ones they are building now are good for far longer. Chinese CATL, for example, are claiming their new cells are good for 2m km (and those are the LIP chemistry cells for the cheaper models).
Buying pre-2020 models second hand is going to be something of a lottery, but standards are improving very rapidly. And as has been pointed out, there will be an awful lot of second hand ICE models on the market for the rest of the decade.
It will be a bit messy, but strangely enough we're just about at the point where the market will sort it out.
How accessible/replaceable are the batteries? After about 2025 there might be a whole bee market emerging in “refurbished” second hand electric vehicles that are still cheaper than buying new. Or we might all have a separate lease on batteries that moves from car to car?
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
Yes. Crudely, a 70% effective vaccine should reduce R by 70%. So we could open things up to about where R would be 4 without vaccines, and keep it below 1.
With a 90% effective vaccine, we could open up to where R would otherwise be 10.
To describe the events of 1688 as an invasion is a bit of an over simplification. In particular the new queen, reigning jointly, just happened to be the daughter of the abdicating/fleeing king.
From many English perspectives it was the overthrowing of an attempted tyranny...
Does that make Rees Mogg's comment any less foolish ?
Especially, as I suggested upthread, from a Catholic.
That's a LOL.
A lot of politicians invited them to come...
My family, so far as I can tell, would have been Chapel, so were probably pleased. Overall.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
The official data from Scotland has been troubling for a while. Very high positivity rate in Scotland. Not seen any logical explanation for the difference. Something going on.
"In the Commons there’s now even a growing group of Tory MPs who are pressing hard for change"
Numbers please? Because that is not what I am hearing.
There is one over-arching aim in Government - never again will there be Covid lockdowns. We will come out of lockdown when it is clear there will never be a need for more. Now, that might be quick, once the confirmation is in that a) the vaccines are as good as is hoped and b) the numbers for deliveries of those vaccines to give the jab to everyone are secured.
But if it needs an extra month to be completely sure, then the Government will take the extra pain to be able to say to the UK "Covid has been banished as an impediment to getting on with your life within this country* ". That is the political win within reach.
*Foreign travel for work or holibobs will be the very last thing to get the green light - and that could be quite some time. The UK has the genome testing capacity to know how safe it really is outside our borders. Again, the way the virus has retreated in just the past five weeks around the globe means the scope for mutations is already reducing markedly. If it continues - wonderful. But the win will not be lightly lost.
The smart money is on booking your holiday in 2021 in Northumberland. Or Scotland. Or Devon. That spend will be a one-off boost to a nation whose residents spent £62.3 billion on visits overseas in 2019, compared to overseas residents spending £28.4 billion on visits to the UK in 2019. Some of that overseas money will still come here, if it is from people with (non-forged) vaccine certificates. We will be opening earlier than most - restaurants, pubs, museums, galleries, the stuff to make a memorable holiday here. An obvious choice to come here (if you can find the accommodation). I have it on very good authority that the Governor of the Bank of England is very chipper about our prospects for coming out of Covid in a most robust fashion. Things are looking up. Prepare for a much, much better year. But only when it is beaten to the point where it isn't wrecking our lives ever again.
Very good post @MarqueeMark but can you clarify a couple of things?
I understood that when we come out it will be back into the tier system - is that how you understand it?
Secondly, you appear to be suggesting that foreign travellers will be permitted to travel into the country but UK citizens will be barred from travelling out.
Yes, tiers when we reopen - but again, only reducing. So unlikely to be many seeing tier 1 or 2 immediately.
On foreign travel, the ban will stay as the last Covid measure to go. Even then, when lifted, the message will continue to be exercise caution: if you lose your money, there'll be no compensation from the Government. If we are first out of lockdowns, that still means you risk spending 14 days in quarantine when you arrive at a place that is still way behind us.
So this year, give Scotland a try instead. You'll love it.
Er...no, we don’t need to give Hyufd ideas about trying Scotland, thanks.
Are saying he won't tank me?
How does one get to Scotland anyway? I`m fucked if I`m driving ten hours there and ten hours back. Train and then car hire I guess?
If you are brave enough to face airports....fly. Barely an hour to Glasgow or Inverness.
Maybe don't book until jab + 3 weeks. To be safe.
Jab update: arm feels like it has been kicked by a horse, but nothing else to report back.
Curious. My mum and dad both had Oxford AZN and didn`t feel a thing during or afterwards. Did you have the Oxford?
Pfizer. On the bumph they give you at the time, it says more than 1 in 10 get some reaction.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
First, if you regularly get through that much fuel, you are a fairly extreme outlier (if perhaps far from unique). Second, you're ignoring the continuing rapid improvement in battery capacity, cost, changing speed and durability. It won't be very many years until it's completely uneconomic to make ICE powered vehicles.
The issue is that an older petrol car may be slightly inefficient but that just means you visit a petrol station slightly more often.
An older electric car means that the battery range is no longer 200 miles but 100 miles or worse.
And that isn't something that you can fix with 5 minutes and £30, it requires sitting still for 2+ hours as it recharges
Now better battery management is going to reduce that problem but that's a longer term solution for a problem that will appear very rapidly sometime between 2027 to 2035 as none ICE cars become the exception.
That might have been true for the early generations of electric vehicles, but the ones they are building now are good for far longer. Chinese CATL, for example, are claiming their new cells are good for 2m km (and those are the LIP chemistry cells for the cheaper models).
Buying pre-2020 models second hand is going to be something of a lottery, but standards are improving very rapidly. And as has been pointed out, there will be an awful lot of second hand ICE models on the market for the rest of the decade.
It will be a bit messy, but strangely enough we're just about at the point where the market will sort it out.
How accessible/replaceable are the batteries? After about 2025 there might be a whole bee market emerging in “refurbished” second hand electric vehicles that are still cheaper than buying new. Or we might all have a separate lease on batteries that moves from car to car?
The wholesale price of batteries will indeed continue to fall. That’s only part of the replacement cost though, there’s also packaging, distribution and fitting costs. A 100kW Tesla battery pack, from the dealer, is about $40k.
We might see battery as a service for commercial vehicles, where they are designed for stop and swap, rather than vehicle charging. It probably won’t happen for cars, due to packaging constraints.
To describe the events of 1688 as an invasion is a bit of an over simplification. In particular the new queen, reigning jointly, just happened to be the daughter of the abdicating/fleeing king.
From many English perspectives it was the overthrowing of an attempted tyranny...
Does that make Rees Mogg's comment any less foolish ?
Especially, as I suggested upthread, from a Catholic.
That's a LOL.
A lot of politicians invited them to come...
My family, so far as I can tell, would have been Chapel, so were probably pleased. Overall.
In 1688 that would be a special, tough, minority.
Actually, should have said half my family, the East Midlands Puritan half. Don't suppose the West Welsh half would have been bothered either way.
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
I am not sure this question really means anything. The R is, by definition, the average number of people an infected person will infect. If a vaccine reduces transmission it will reduce R. Will it reduce it so much that it is below 1 even without any other restrictions? Hopefully but not known.
And the "barring mutations" point is a pretty big proviso which isn't really valid - there will definitely be mutations which will definitely affect the effectiveness of vaccines. That's fine as the vaccines themselves develop and this will simply become business as usual. But you can't just assume away something that's going to happen.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
Literally zero acutal positive cases, every single one a false positive.
For 800,000 daily tests then 0.08% still equals 640 potentially doesn't it?
"In the Commons there’s now even a growing group of Tory MPs who are pressing hard for change"
Numbers please? Because that is not what I am hearing.
There is one over-arching aim in Government - never again will there be Covid lockdowns. We will come out of lockdown when it is clear there will never be a need for more. Now, that might be quick, once the confirmation is in that a) the vaccines are as good as is hoped and b) the numbers for deliveries of those vaccines to give the jab to everyone are secured.
But if it needs an extra month to be completely sure, then the Government will take the extra pain to be able to say to the UK "Covid has been banished as an impediment to getting on with your life within this country* ". That is the political win within reach.
*Foreign travel for work or holibobs will be the very last thing to get the green light - and that could be quite some time. The UK has the genome testing capacity to know how safe it really is outside our borders. Again, the way the virus has retreated in just the past five weeks around the globe means the scope for mutations is already reducing markedly. If it continues - wonderful. But the win will not be lightly lost.
The smart money is on booking your holiday in 2021 in Northumberland. Or Scotland. Or Devon. That spend will be a one-off boost to a nation whose residents spent £62.3 billion on visits overseas in 2019, compared to overseas residents spending £28.4 billion on visits to the UK in 2019. Some of that overseas money will still come here, if it is from people with (non-forged) vaccine certificates. We will be opening earlier than most - restaurants, pubs, museums, galleries, the stuff to make a memorable holiday here. An obvious choice to come here (if you can find the accommodation). I have it on very good authority that the Governor of the Bank of England is very chipper about our prospects for coming out of Covid in a most robust fashion. Things are looking up. Prepare for a much, much better year. But only when it is beaten to the point where it isn't wrecking our lives ever again.
Very good post @MarqueeMark but can you clarify a couple of things?
I understood that when we come out it will be back into the tier system - is that how you understand it?
Secondly, you appear to be suggesting that foreign travellers will be permitted to travel into the country but UK citizens will be barred from travelling out.
Yes, tiers when we reopen - but again, only reducing. So unlikely to be many seeing tier 1 or 2 immediately.
On foreign travel, the ban will stay as the last Covid measure to go. Even then, when lifted, the message will continue to be exercise caution: if you lose your money, there'll be no compensation from the Government. If we are first out of lockdowns, that still means you risk spending 14 days in quarantine when you arrive at a place that is still way behind us.
So this year, give Scotland a try instead. You'll love it.
Er...no, we don’t need to give Hyufd ideas about trying Scotland, thanks.
Are saying he won't tank me?
How does one get to Scotland anyway? I`m fucked if I`m driving ten hours there and ten hours back. Train and then car hire I guess?
If you are brave enough to face airports....fly. Barely an hour to Glasgow or Inverness.
Maybe don't book until jab + 3 weeks. To be safe.
Jab update: arm feels like it has been kicked by a horse, but nothing else to report back.
Curious. My mum and dad both had Oxford AZN and didn`t feel a thing during or afterwards. Did you have the Oxford?
Pfizer. On the bumph they give you at the time, it says more than 1 in 10 get some reaction.
I know two other people that had a painful arm with Pfizer for around 2 days.
My mother had AZ and two weeks on has had no side effects other than feeling sleepy the next day (and that might have been more to do with leaving the house for the first time in months lol)
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
Yes. Crudely, a 70% effective vaccine should reduce R by 70%. So we could open things up to about where R would be 4 without vaccines, and keep it below 1.
With a 90% effective vaccine, we could open up to where R would otherwise be 10.
Also have to multiply that by the proportion having the vaccine, of course (which lowers effect). But the basic point stands.
On the other side, you would get a greater reduction if vaccine also reduces infectiousness of disease in those who do still get it - say an infected vaccinated person meets 10 vaccinated people who they would otherwise have infected, 80% of whom don't get it. But if the infected vaccinated person is less infectious (say half as infectious) then they might only infect 5/10 unvaccinated people or 5/10 x 2/10 = 1/10 vaccinated people.
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
I am not sure this question really means anything. The R is, by definition, the average number of people an infected person will infect. If a vaccine reduces transmission it will reduce R. Will it reduce it so much that it is below 1 even without any other restrictions? Hopefully but not known.
And the "barring mutations" point is a pretty big proviso which isn't really valid - there will definitely be mutations which will definitely affect the effectiveness of vaccines. That's fine as the vaccines themselves develop and this will simply become business as usual. But you can't just assume away something that's going to happen.
If the case numbers are minimal in this country and the border is reasonably secured then why would we have devastating mutations?
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
First, if you regularly get through that much fuel, you are a fairly extreme outlier (if perhaps far from unique). Second, you're ignoring the continuing rapid improvement in battery capacity, cost, changing speed and durability. It won't be very many years until it's completely uneconomic to make ICE powered vehicles.
The issue is that an older petrol car may be slightly inefficient but that just means you visit a petrol station slightly more often.
An older electric car means that the battery range is no longer 200 miles but 100 miles or worse.
And that isn't something that you can fix with 5 minutes and £30, it requires sitting still for 2+ hours as it recharges
Now better battery management is going to reduce that problem but that's a longer term solution for a problem that will appear very rapidly sometime between 2027 to 2035 as none ICE cars become the exception.
That might have been true for the early generations of electric vehicles, but the ones they are building now are good for far longer. Chinese CATL, for example, are claiming their new cells are good for 2m km (and those are the LIP chemistry cells for the cheaper models).
Buying pre-2020 models second hand is going to be something of a lottery, but standards are improving very rapidly. And as has been pointed out, there will be an awful lot of second hand ICE models on the market for the rest of the decade.
It will be a bit messy, but strangely enough we're just about at the point where the market will sort it out.
How accessible/replaceable are the batteries? After about 2025 there might be a whole bee market emerging in “refurbished” second hand electric vehicles that are still cheaper than buying new. Or we might all have a separate lease on batteries that moves from car to car?
The wholesale price of batteries will indeed continue to fall. That’s only part of the replacement cost though, there’s also packaging and distribution costs. A 100kW Tesla battery pack, from the dealer, is about $40k.
We might see battery as a service for commercial vehicles, where they are designed for stop and swap, rather than vehicle charging. It probably won’t happen for cars, due to packaging constraints.
Wasn't that the business model of betterplace which were probably 15 years too early.
I think because battery car ranges are just about good enough for most use cases that business model won't exist except for commercial vehicles where ownership issues won't be such a concern.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
Thanks Alistair - that's some reassurance. Although that still makes it pretty difficult to get below 1,000 positives a day on the scale of testing we are seeing at the moment. But not, thankfully, actually impossible.
Today the Daily Mail is saying Boris is far too slow in opening up...how many days, sorry hours, do we give it until they report new mutant strain discovered in larger numbers, too risky to open up quickly....
"In the Commons there’s now even a growing group of Tory MPs who are pressing hard for change"
Numbers please? Because that is not what I am hearing.
There is one over-arching aim in Government - never again will there be Covid lockdowns. We will come out of lockdown when it is clear there will never be a need for more. Now, that might be quick, once the confirmation is in that a) the vaccines are as good as is hoped and b) the numbers for deliveries of those vaccines to give the jab to everyone are secured.
But if it needs an extra month to be completely sure, then the Government will take the extra pain to be able to say to the UK "Covid has been banished as an impediment to getting on with your life within this country* ". That is the political win within reach.
*Foreign travel for work or holibobs will be the very last thing to get the green light - and that could be quite some time. The UK has the genome testing capacity to know how safe it really is outside our borders. Again, the way the virus has retreated in just the past five weeks around the globe means the scope for mutations is already reducing markedly. If it continues - wonderful. But the win will not be lightly lost.
The smart money is on booking your holiday in 2021 in Northumberland. Or Scotland. Or Devon. That spend will be a one-off boost to a nation whose residents spent £62.3 billion on visits overseas in 2019, compared to overseas residents spending £28.4 billion on visits to the UK in 2019. Some of that overseas money will still come here, if it is from people with (non-forged) vaccine certificates. We will be opening earlier than most - restaurants, pubs, museums, galleries, the stuff to make a memorable holiday here. An obvious choice to come here (if you can find the accommodation). I have it on very good authority that the Governor of the Bank of England is very chipper about our prospects for coming out of Covid in a most robust fashion. Things are looking up. Prepare for a much, much better year. But only when it is beaten to the point where it isn't wrecking our lives ever again.
Very good post @MarqueeMark but can you clarify a couple of things?
I understood that when we come out it will be back into the tier system - is that how you understand it?
Secondly, you appear to be suggesting that foreign travellers will be permitted to travel into the country but UK citizens will be barred from travelling out.
Yes, tiers when we reopen - but again, only reducing. So unlikely to be many seeing tier 1 or 2 immediately.
On foreign travel, the ban will stay as the last Covid measure to go. Even then, when lifted, the message will continue to be exercise caution: if you lose your money, there'll be no compensation from the Government. If we are first out of lockdowns, that still means you risk spending 14 days in quarantine when you arrive at a place that is still way behind us.
So this year, give Scotland a try instead. You'll love it.
Er...no, we don’t need to give Hyufd ideas about trying Scotland, thanks.
Are saying he won't tank me?
How does one get to Scotland anyway? I`m fucked if I`m driving ten hours there and ten hours back. Train and then car hire I guess?
If you are brave enough to face airports....fly. Barely an hour to Glasgow or Inverness.
Maybe don't book until jab + 3 weeks. To be safe.
Jab update: arm feels like it has been kicked by a horse, but nothing else to report back.
Curious. My mum and dad both had Oxford AZN and didn`t feel a thing during or afterwards. Did you have the Oxford?
Pfizer. On the bumph they give you at the time, it says more than 1 in 10 get some reaction.
I know two other people that had a painful arm with Pfizer for around 2 days.
My mother had AZ and two weeks on has had no side effects other than feeling sleepy the next day (and that might have been more to do with leaving the house for the first time in months lol)
Anecdotally, young people seem to get much stronger reactions than older people, which probably makes sense. Also know of several (young) people with highish fever after getting the Moderna jab
I notice England are forcing their players to stay in a bio-secure bubble, countries like Wales have let their players go back to play for their clubs during the down week in the 6 nations.
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
Yes. Crudely, a 70% effective vaccine should reduce R by 70%. So we could open things up to about where R would be 4 without vaccines, and keep it below 1.
With a 90% effective vaccine, we could open up to where R would otherwise be 10.
Also have to multiply that by the proportion having the vaccine, of course (which lowers effect). But the basic point stands.
On the other side, you would get a greater reduction if vaccine also reduces infectiousness of disease in those who do still get it - say an infected vaccinated person meets 10 vaccinated people who they would otherwise have infected, 80% of whom don't get it. But if the infected vaccinated person is less infectious (say half as infectious) then they might only infect 5/10 unvaccinated people or 5/10 x 2/10 = 1/10 vaccinated people.
Also, given R0 estimates for coronavirus are generally around 3, there's good reason to be very optimistic about the effects of mass use of vaccines that look to be >70% effective. (That's why, before the first trial results, people were talking about 66% effective or so as the baseline to look out for).
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
Last summer the day with fewest cases was 12th July: 370. There were 94,700 tests on that day. So the positivity rate was 0.39%
I think it's very unlikely that they were all false positives, given that the local lockdown in Leicester happened at the end of June - there was clearly still some community transmission of Covid in the UK, as well as cases imported from abroad that were then tested positive here.
The false positive rate is very unlikely to be above 0.1%
And, we won't be using 1,000 cases as a threshold anyway.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
Last summer the day with fewest cases was 12th July: 370. There were 94,700 tests on that day. So the positivity rate was 0.39%
I think it's very unlikely that they were all false positives, given that the local lockdown in Leicester happened at the end of June - there was clearly still some community transmission of Covid in the UK, as well as cases imported from abroad that were then tested positive here.
The false positive rate is very unlikely to be above 0.1%
And, we won't be using 1,000 cases as a threshold anyway.
"In the Commons there’s now even a growing group of Tory MPs who are pressing hard for change"
Numbers please? Because that is not what I am hearing.
There is one over-arching aim in Government - never again will there be Covid lockdowns. We will come out of lockdown when it is clear there will never be a need for more. Now, that might be quick, once the confirmation is in that a) the vaccines are as good as is hoped and b) the numbers for deliveries of those vaccines to give the jab to everyone are secured.
But if it needs an extra month to be completely sure, then the Government will take the extra pain to be able to say to the UK "Covid has been banished as an impediment to getting on with your life within this country* ". That is the political win within reach.
*Foreign travel for work or holibobs will be the very last thing to get the green light - and that could be quite some time. The UK has the genome testing capacity to know how safe it really is outside our borders. Again, the way the virus has retreated in just the past five weeks around the globe means the scope for mutations is already reducing markedly. If it continues - wonderful. But the win will not be lightly lost.
The smart money is on booking your holiday in 2021 in Northumberland. Or Scotland. Or Devon. That spend will be a one-off boost to a nation whose residents spent £62.3 billion on visits overseas in 2019, compared to overseas residents spending £28.4 billion on visits to the UK in 2019. Some of that overseas money will still come here, if it is from people with (non-forged) vaccine certificates. We will be opening earlier than most - restaurants, pubs, museums, galleries, the stuff to make a memorable holiday here. An obvious choice to come here (if you can find the accommodation). I have it on very good authority that the Governor of the Bank of England is very chipper about our prospects for coming out of Covid in a most robust fashion. Things are looking up. Prepare for a much, much better year. But only when it is beaten to the point where it isn't wrecking our lives ever again.
Very good post @MarqueeMark but can you clarify a couple of things?
I understood that when we come out it will be back into the tier system - is that how you understand it?
Secondly, you appear to be suggesting that foreign travellers will be permitted to travel into the country but UK citizens will be barred from travelling out.
Yes, tiers when we reopen - but again, only reducing. So unlikely to be many seeing tier 1 or 2 immediately.
On foreign travel, the ban will stay as the last Covid measure to go. Even then, when lifted, the message will continue to be exercise caution: if you lose your money, there'll be no compensation from the Government. If we are first out of lockdowns, that still means you risk spending 14 days in quarantine when you arrive at a place that is still way behind us.
So this year, give Scotland a try instead. You'll love it.
Er...no, we don’t need to give Hyufd ideas about trying Scotland, thanks.
Are saying he won't tank me?
How does one get to Scotland anyway? I`m fucked if I`m driving ten hours there and ten hours back. Train and then car hire I guess?
If you are brave enough to face airports....fly. Barely an hour to Glasgow or Inverness.
Maybe don't book until jab + 3 weeks. To be safe.
Jab update: arm feels like it has been kicked by a horse, but nothing else to report back.
Curious. My mum and dad both had Oxford AZN and didn`t feel a thing during or afterwards. Did you have the Oxford?
Pfizer. On the bumph they give you at the time, it says more than 1 in 10 get some reaction.
I know two other people that had a painful arm with Pfizer for around 2 days.
My mother had AZ and two weeks on has had no side effects other than feeling sleepy the next day (and that might have been more to do with leaving the house for the first time in months lol)
Anecdotally, young people seem to get much stronger reactions than older people, which probably makes sense. Also know of several (young) people with highish fever after getting the Moderna jab
I had blue lips a few hours after receiving a vaccine at school once. Not happened with any vaccine since (Had a few to go travelling in early 20s)
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
One thing I wonder about is whether children especially will be left with any mental scarring like OCD, agoraphobia or germophobia from this past year.
Don't know how others with children are finding it but my six year old now is almost religiously trying to follow the rules. Whenever she washes her hands she sings out loud Happy Birthday To Me twice as she washes her hands.
On the one hand it's good to be healthy, on the other hand I don't want it to become too much for her. Striking the right balance is tough.
We have one child, a son 15 months old, who has never really got to play with other kids or see anyone much outside of the close family. When he did, in the late summer, he loved it. I do worry if he will be part of the Covid generation who missed out on playtime and social interaction. Maybe most kids his age mostly see parents and grandparents anyway though? And he has had more one on one time with his family than most I guess
One of the regular requests on our town's Facebook page is from new mothers for 'Mother and Baby or similar groups. While there's obviously a strong support for the mother element the children, even tiny ones, socialise as well.
Yes, they did baby massage over the park, loved it.
Sorry to hear people are suffering with lockdown depression. One of my closest friends took his own life last month. He’d had mental health battles on and off for a long time, but I cant imagine lockdown helped - he was the most successful, and sociable, person I knew.
I think you're missing out the Texas Governor there.
If the power goes out all over Texas, they are going to be looking to blame Washington first, regardless of whether that is fair....
Despite Texas not being connected to the Federal grid?
Since when did facts interrupt a pass the blame news story. Watch Boris / Trump to see how you pull it off by just repeating the story often enough that everything else looks false.
Good to be reminded that there’s more to football than millionaires breaking lockdown and has-beens spouting inanities for money on the telly. Perhaps Lou can get a spot in Marcus’s first cabinet..
We have seen this before where Northern England in particular really seems to struggle to get COVID right down and stay down, hence large part of it having been in pseudo-lockdown for best part of 6 months.
I see Ford has announced it is transitioning to all electric vehicles by 2030. Funny to remember how many on here reacted with such fury when Corbyn proposed banning ICEs by 2030 a few years ago.
Is it all electric or is it all at least hybrid electric in combination with ICEs?
All PHEV/BEV by 2024 and 100% BEV by 2030.
Ford didn't sell a single electric car in Europe last year and no manufacturer wants to be the last IC hold out.
All well and good, but electric cars still aren't nearly good enough to be usable for some users; currently I don't think there isn't a model on the market with the range I need (if there is, it's going to be at the £50-75k pricepoint) - one of my regular tips I run through almost two tanks of fuel in a day in my ICE car, but as that's less than 5 minutes it's not a problem.
However that isn't the biggest problem. One aspect that I don't think has been considered nearly enough is how much the electric car "revolution" will shaft the poor buying second hand. Currently you can buy a usable low end car for £300, and it will be good for any range you care to drive it; the car before my current car was a rough old diesel Skoda - I paid £300, did 20k miles without even servicing it, then eBayed it for £320! I paid £2k for a fairly sensible 8 year old car four years ago, and have put 100k miles on it. I can't see it ever being possible to buy a 400 mile range electric car for £2k, never mind £300. Maybe a Nissan Zoe with the range degraded to 50 miles, but that's going to be pretty useless.
It seems chronically unfair that only those rich enough to buy high end cars will be able to afford cars that have a usable range - but no-one seems to have thought about this in the mad dash for electric cars.
First, if you regularly get through that much fuel, you are a fairly extreme outlier (if perhaps far from unique). Second, you're ignoring the continuing rapid improvement in battery capacity, cost, changing speed and durability. It won't be very many years until it's completely uneconomic to make ICE powered vehicles.
The issue is that an older petrol car may be slightly inefficient but that just means you visit a petrol station slightly more often.
An older electric car means that the battery range is no longer 200 miles but 100 miles or worse.
And that isn't something that you can fix with 5 minutes and £30, it requires sitting still for 2+ hours as it recharges
Now better battery management is going to reduce that problem but that's a longer term solution for a problem that will appear very rapidly sometime between 2027 to 2035 as none ICE cars become the exception.
That might have been true for the early generations of electric vehicles, but the ones they are building now are good for far longer. Chinese CATL, for example, are claiming their new cells are good for 2m km (and those are the LIP chemistry cells for the cheaper models).
Buying pre-2020 models second hand is going to be something of a lottery, but standards are improving very rapidly. And as has been pointed out, there will be an awful lot of second hand ICE models on the market for the rest of the decade.
It will be a bit messy, but strangely enough we're just about at the point where the market will sort it out.
How accessible/replaceable are the batteries? After about 2025 there might be a whole bee market emerging in “refurbished” second hand electric vehicles that are still cheaper than buying new. Or we might all have a separate lease on batteries that moves from car to car?
For some of the stuff they're planning now - not very. One of the ways companies like Tesla are getting build costs down is to make the battery pack an integral part of the vehicle structure. That's why they're trying to make the next generation of batteries good for 1m plus km.
On the other hand, there's a move towards standardising battery formats, so for some layouts it might be relatively simple.
There's a huge amount of money being spent in battery development, and development of battery manufacturing. What we've seen so far is just the start.
Halfway through the decade, battery costs could be as low as $50 per kWH, at which point cheap mass market vehicles will be widespread. Given the relatively small number of vehicles built up to 2020, I don't think there will be much of a second had market in them at all.
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
Yes. Crudely, a 70% effective vaccine should reduce R by 70%. So we could open things up to about where R would be 4 without vaccines, and keep it below 1.
With a 90% effective vaccine, we could open up to where R would otherwise be 10.
Also have to multiply that by the proportion having the vaccine, of course (which lowers effect). But the basic point stands.
On the other side, you would get a greater reduction if vaccine also reduces infectiousness of disease in those who do still get it - say an infected vaccinated person meets 10 vaccinated people who they would otherwise have infected, 80% of whom don't get it. But if the infected vaccinated person is less infectious (say half as infectious) then they might only infect 5/10 unvaccinated people or 5/10 x 2/10 = 1/10 vaccinated people.
I'm still not 100% on this, perhaps you know.
In addition to reducing your chance of getting sick IF you are infected, do the professionals think the vaccine also reduces your chance of getting infected at all?
As part of my dream that involves getting a Jag Mk2 and converting it to electric the current purchase price of a 5kWh battery is about £1000.
You ain't going very far on a 5kWh battery. Having said that, it's still probably further than the original Jag would have gone without spinning a rod bearing.
There is a whole cottage industry doing electroclassics now. They aren't cheap though. This MGB costs 90 grand...
Good to be reminded that there’s more to football than millionaires breaking lockdown and has-beens spouting inanities for money on the telly. Perhaps Lou can get a spot in Marcus’s first cabinet..
At the moment we have around 20% of the population with antibodies with a vaccine mix that is likely around ~ 75% effective (Single dose AZ only and Pfizer at 90% and older people so less real world effectiveness). Herd immunity is probably around a 15% overall effect which means the suppression from r = 3 -> r = 1 is being done via health controls and taking it down to ~ 0.85 is via vaccine effect.*
* Figures are probably wrong but the overall effect of "herd immunity" is still small. Of course that will improve daily with the vaccine rollout.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
Last summer the day with fewest cases was 12th July: 370. There were 94,700 tests on that day. So the positivity rate was 0.39%
I think it's very unlikely that they were all false positives, given that the local lockdown in Leicester happened at the end of June - there was clearly still some community transmission of Covid in the UK, as well as cases imported from abroad that were then tested positive here.
The false positive rate is very unlikely to be above 0.1%
And, we won't be using 1,000 cases as a threshold anyway.
Firstly the UK doesn't have highest deaths per million.
Secondly a large chunk of our deaths come from before mass testing was established.
If you look at the UKs excess deaths versus other comparable nations the UK has done worse before mass testing was established and better after it was.
"In the Commons there’s now even a growing group of Tory MPs who are pressing hard for change"
Numbers please? Because that is not what I am hearing.
There is one over-arching aim in Government - never again will there be Covid lockdowns. We will come out of lockdown when it is clear there will never be a need for more. Now, that might be quick, once the confirmation is in that a) the vaccines are as good as is hoped and b) the numbers for deliveries of those vaccines to give the jab to everyone are secured.
But if it needs an extra month to be completely sure, then the Government will take the extra pain to be able to say to the UK "Covid has been banished as an impediment to getting on with your life within this country* ". That is the political win within reach.
*Foreign travel for work or holibobs will be the very last thing to get the green light - and that could be quite some time. The UK has the genome testing capacity to know how safe it really is outside our borders. Again, the way the virus has retreated in just the past five weeks around the globe means the scope for mutations is already reducing markedly. If it continues - wonderful. But the win will not be lightly lost.
The smart money is on booking your holiday in 2021 in Northumberland. Or Scotland. Or Devon. That spend will be a one-off boost to a nation whose residents spent £62.3 billion on visits overseas in 2019, compared to overseas residents spending £28.4 billion on visits to the UK in 2019. Some of that overseas money will still come here, if it is from people with (non-forged) vaccine certificates. We will be opening earlier than most - restaurants, pubs, museums, galleries, the stuff to make a memorable holiday here. An obvious choice to come here (if you can find the accommodation). I have it on very good authority that the Governor of the Bank of England is very chipper about our prospects for coming out of Covid in a most robust fashion. Things are looking up. Prepare for a much, much better year. But only when it is beaten to the point where it isn't wrecking our lives ever again.
Very good post @MarqueeMark but can you clarify a couple of things?
I understood that when we come out it will be back into the tier system - is that how you understand it?
Secondly, you appear to be suggesting that foreign travellers will be permitted to travel into the country but UK citizens will be barred from travelling out.
Yes, tiers when we reopen - but again, only reducing. So unlikely to be many seeing tier 1 or 2 immediately.
On foreign travel, the ban will stay as the last Covid measure to go. Even then, when lifted, the message will continue to be exercise caution: if you lose your money, there'll be no compensation from the Government. If we are first out of lockdowns, that still means you risk spending 14 days in quarantine when you arrive at a place that is still way behind us.
So this year, give Scotland a try instead. You'll love it.
Er...no, we don’t need to give Hyufd ideas about trying Scotland, thanks.
Are saying he won't tank me?
How does one get to Scotland anyway? I`m fucked if I`m driving ten hours there and ten hours back. Train and then car hire I guess?
If you are brave enough to face airports....fly. Barely an hour to Glasgow or Inverness.
Maybe don't book until jab + 3 weeks. To be safe.
Jab update: arm feels like it has been kicked by a horse, but nothing else to report back.
Curious. My mum and dad both had Oxford AZN and didn`t feel a thing during or afterwards. Did you have the Oxford?
Pfizer. On the bumph they give you at the time, it says more than 1 in 10 get some reaction.
I know two other people that had a painful arm with Pfizer for around 2 days.
My mother had AZ and two weeks on has had no side effects other than feeling sleepy the next day (and that might have been more to do with leaving the house for the first time in months lol)
Zoe have a blog on the data they've collected on Pfizer side effects:
As part of my dream that involves getting a Jag Mk2 and converting it to electric the current purchase price of a 5kWh battery is about £1000.
You ain't going very far on a 5kWh battery. Having said that, it's still probably further than the original Jag would have gone without spinning a rod bearing.
There is a whole cottage industry doing electroclassics now. They aren't cheap though. This MGB costs 90 grand...
I've been suffering from a mild depression for the first time in my life in recent weeks.
How do I know it's a depression?
Well, I don't know. I'm not an expert. But my symptoms match what I understand are common ones online.
I'm tired in the morning. I'm tired during the day. I'm tired in the evening. I don't sleep well at night.
I am listless during the day. I stare and drift. I can't focus. I struggle to read books or even newspaper articles - they are too big and long and take too much effort - I go off Netflix and Amazon series almost immediately. I don't want to leave the house. I feel better when I leave the house. I don't want to talk to people outside the house. I feel better if I do see a smile outside the house.
I'm aggressive and frustrated. I want to start fights. On social media and even with my wife. I immediately regret it when I do and feel victimised when they strike back, as they do. A lingering comment can stay with me for weeks. Which puts me off talking to people at all.
The only way I get work done is through immense self-discipline and short bursts of productivity at times when I have no choice, and I absolutely must. I just about do it. I put on a "game face" on for meetings - but I've even dodged a few of those. My tolerance for work colleagues I don't quite click with or who annoy me is virtually zero. And I don't care.
So this lockdown is really really shit. Everyone I've spoken to feels the same. I don't know how many feel how I feel, but I suspect it's undercounted.
It would make all the difference to see close friends and family, and go into work once a week in London (couldn't give tuppence for all the rest really) and get away on holiday with my family, where we can play and eat and have fun. Because that's living. And this is no life.
I'm pushing the boundaries of these rules as far as I can (and some) and feel I have no alternative if I am to maintain some basic level of sanity. Sorry.
I'm sorry to hear that mate and I agree with basically all of what you're saying.
This lockdown has been the worst and if it hadn't been for our house move I think it would have been a lot worse because I'd have had nothing outside of work to set my mind to. Now that it's done both my wife and I are definitely struggling. We're not people who can simply sit in front of the TV and stay there for hours on end and we have pretty active social lives in normal times.
I really miss just being able to message a mate and head to the pub or brewery bar on a Saturday afternoon. I miss being able to meet my wife at 11pm somewhere in the square mile on Thursday or Friday after work drinks and then head for a late dinner and stay out even later for drinks.
The idea that some NHS bod thinks that we need to keep social distancing indefinitely is completely depressing. I'm grateful that MPs like Steve Baker exist to ensure that boot of normal life is kept on the PM's neck and rule by scientist isn't really on the cards.
Its a bit rich that people whose argument you have spent the last year pouring scorn on are suddenly being relied on to get you out of a dreadful situation.
Email your own MP. Email your councillors.
Cut some mouthy anti-lockdown sceptic organisation a small cheque.
You will feel better. Trust me.
I haven't poured any scorn on people who say lockdown isn't a good long term solution. In fact I've been doing the opposite. Being against it as a long term solution doesn't mean it isn't effective at bringing cases down in the short term. In fact I've constantly been saying that without a longer term system in place lockdowns are basically not a really useful way of dealing with this and just pile misery onto people.
Ultimately, I take issue with people who say lockdown doesn't work, it obviously does one only needs to look at our current data to see that. In fact with vaccines we finally have a way out of this shit of lockdown, not lockdown then more lockdown. You can go back across all of my posts and I've been very consistent in this view, lockdown is a mechanism for reducing cases in the short term while other systems should be put in place (border controls, isolation, quarantine) to ensure cases don't explode again after unlocking. They aren't an end state as some people want them to be.
If anything I'd have more in common with Steve Baker than Matt Hancock with the added proviso that we need proper border controls and a fully open internal economy with no social distancing. I couldn't give a fuck if people can't travel in and out for the next 6-8 months.
And that is wholly legitimate.
But you see the issue. Your "I couldn't give a fuck if people can't travel in and out for the next 6-8 months" is someone else's "I couldn't give a fuck if bars and restaurants and clubs are closed for the next 6-8 months".
ie it is important that at every step of the way the government's actions are questioned. Not just when they either align with, or cross our own boundaries.
That is what eg @contrarian has done and I hope I have tried to explain my reasoning for my views. Which are yes of course lockdowns work (as we all have said - no clients, no problems). But they are a huge impingement on our freedoms, they should be questioned at every stage, and they have become, sadly, a policy tool which is now out of the box and, if you listen to Chris Hopson of the NHS on the matter, will not be put back for some time to come.
I have no issue with anyone questioning policies, in fact I'd hope that people are free to do so. As I said the only issue I have is denial that lockdowns work in getting cases and therefore hospitalisations down. They obviously do and saying they don't as some seem to want to say just strikes me as deliberately ignoring evidence. My criticism of them (and yours I think) is that while I accept that lockdowns work in reducing cases, they can't be used as a solution to this because once lockdown is gone cases shot back up and you just end up in lockdown again.
Completely agree that the public policy types aren't going to want to let go of the measures they have and once again I find myself (I'm sure you do too) siding with Steve Baker (a wonderful experience for you, I'm sure) and blocking this dystopian future where NHS bods mouth of to the media that "we could have prevented these 20,000 flu deaths with a lockdown" in 2025 is absolutely a priority.
As I said, the scientists and public health people think they know what's best for us and now have the tools to impose it. We must absolutely take those away from them at the soonest possible opportunity and put them back in their box. We can't have rule by SAGE and scientists briefing the media independently suggesting that we can conquer death by having lockdowns.
For flu I would suggest that higher vaccine takeup of flu vaccine would be more beneficial than a lockdown. Raising that comes way before lockdown imo.
Before this year, even in the most vulnerable UK group flu vaccine takeup was only 70%, and far lower amongst other groups. Even this year that 70% was only up to 80%.
Many other groups are more like 50-60%.
And we are by some way the highest flu vaccine takeup in Europe.
Note Mike writes, in the second paragraph, that the great vaccine effect makes things "much harder" for Johnson.
The fact that this doesn`t read "much easier" (as it should) is testament to that the default position of "lockdown over liberties" and testament to the government`s default aim of "must avoid criticism" over growing some balls and taking us out of this nightmare as quickly as possible within NHS capacity.
We shouldn`t be constrained for a day longer than is necessary and that is legal.
Just catching up on threads. Firstly, excellent piece by Mike – there have been some brilliant leaders by the Smithsons (Jr and Sr) in recent days. Also enjoyed the linked column by Dr John Lees in the Mail.
I couldn't agree more with @Stocky here – the government needs to grow a pair. The first and most important step is drumming into the Mad Scientists that it is HOSPITALISATIONS that should be the key metric not CASES (h/t @theProle FPT).
Do we even need to know the number of daily positive cases anymore? Isn`t this just stoking up fear?
No. Watching the daily positive cases coming down is one of the only things that gives me optimism and hope.
Deaths and hospitalisations are what actually matter.
Well not quite. Until a vast majority of our population is vaccinated higher cases still leads to higher hospitalisations and higher deaths. They are all linked.
The less (fewer) cases, the less chance I have of catching COVID.
But the issue is that the scientists are moving the goalposts. Rishi was right, we were sold this lockdown as a way to protect the NHS from collapse. Now we're being told it's a way to get cases down. How long until that becomes getting cases to zero before we're allowed out of it?
No. The line must be kept at ensuring the NHS doesn't collapse, we're on the way to achieving that in a lasting way by ensuring all people at risk of ending up on hospital from this will be immunised by the end of April (in reality probably the end of March) and all adults by August (more likely June). The idea that once this is achieved we should stay in lockdown because cases are high is simply unacceptable and the scientists are moving the goalposts. We can't have rule by SAGE, no one voted for them.
We won't have rule by SAGE any more than we had rule by Cummings. The PM/ministers will listen to advisers, but they make the call and they are held to account for it.
The scientists (in the virology/public health/epidemiology areas) will advise on what's best for their area of expertise. The virologists and epidemiologists might well push for crushing cases to reduce chances of further damaging mutations (although, realistically, they are more likely to come from countries with few vaccinations and largely beyond our control other than border closing). The public health scientists should take a wider view on e.g. mental health, getting other health services back to full capacity. There should also be economists advising, who will likely push to open as much as possible as soon as possible.
Having said that, I agree that getting everyone* vaccinated (plus two-three weeks) should be a pretty clear end point. After that, things are as good as they're going to get, unless the NHS is on point of collapse there's no holding on a bit longer for things to get better, as they won't (they should be pretty good by then). The only justification for going longer would be a new vaccine-dodging strain that puts a lot of people in hospital or kills them (i.e. the already used vaccines don't prevent even severe illness) and a new vaccine for that very close. In that scenario, restrictions would still be to prevent NHS collapse, but we should not get into that situation.
* or indeed just the vulnerable for at least most restrictions
As we are constantly being told, the public is hugely in favour of continued lockdown. So why on earth wouldn't Boris continue to say "we are following the science" and maintain the lockdown until we have a "robust and effective strategy to identify new variants"?
= continued popularity = continued governing = trebles all round.
Current polling maybe. Try polling on a scenario in which we're in July, deaths are in double figures or lower. People hate lockdown, but at present they think it's justified. They won't think that when it isn't.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
We shall see.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
Yup, and there's always going to be a "just in case" reason for these types, it could be mutations, it could be the unvaccinated BAME people being put at risk, it could be too many cases or the NHS not being able to cope with new non-COVID issues. It's like you said, they've been handed this all powerful policy tool to conquer death and for public health types that's their primary concern.
Isn't it just about impossible to get positive tests at less than 1000 a day? My understanding (and I can't remember where from) is that false positivity rate is around 0.5%. If Covid doesn't exist, but we are doing 300,000 tests a day, we'll still be getting 1,500 positives a day. And of those 1,500, you will always get a handful then dying in the next 28 days. Therefore, deaths will never be zero. If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
That false positive rate is not 0.5%.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
Literally zero acutal positive cases, every single one a false positive.
For 800,000 daily tests then 0.08% still equals 640 potentially doesn't it?
Correct but 0.08% is not the actual false positive rate. It is the absolute ceiling on false positives.
I think you're missing out the Texas Governor there.
If the power goes out all over Texas, they are going to be looking to blame Washington first, regardless of whether that is fair....
To what end ? They already have a Republican governor and Republican senators; they've opted out of federal energy arrangements. The federal government might kick in some aid, but this is effectively an event of their own making, and the solutions to it lie in their own hands.
A question for the data crunchers here - if the vaccine reduces transmission then will it reduce R below 1 by itself even without other restrictions? Barring mutations.
Yes. Crudely, a 70% effective vaccine should reduce R by 70%. So we could open things up to about where R would be 4 without vaccines, and keep it below 1.
With a 90% effective vaccine, we could open up to where R would otherwise be 10.
Also have to multiply that by the proportion having the vaccine, of course (which lowers effect). But the basic point stands.
On the other side, you would get a greater reduction if vaccine also reduces infectiousness of disease in those who do still get it - say an infected vaccinated person meets 10 vaccinated people who they would otherwise have infected, 80% of whom don't get it. But if the infected vaccinated person is less infectious (say half as infectious) then they might only infect 5/10 unvaccinated people or 5/10 x 2/10 = 1/10 vaccinated people.
I'm still not 100% on this, perhaps you know.
In addition to reducing your chance of getting sick IF you are infected, do the professionals think the vaccine also reduces your chance of getting infected at all?
"Infection" is not quite as easily defined as you might think. The term used is "sterilising immunity" if you essentially don't get infected at all (virus still reaches you, but gets wiped out quickly).
I think you're missing out the Texas Governor there.
If the power goes out all over Texas, they are going to be looking to blame Washington first, regardless of whether that is fair....
To what end ? They already have a Republican governor and Republican senators; they've opted out of federal energy arrangements. The federal government might kick in some aid, but this is effectively an event of their own making, and the solutions to it lie in their own hands.
Comments
Most people will be happy to see a slow and steady return to normality
These could emerge at any time. So it is open-ended.
If it's your bog-standard Covid (and attendant variants) then we are vaccinated aren't we?
Completely agree that the public policy types aren't going to want to let go of the measures they have and once again I find myself (I'm sure you do too) siding with Steve Baker (a wonderful experience for you, I'm sure) and blocking this dystopian future where NHS bods mouth of to the media that "we could have prevented these 20,000 flu deaths with a lockdown" in 2025 is absolutely a priority.
As I said, the scientists and public health people think they know what's best for us and now have the tools to impose it. We must absolutely take those away from them at the soonest possible opportunity and put them back in their box. We can't have rule by SAGE and scientists briefing the media independently suggesting that we can conquer death by having lockdowns.
Also, I was unfair on the epidemiologists/virologists above. They didn't call for a lockdown very early in the pandemic, which is what you would do if only bothered about cases and damn everything else - didn't SAGE recommend it about two weeks or so before it actually happened? There's not a lot of evidence that even SAGE are lockdown-happy.
Second, you're ignoring the continuing rapid improvement in battery capacity, cost, changing speed and durability. It won't be very many years until it's completely uneconomic to make ICE powered vehicles.
And yes, I've always liked that nice Mr. Baker!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9269271/UK-California-Covid-variants-merged-coronavirus-case-scientists-say.html?ito=push-notification&ci=78440&si=25474331
Looking closely that was at around +49% on cases for w/c 9/2 compared to w/c 2/2 (Wednesday-Tuesday).
It turns out that at least half of this spike is due to snow on Tuesday 2/2. 26 positive tests occurred on that snow day (in the denominator) and 92 on the Wednesday (in the numerator), against a weekly figure of 473 (67 per day) over the last 7 days.
Rates do seem to be genuinely going up on the figures coming through, but is making those figures and the increases/decreases much more variable from day to day than would otherwise be the case.
I think all 5 areas in West Yorkshire have seen the cases measure turn red for a few days at times during this current lockdown, often weather related, but the longer term trends have remained slowly downwards for all areas.
But it is entirely possible that Chris Whitty, Chris Hopson et al will agitate against opening up "just in case". And they will do so standing alongside the Prime Minister broadcasting live to the country at 5pm in front of the Union Jack.
Plenty of people will imo take what they say as "the science" and to be followed.
The big change is in the price of batteries. The price is coming down every year, despite capacities going up. $100/KWh is the current pricing (ish). So $10,000 to replace a 100kWh pack today. Probably half that in 5 years.
Ultimately we can't conquer death, and I think the government has got to learn to live with a few bad headlines of a few thousand unvaccinated people dying of this every year.
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1361817799010746372?s=20
An older electric car means that the battery range is no longer 200 miles but 100 miles or worse.
And that isn't something that you can fix with 5 minutes and £30, it requires sitting still for 2+ hours as it recharges
Now better battery management is going to reduce that problem but that's a longer term solution for a problem that will appear very rapidly sometime between 2027 to 2035 as none ICE cars become the exception.
If it is just like putting on knickers a blouse and a dress though I don't have a lot of experience, and it might confuse the new puppy.
https://twitter.com/KateAndrs/status/1361372252655255557
https://twitter.com/raecomm/status/1361813303346008068?s=21
Anyway, he makes no comment. He quotes Dryden. Here's some more. If the cap fits.....
A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind’s epitome:
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was everything by starts, and nothing long,
But, in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon,
https://twitter.com/ThatRyanChap/status/1361998316934991874
https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/transport/uk-hotel-quarantine-passengers-scramble-for-indirect-flights-as-experts-slam-system-1.1167769
https://twitter.com/ScottishVoter/status/1361986248798318597
A lot of politicians invited them to come...
It will be interesting to see if a rise in cases feeds through to a rise in hospitalisations. If it doesn't then it's an even more compelling reason to downgrade case statistics in the lockdown factors.
As part of my dream that involves getting a Jag Mk2 and converting it to electric the current purchase price of a 5kWh battery is about £1000.
Which means replacing a battery pack is going to be about £10k and probably beyond the reach of anyone who is playing bangermonics.
Owing to a mix up someone in catering filled bottles with tap water (normal practice but not when working with foreigners). The mistake wasn't discovered until seven had drunk from the bottles. All seven were seriously ill and couldn't function for the next two days. One more serious than that. I wonder whether some nations are just hardier than others.
Poor mental health isn't a sign of weakness any more than cancer is. And equally can happen to anyone. And indeed does happen to everyone occasionally.
The grit your teeth and battle through alone attitude is not a beneficial one.
Oh, and about that extra money for the NHS. We need huge investment in talking therapy for one. Access to which is patchy to say the least unless you can afford it. Or are willing to use a minimally trained volunteer.
We need more fully trained practitioners.
Chinese CATL, for example, are claiming their new cells are good for 2m km (and those are the LIP chemistry cells for the cheaper models).
Buying pre-2020 models second hand is going to be something of a lottery, but standards are improving very rapidly. And as has been pointed out, there will be an awful lot of second hand ICE models on the market for the rest of the decade.
It will be a bit messy, but strangely enough we're just about at the point where the market will sort it out.
https://twitter.com/jfkirkegaard/status/1361990549922848769?s=20
If anyone can disabuse me of this I'd be very grateful - otherwise I can't see a route out of lockdown ever.
Because it would gradually reduce the proportion of people exposed who are susceptible to catching the virus.
Other people, more careful, had days confined to the toilet.
With a 90% effective vaccine, we could open up to where R would otherwise be 10.
The ONS estimate puts the absolute upper bound of false positives to be 0.08%
That is assuming every single positive from its test sample of ~200k were positive.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/methodologies/covid19infectionsurveypilotmethodsandfurtherinformation#test-sensitivity-and-specificity
https://twitter.com/HYUFD1/status/1361997106739892233?s=20
We might see battery as a service for commercial vehicles, where they are designed for stop and swap, rather than vehicle charging. It probably won’t happen for cars, due to packaging constraints.
And the "barring mutations" point is a pretty big proviso which isn't really valid - there will definitely be mutations which will definitely affect the effectiveness of vaccines. That's fine as the vaccines themselves develop and this will simply become business as usual. But you can't just assume away something that's going to happen.
My mother had AZ and two weeks on has had no side effects other than feeling sleepy the next day (and that might have been more to do with leaving the house for the first time in months lol)
On the other side, you would get a greater reduction if vaccine also reduces infectiousness of disease in those who do still get it - say an infected vaccinated person meets 10 vaccinated people who they would otherwise have infected, 80% of whom don't get it. But if the infected vaccinated person is less infectious (say half as infectious) then they might only infect 5/10 unvaccinated people or 5/10 x 2/10 = 1/10 vaccinated people.
I think because battery car ranges are just about good enough for most use cases that business model won't exist except for commercial vehicles where ownership issues won't be such a concern.
And look where that ended up.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9269163/Hospital-bosses-call-lockdown-SUMMER-cases-need-drop-tenfold.html
Six Nations 2021: France assistant coach William Servat tests positive for coronavirus - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/56084565
I notice England are forcing their players to stay in a bio-secure bubble, countries like Wales have let their players go back to play for their clubs during the down week in the 6 nations.
There were 94,700 tests on that day.
So the positivity rate was 0.39%
I think it's very unlikely that they were all false positives, given that the local lockdown in Leicester happened at the end of June - there was clearly still some community transmission of Covid in the UK, as well as cases imported from abroad that were then tested positive here.
The false positive rate is very unlikely to be above 0.1%
And, we won't be using 1,000 cases as a threshold anyway.
https://twitter.com/LukeJohnsonRCP/status/1361997721880694791
Have to have bigger powercuts than anyone else...
Sorry to hear people are suffering with lockdown depression. One of my closest friends took his own life last month. He’d had mental health battles on and off for a long time, but I cant imagine lockdown helped - he was the most successful, and sociable, person I knew.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56084500
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/neville-southall-wales-everton-football-18903230.amp
One of the ways companies like Tesla are getting build costs down is to make the battery pack an integral part of the vehicle structure. That's why they're trying to make the next generation of batteries good for 1m plus km.
On the other hand, there's a move towards standardising battery formats, so for some layouts it might be relatively simple.
There's a huge amount of money being spent in battery development, and development of battery manufacturing. What we've seen so far is just the start.
Halfway through the decade, battery costs could be as low as $50 per kWH, at which point cheap mass market vehicles will be widespread.
Given the relatively small number of vehicles built up to 2020, I don't think there will be much of a second had market in them at all.
In addition to reducing your chance of getting sick IF you are infected, do the professionals think the vaccine also reduces your chance of getting infected at all?
https://twitter.com/fact_covid/status/1362008362452471808
There is a whole cottage industry doing electroclassics now. They aren't cheap though. This MGB costs 90 grand...
https://rbwevcars.com/
Well, I say good, options are a bit sparse atm.
Herd immunity is probably around a 15% overall effect which means the suppression from r = 3 -> r = 1 is being done via health controls and taking it down to ~ 0.85 is via vaccine effect.*
* Figures are probably wrong but the overall effect of "herd immunity" is still small.
Of course that will improve daily with the vaccine rollout.
Firstly the UK doesn't have highest deaths per million.
Secondly a large chunk of our deaths come from before mass testing was established.
If you look at the UKs excess deaths versus other comparable nations the UK has done worse before mass testing was established and better after it was.
https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-vaccine-pfizer-effects
At which point I look at the price of a ID4 and think I may as well just get one of those.
Before this year, even in the most vulnerable UK group flu vaccine takeup was only 70%, and far lower amongst other groups. Even this year that 70% was only up to 80%.
Many other groups are more like 50-60%.
And we are by some way the highest flu vaccine takeup in Europe.
They already have a Republican governor and Republican senators; they've opted out of federal energy arrangements. The federal government might kick in some aid, but this is effectively an event of their own making, and the solutions to it lie in their own hands.
See e.g. https://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/news/coronavirus-few-vaccines-prevent-infection-–-heres-why-thats-not-problem for a fairly accessible write-up. There's also a Lancet article with some interesting bits, but I don't think it's open access*: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30773-8/fulltext
* Might be - I'm on university network so hard to tell, but there's nothing I can see saying open access