in fairness thats not 'Americans' but some millenial antifa bot on twitter. I suspect most Americans care less than most Brits about Harry and Meghan. 17m viewers is pretty weak for a nation of 330m people.
You say millenial as if its a bad thing.
As for 17m views that's not weak, that's extremely high for live overnight figures for non sporting events. Don't forget it doesn't include on demand viewing figures, which of course is how millenials consume TV since you brought them up.
I am a millennial myself, it's not a positive label. For a live event it's particularly dissapointing given it was the first global showing and all the hype, a decent NFL season game would hit those numbers.
Interesting thread. Thanks. He is very in favour of the vaccine plans. On the other hand a vaccine specialist I saw speaking on a video the other day seemed to be saying we were making a massive mistake as what he called "prophylactic vaccine" should not be used in the middle of a pandemic. It was a bit technical for me, but seemed to be along the lines that the virus will be under intense pressure and so mutate and our innate general purpose immune defences will be lot less useful against mutation as the defences 'created' by the vaccine would kind of override them (or get there first) and these would be evaded.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
Yep, there's a legitimate debate to be had about that. I've not criticised the Swedish approach - it leads to more cases and deaths, but it has other benefits. I prefer the harder lockdown, but 'better' depends on how you value different things.
The practical problem with self-imposed lockdown as RCS mentions is that it comes later. 'Science led' lockdowns can look at the cases, R etc and apply a lockdown before the severe sickness and deaths get horrific. People largely only get scared enough to greatly change their behaviour when they can see locally/nationally a lot of people getting sick. That delay costs potentially a lot of lives while the extra 2-3 weeks of 'freedom' have limited utility
Its not an either or option though, here in the UK we have laws, guidance and people making judgment calls themselves. In practice this is further split with two levels of laws, some enforced and others not.
Id say the laws we are enforcing are about right, but the laws we are not enforcing should be guidance and/or peoples own judgment calls.
in fairness thats not 'Americans' but some millenial antifa bot on twitter. I suspect most Americans care less than most Brits about Harry and Meghan. 17m viewers is pretty weak for a nation of 330m people.
Indeed and in any case what they think is not really that important anyway. They got rid of our royal family 250 years ago and they rarely care if we dislike some of their Presidents as we often do and nor should we care if they dislike some of our royals.
FURTHER EDIT - "From 11 March, vaccine supply will increase substantially and be sustained at a higher level for several weeks. Therefore, from the week of 15 March we are now asking systems to plan and support all vaccination centres and local vaccination services to deliver around twice the level of vaccine available in the week of 1 March."
And if 250,000 is our definition of a poor day now, is that not a reflection of just how well things have gone to date?
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
Interesting thread. Thanks. He is very in favour of the vaccine plans. On the other hand a vaccine specialist I saw speaking on a video the other day seemed to be saying we were making a massive mistake as what he called "prophylactic vaccine" should not be used in the middle of a pandemic. It was a bit technical for me, but seemed to be along the lines that the virus will be under intense pressure and so mutate and our innate general purpose immune defences will be lot less useful against mutation as the defences 'created' by the vaccine would kind of override them (or get there first) and these would be evaded.
That strikes me as a case of anthropomorphism. The virus doesn't feel pressure and isn't able to strategise against us.
Interesting thread. Thanks. He is very in favour of the vaccine plans. On the other hand a vaccine specialist I saw speaking on a video the other day seemed to be saying we were making a massive mistake as what he called "prophylactic vaccine" should not be used in the middle of a pandemic. It was a bit technical for me, but seemed to be along the lines that the virus will be under intense pressure and so mutate and our innate general purpose immune defences will be lot less useful against mutation as the defences 'created' by the vaccine would kind of override them (or get there first) and these would be evaded.
Frankly, sometimes experts in very narrow fields can talk total nonsense, simply because it makes sense in their narrow view, but not in the big picture*.
So, we are to let tens of millions needlessly die by not vaccinating, to protect against the possibility of the virus adapting to the vaccine.
In any case, I think he is wrong. As the evolutionary virologists are showing, there is only so much evolutionary room for the virus in relation to its epitopes - the parts of the spike protein that binds to the ACE2 receptor - before that evolution makes the virus unable to infect.
* Edit. He is right to the extent that in an ideal world, you'd have the vaccine before the pandemic, and have the world's population vaccinated before the virus was widespread, and that would reduce the virus' ability to achieve vaccine escape as there would simply be fewer virions around to mutate. But that is simply not where we are and his arguments are 'surprising' given that the vaccine can save millions of people.
The Times has an article (paywalled; sorry, but you can get 2 free articles a week by registering which is what I've done) ripping the everloving shit out of Sunak (identified as the main holdout against the SAGE-advised circuit breaker of early October) and the lockdown sceptics as of September.
"Nicholas Davies, an assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who sits on the government’s Spi-M modelling committee, said his colleagues were not consulted about the new rule, or indeed about Eat Out to Help Out. “They seemed to be making decisions and it wasn’t really clear what the rationale for them was,” he said."
...
"On September 16, Whitty and Vallance urged the prime minister — who had firmly ruled out a second lockdown that afternoon — to impose a two-week circuit breaker lockdown to bring R under control. Hospital admissions for the virus had increased by 100 per cent since the beginning of the month. Without a drastic intervention, they argued, the country was now on track for 200 to 500 deaths a day by early November.
The grim reality of the situation began to dawn on the prime minister. “That was the moment when he knew we needed to do something,” one aide told The Sunday Times."
...
"The proposal for the two-week lockdown went before the Cabinet Office’s Covid-19 operation committee that day. Hancock and Gove were said to be in favour of the tougher measures, but one key member was not onside. Sunak later met with Johnson to express deep concern about the damage a lockdown would do to business and jobs. Rumours circulated afterwards that Sunak had threatened to resign if there was a lockdown, but this has been denied."
...
"Three of the four academics who had been invited to speak were advocates of letting the virus run its course with the use of lighter restrictions. One was Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s top epidemiologist, viewed across the world as the poster boy for herd immunity. His presence said much about the way the prime minister and his chancellor were thinking, and it opened them up to accusations that they were re-engaging with the “herd immunity” strategy which had proved unpopular back in March."
Glenn Campbell @GlennBBC · Hearing harassment complaints committee is looking to use Holyrood’s section 23 power to secure release of documents from @AlexSalmond lawyers - material he said they’d be happy to handover
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
There seems to be a need to win every argument and nuance supporting a view nowadays, rather than accepting any position has pros and cons, but that the pros outweigh the cons. This fashion leads to all politicians lying to us and sadly we reward them for it.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
I havent followed him closely on this, but Baker was also the most honest of the ERG tories about Brexit.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
FURTHER EDIT - "From 11 March, vaccine supply will increase substantially and be sustained at a higher level for several weeks. Therefore, from the week of 15 March we are now asking systems to plan and support all vaccination centres and local vaccination services to deliver around twice the level of vaccine available in the week of 1 March."
And if 250,000 is our definition of a poor day now, is that not a reflection of just how well things have gone to date?
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
Worth noting that the figures for 1st-7th March were 2,428,631 total vaccinations
So they are saying it will be 4.8m a week or so... 700k a day average.... which is not far off a "year" of the population per day.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
The problem is Toby etc undermine the sensible criticisms of Baker et al.
When the leading "lockdown skeptics" are people who can't get any basic facts right they undermine what they're saying. Quite frankly lockdown skepticism would be better served if the likes of Toby, JHB etc shut up and we paid more attention to the others speaking.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
I agree but I can also see why people are getting twitchy when they see the first two Whitty/surge headlines on the Beeb news app.
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
FURTHER EDIT - "From 11 March, vaccine supply will increase substantially and be sustained at a higher level for several weeks. Therefore, from the week of 15 March we are now asking systems to plan and support all vaccination centres and local vaccination services to deliver around twice the level of vaccine available in the week of 1 March."
And if 250,000 is our definition of a poor day now, is that not a reflection of just how well things have gone to date?
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
Worth noting that the figures for 1st-7th March were 2,428,631 total vaccinations
So they are saying it will be 4.8m a week or so... 700k a day average.... which is not far off a "year" of the population per day.
Would be bananas. That's basically the population of Leeds, every day, for a week.
FURTHER EDIT - "From 11 March, vaccine supply will increase substantially and be sustained at a higher level for several weeks. Therefore, from the week of 15 March we are now asking systems to plan and support all vaccination centres and local vaccination services to deliver around twice the level of vaccine available in the week of 1 March."
And if 250,000 is our definition of a poor day now, is that not a reflection of just how well things have gone to date?
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
Worth noting that the figures for 1st-7th March were 2,428,631 total vaccinations
So they are saying it will be 4.8m a week or so... 700k a day average.... which is not far off a "year" of the population per day.
Its essentially an entire 5-year cohort per week isn't it?
We should be completed vaccinating the over 50s and doing 40-somethings before the end of March. Add 3 weeks for middle of April and there's no excuse not to open indoors by then.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
The problem is Toby etc undermine the sensible criticisms of Baker et al.
When the leading "lockdown skeptics" are people who can't get any basic facts right they undermine what they're saying. Quite frankly lockdown skepticism would be better served if the likes of Toby, JHB etc shut up and we paid more attention to the others speaking.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
The problem is Toby etc undermine the sensible criticisms of Baker et al.
When the leading "lockdown skeptics" are people who can't get any basic facts right they undermine what they're saying. Quite frankly lockdown skepticism would be better served if the likes of Toby, JHB etc shut up and we paid more attention to the others speaking.
What others?
Baker etc
The problem is they're less strident in their skepticism, since they approach it from a perspective of realism, sanity and philosophy rather than sticking your head in the sand and denying there's an issue, so they get ignored for the siren voices of the lunatics.
If the lunatics weren't there, then the sane skeptics would be the "balance" the media uses instead.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The problem with this debate is how exactly do you properly test the non-intervention strategy in a democracy? In most countries - certainly in this one - the press and the public were screaming for government intervention from early on, and it would be a brave government indeed that said no to the electorate on that kind of issue, same as if it refused to take defensive measures if we were being hit by missiles launched by an aggressor.
How many democracies worldwide left dealing with the pandemic up to the citizens? Sweden did to some extent, and that didn't work out well. Ditto the USA. One could perhaps make a case for Japan, but even there various emergency powers were used, and they have a very particular type of society.
I agree. It's a life and death call. They can't go back and say "ah well I see that didn't work so we'll try this other way now".
So I suppose it's a question of principles both for the government and for each person concerned. It has been interesting to see that when it came down to it, the fabled free market liberal Conservative government didn't trust its citizens to do the right thing.
Not saying they were right or wrong - and in the blitz, air raid wardens ensured that everyone's blackouts were up - but the totality of the restrictions of our freedoms has been mind-boggling. Equally mind-boggling has been the instant acceptance of this by so many so quickly, not least here on PB.
It comes back to the point we've tussled over before, which is whether matters of life and death - wars, pandemics, etc. - are the touchstones that require you to prove your principles by sticking to them even when the price is enormous, or separate categories that are clearly demarcated from peacetime values and can therefore be approached differently. My own view is that whether or not the latter is morally correct (although I tend to think so), it is from a practical and historical perspective what almost always happens; resistance during the crisis is therefore unlikely to be productive. That doesn't mean I don't in some way admire those who take a genuinely principled position, especially since I'm not sure I could muster either the personal or the political courage to do the same if I thought it was the right thing to do.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Interesting thread. Thanks. He is very in favour of the vaccine plans. On the other hand a vaccine specialist I saw speaking on a video the other day seemed to be saying we were making a massive mistake as what he called "prophylactic vaccine" should not be used in the middle of a pandemic. It was a bit technical for me, but seemed to be along the lines that the virus will be under intense pressure and so mutate and our innate general purpose immune defences will be lot less useful against mutation as the defences 'created' by the vaccine would kind of override them (or get there first) and these would be evaded.
That strikes me as a case of anthropomorphism. The virus doesn't feel pressure and isn't able to strategise against us.
That said, we do talk about natural selection creating evolutionary pressure.
But that pressure is to select out those strains that reproduce the most effectively, which is a complex mix of factors, including: - binding more efficiently with host cells - being ejected more efficiently from hosts after replication (causing upper respiratory tract infections that lead to sneezing, coughing) - causing longer infections so extending the period during which a host is infectious - survivability in the environment between hosts - low infectious dose so that aerosols infect - evading the host's immune defenses at every level so that the virus can infect, replicate and be released for onward transmission - effectively hijacking the infected cell's production machinery to increase the number of copies made.
Note that causing severe disease or host death is not one of those selective pressures
FURTHER EDIT - "From 11 March, vaccine supply will increase substantially and be sustained at a higher level for several weeks. Therefore, from the week of 15 March we are now asking systems to plan and support all vaccination centres and local vaccination services to deliver around twice the level of vaccine available in the week of 1 March."
And if 250,000 is our definition of a poor day now, is that not a reflection of just how well things have gone to date?
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
Worth noting that the figures for 1st-7th March were 2,428,631 total vaccinations
So they are saying it will be 4.8m a week or so... 700k a day average.... which is not far off a "year" of the population per day.
Its essentially an entire 5-year cohort per week isn't it?
We should be completed vaccinating the over 50s and doing 40-somethings before the end of March. Add 3 weeks for middle of April and there's no excuse not to open indoors by then.
Yet even with the vaccination, it comes back and surges again. Apparently. According to top scientists. 😕
“ Virus will surge at some point - either in the summer after the gradual easing of lockdown - or as a result of the seasonal effect, in autumn and winter.”
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
Mid-September. It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned. Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
FURTHER EDIT - "From 11 March, vaccine supply will increase substantially and be sustained at a higher level for several weeks. Therefore, from the week of 15 March we are now asking systems to plan and support all vaccination centres and local vaccination services to deliver around twice the level of vaccine available in the week of 1 March."
And if 250,000 is our definition of a poor day now, is that not a reflection of just how well things have gone to date?
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
Worth noting that the figures for 1st-7th March were 2,428,631 total vaccinations
So they are saying it will be 4.8m a week or so... 700k a day average.... which is not far off a "year" of the population per day.
Its essentially an entire 5-year cohort per week isn't it?
We should be completed vaccinating the over 50s and doing 40-somethings before the end of March. Add 3 weeks for middle of April and there's no excuse not to open indoors by then.
Yet even with the vaccination, it comes back and surges again. Apparently. According to top scientists. 😕
“ Virus will surge at some point - either in the summer after the gradual easing of lockdown - or as a result of the seasonal effect, in autumn and winter.”
How’s that happen then?
For the same reason the flu comes back every year.
We will just have to live with it, as he said and explained.
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
Mid-September. It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned. Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
Except circuit breakers don't work.
Wales tried the circuit break, it was a miserable failure.
Other nations around the globe have tried circuit breaks. Not one of them has succeeded.
Interesting thread. Thanks. He is very in favour of the vaccine plans. On the other hand a vaccine specialist I saw speaking on a video the other day seemed to be saying we were making a massive mistake as what he called "prophylactic vaccine" should not be used in the middle of a pandemic. It was a bit technical for me, but seemed to be along the lines that the virus will be under intense pressure and so mutate and our innate general purpose immune defences will be lot less useful against mutation as the defences 'created' by the vaccine would kind of override them (or get there first) and these would be evaded.
There are three basic options as I see it (and you can mix and match the options) -
(1) globally lockdown until the virus stops transmitting. Not possible given that it would have to involve all jurisdictions to be effective. (2) let it run riot until the population gets herd immunity that way. Not ethical. (3) vaccinate our way out of trouble.
The UK is locally combining 1 and 3 (although I suspect there is a temptation to let it run through the very young population even now - meaning there is an element of 2 in there). It is incredibly unlikely that the vaccines stop being effective at all. The best layman's explainer that I can find is here -
That article from Harvard appears to chime with what the postdoc whose thread I post above is saying. Over time, as we get more and more exposed to the virus, mutations are likely to begin to evade antibody immunity, but the T-Cells contain better memories of the infection. That's what has happened to the currently existing coronaviruses - indeed survivors of SARS were found to have T-Cell reactions 17 years later. Mutations might happen, and they might mean we are all f**ked, but it appears very unlikely that a mutation so extreme will happen that renders the virus completely unrecognisable to the immune system. Coronaviruses are more stable than, say, influenza viruses.
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
Mid-September. It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned. Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
We have Whitty soundbiting* extra surges later in the year some time. The govt has been following the science and is bound by data, not dates. I mean I've no idea if they would or they wouldn't, but everything is in place for the data and the science to dictate that June is too early.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
We have Whitty soundbiting* extra surges later in the year some time. The govt has been following the science and is bound by data, not dates. I mean I've no idea if they would or they wouldn't, but everything is in place for the data and the science to dictate that June is too early.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
*apols for verbing "soundbite".
Its worth listening to what Whitty says in full. He's saying there will be extra surges later but that they will need to be lived with and the vaccine will prevent deaths.
To clarify I'm not saying the June one is too late. The June one includes reopening nightclubs etc and that should be done perhaps three weeks after all adults have been vaccinated, including 18-21 year olds going clubbing. So June might be right for that. Maybe it should be brought forwards, but its a bit early to answer that definitively yet.
The one I think is ridiculous is reopening indoor hospitality in May. That should be done with the outdoor hospitality in April.
There is a world of difference in reopening a restaurant, and reopening a nightclub.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
And depending on processing power, you can build in Monte Carlo simulations for all the key assumptions of the model (or even Game Theory for those parts of the model dealing with people's decisions) to understand what range of outcomes are possible given stated uncertainties, and by playing with the settings, to what inputs the outputs are most sensitive.
I thoroughly approve of this type of modeling - I hate those who build a model and then believe it is unerringly accurate. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of people in the latter group.
One problem with Monte Carlo simulations is to determine a sensible distribution for the unknown parameters. These are often rather arbitrary -- Gaussian, Pearson, Beta, or pick-your-favourite distribution with specified mean and maybe variance -- and in my opinion this can lead to a different type of false precision. (Indeed I've published a paper, in a different area, showing that it was *impossible* to model a certain kind of lack of information correctly with Bayesian priors.) I certainly agree that sensitivity testing is paramount, e.g. today Whitty mentioned that vaccine effectiveness was not a very significant parameter in the 30,000 death model, and I'd like to see more of it in the SAGE papers.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
We have Whitty soundbiting* extra surges later in the year some time. The govt has been following the science and is bound by data, not dates. I mean I've no idea if they would or they wouldn't, but everything is in place for the data and the science to dictate that June is too early.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
*apols for verbing "soundbite".
Its worth listening to what Whitty says in full. He's saying there will be extra surges later but that they will need to be lived with and the vaccine will prevent deaths.
To clarify I'm not saying the June one is too late. The June one includes reopening nightclubs etc and that should be done perhaps three weeks after all adults have been vaccinated, including 18-21 year olds going clubbing. So June might be right for that. Maybe it should be brought forwards, but its a bit early to answer that definitively yet.
The one I think is ridiculous is reopening indoor hospitality in May. That should be done with the outdoor hospitality in April.
There is a world of difference in reopening a restaurant, and reopening a nightclub.
Yes. Whitty says the ratio of cases to deaths will be hugely different on account of the vaccinations. But he also says that it will occur in those unvaccinated. Hence the surge.
The building blocks are in place for the govt to "follow the science" by saying we can't afford a surge.
And your ridiculous might be, say, @FrancisUrquhart or @Andy_Cooke's too early (you'll of course have to ask them - @Andy is online now I think). Given the past year there will always be people who are happy to sit out and wait longer. Plenty of them on PB.
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
Mid-September. It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned. Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
Except circuit breakers don't work.
Wales tried the circuit break, it was a miserable failure.
Other nations around the globe have tried circuit breaks. Not one of them has succeeded.
So other than that, good point, well done.
They do work. It's coming out of them that doesn't work as well. The four week circuit break in November brought it down. The nine weeks since early January has worked as well.
Call it what you like; we're talking about applying lockdown rules for a given period to bring down infection rates. And every time we've done this, infection rates have dropped.
Just when you think it can get no worse - Andalucia is pausing for 2 weeks the first dose of Pfizer to over 80s as they have ran out of vaccine and will focus what they have on second doses only. Meanwhile they will continue giving out AZN to under 55s only. Utterly and completely mental.
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
Mid-September. It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned. Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
Kent Covid (or equivalent thereof) says hi...
Tier 4 was holding until it got going. Lockdown was inevitable once it did.
We could certainly have had fewer deaths in January but I don't think you can say that the kids would have been in school throughout.
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
FURTHER EDIT - "From 11 March, vaccine supply will increase substantially and be sustained at a higher level for several weeks. Therefore, from the week of 15 March we are now asking systems to plan and support all vaccination centres and local vaccination services to deliver around twice the level of vaccine available in the week of 1 March."
And if 250,000 is our definition of a poor day now, is that not a reflection of just how well things have gone to date?
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
Worth noting that the figures for 1st-7th March were 2,428,631 total vaccinations
So they are saying it will be 4.8m a week or so... 700k a day average.... which is not far off a "year" of the population per day.
Its essentially an entire 5-year cohort per week isn't it?
We should be completed vaccinating the over 50s and doing 40-somethings before the end of March. Add 3 weeks for middle of April and there's no excuse not to open indoors by then.
Yet even with the vaccination, it comes back and surges again. Apparently. According to top scientists. 😕
“ Virus will surge at some point - either in the summer after the gradual easing of lockdown - or as a result of the seasonal effect, in autumn and winter.”
How’s that happen then?
If only we had a press that would ask that question - instead of banging on about their holibobs.....
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
Mid-September. It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned. Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
Except circuit breakers don't work.
Wales tried the circuit break, it was a miserable failure.
Other nations around the globe have tried circuit breaks. Not one of them has succeeded.
So other than that, good point, well done.
They do work. It's coming out of them that doesn't work as well. The four week circuit break in November brought it down. The nine weeks since early January has worked as well.
Call it what you like; we're talking about applying lockdown rules for a given period to bring down infection rates. And every time we've done this, infection rates have dropped.
Lockdowns work, circuit breaks don't. That's the point.
The second you lift the "circuit break" cases instantly start rising again. And if its only 2 weeks that achieves squat since people party "last night of freedom" before the 2 weeks, then party "wahay free again" afterwards counteracting the whole point of just 2 weeks which isn't long enough to do much.
So you can't point to today's lockdown and act as if it would have all been avoidable had we just wished it away with a 2 week circuit break. 2 weeks doesn't work.
If you want a lockdown, fair enough, but then don't complain about having a lockdown. The idea a lockdown could be avoided if we'd just done one for 2 weeks then got back to normal is farcical wishful thinking.
If the 4 weeks in November worked then you can't blame today's lockdown on not having a 2 week one in October.
FURTHER EDIT - "From 11 March, vaccine supply will increase substantially and be sustained at a higher level for several weeks. Therefore, from the week of 15 March we are now asking systems to plan and support all vaccination centres and local vaccination services to deliver around twice the level of vaccine available in the week of 1 March."
And if 250,000 is our definition of a poor day now, is that not a reflection of just how well things have gone to date?
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
Worth noting that the figures for 1st-7th March were 2,428,631 total vaccinations
So they are saying it will be 4.8m a week or so... 700k a day average.... which is not far off a "year" of the population per day.
Would be bananas. That's basically the population of Leeds, every day, for a week.
If the original optimistic plans for vaccine production had worked out, then we would have been at these rates (and higher) since January.....
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
Mid-September. It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned. Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
While we should have done the 2 weeks (half-term) circuit break, the problem is that we actually need more than two weeks to get case number seriously down - the latest one has worked well, but we are 8 weeks in. I fear a 2 week would not have achieved that much, other than possibly delay the spike. The real problem was start of December. The release to go Christmas shopping was where the deaths in Jan and Feb came from. I have the utmost sympathy for the government. There are no easy options when considering the other harms of lockdown. But in this case, with vaccines coming shortly, we should have stayed in a much tighter lockdown through December. Ah - hindsight, my old friend. (I know some of you will say it was obvious at the time, but I think the Kent variant has played a huge role in the UK, and is now exerting its baleful effects on Europe).
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
We have Whitty soundbiting* extra surges later in the year some time. The govt has been following the science and is bound by data, not dates. I mean I've no idea if they would or they wouldn't, but everything is in place for the data and the science to dictate that June is too early.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
*apols for verbing "soundbite".
Its worth listening to what Whitty says in full. He's saying there will be extra surges later but that they will need to be lived with and the vaccine will prevent deaths.
To clarify I'm not saying the June one is too late. The June one includes reopening nightclubs etc and that should be done perhaps three weeks after all adults have been vaccinated, including 18-21 year olds going clubbing. So June might be right for that. Maybe it should be brought forwards, but its a bit early to answer that definitively yet.
The one I think is ridiculous is reopening indoor hospitality in May. That should be done with the outdoor hospitality in April.
There is a world of difference in reopening a restaurant, and reopening a nightclub.
Yes. Whitty says the ratio of cases to deaths will be hugely different on account of the vaccinations. But he also says that it will occur in those unvaccinated. Hence the surge.
The building blocks are in place for the govt to "follow the science" by saying we can't afford a surge.
And your ridiculous might be, say, @FrancisUrquhart or @Andy_Cooke's too early (you'll of course have to ask them - @Andy is online now I think). Given the past year there will always be people who are happy to sit out and wait longer. Plenty of them on PB.
And pour scorn on those who say there are elements in the governing regime who either do not want lockdown to end or do not want the abhorrent threat of its brutal sanction to end.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
We have Whitty soundbiting* extra surges later in the year some time. The govt has been following the science and is bound by data, not dates. I mean I've no idea if they would or they wouldn't, but everything is in place for the data and the science to dictate that June is too early.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
*apols for verbing "soundbite".
Its worth listening to what Whitty says in full. He's saying there will be extra surges later but that they will need to be lived with and the vaccine will prevent deaths.
To clarify I'm not saying the June one is too late. The June one includes reopening nightclubs etc and that should be done perhaps three weeks after all adults have been vaccinated, including 18-21 year olds going clubbing. So June might be right for that. Maybe it should be brought forwards, but its a bit early to answer that definitively yet.
The one I think is ridiculous is reopening indoor hospitality in May. That should be done with the outdoor hospitality in April.
There is a world of difference in reopening a restaurant, and reopening a nightclub.
Yes. Whitty says the ratio of cases to deaths will be hugely different on account of the vaccinations. But he also says that it will occur in those unvaccinated. Hence the surge.
The building blocks are in place for the govt to "follow the science" by saying we can't afford a surge.
And your ridiculous might be, say, @FrancisUrquhart or @Andy_Cooke's too early (you'll of course have to ask them - @Andy is online now I think). Given the past year there will always be people who are happy to sit out and wait longer. Plenty of them on PB.
I think the current timeline is either pretty close to right, or even may have the potential to be brought earlier - depending on how cases and hospitalisations go. The acid test on that will be the next three weeks. If R craters even with schools back (which isn't impossible), we could be very much on the sunny side of what's possible. Let's see.
Indeed, if 1000 false positive school kids have to stay home until they get a series of negative results so that everyone else can go to school, is that not worth the price? Even if you multiply that by 5 (the time to get a set of negatives), 5000 at home to let the rest of us go on seems fairly simple maths.
I didn't bother reading the article after seeing the headline, but wonder if they went on to consider the number of true positives who would stay at home and not pass on the infection. Which is after all the point of the whole exercise.
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
We have Whitty soundbiting* extra surges later in the year some time. The govt has been following the science and is bound by data, not dates. I mean I've no idea if they would or they wouldn't, but everything is in place for the data and the science to dictate that June is too early.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
*apols for verbing "soundbite".
Its worth listening to what Whitty says in full. He's saying there will be extra surges later but that they will need to be lived with and the vaccine will prevent deaths.
To clarify I'm not saying the June one is too late. The June one includes reopening nightclubs etc and that should be done perhaps three weeks after all adults have been vaccinated, including 18-21 year olds going clubbing. So June might be right for that. Maybe it should be brought forwards, but its a bit early to answer that definitively yet.
The one I think is ridiculous is reopening indoor hospitality in May. That should be done with the outdoor hospitality in April.
There is a world of difference in reopening a restaurant, and reopening a nightclub.
Yes. Whitty says the ratio of cases to deaths will be hugely different on account of the vaccinations. But he also says that it will occur in those unvaccinated. Hence the surge.
The building blocks are in place for the govt to "follow the science" by saying we can't afford a surge.
And your ridiculous might be, say, @FrancisUrquhart or @Andy_Cooke's too early (you'll of course have to ask them - @Andy is online now I think). Given the past year there will always be people who are happy to sit out and wait longer. Plenty of them on PB.
I think the current timeline is either pretty close to right, or even may have the potential to be brought earlier - depending on how cases and hospitalisations go. The acid test on that will be the next three weeks. If R craters even with schools back (which isn't impossible), we could be very much on the sunny side of what's possible. Let's see.
In addition - it's rather important to note that Whitty is saying that this may happen and we shouldn't overreact; we can't get zero covid, we're going to have to live with it.
It was impossible to predict exactly how many would die, Prof Whitty said.
He said it would be a "significant number", though nothing like we had seen over the past year.
"The ratio of cases to deaths will go right down as a result of vaccination - but not right down to zero unfortunately," he said.
But he pointed out this was already the case for flu, saying in a bad winter 20,000 people could die.
And while Covid was expected to become seasonal, with future surges in the autumn and winter, he could not rule out a rise in cases in the summer.
So I'm not sure why the lockdown sceptics are pouring scorn on.
Another very poor day of vaccination numbers. This bumper March thing hasn't got off to a very good start.
It is at least ahead of last week. The arrival of the bumper March seems to keep being delayed.
I think we need to threaten to sue AZN and Pfizer, perhaps a raid or two on their production facilities, and failing that accuse the EU of starting a war.....that should speed things up.
Johnson’s decision [not to lock down] flew in the face of all the advice over the summer from the World Bank, the cross-party group of politicians and leading international public health experts. Some of his advisers were incandescent. “I don’t have sympathy for the government making the same mistake twice,” said a senior source on the Sage committee. “We told them quite clearly what they need to do for it to work. They don’t do that . . . It’s been wishful thinking all the way through. I think that probably characterises Boris Johnson, frankly.” "
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus. The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time. (The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics. And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists. [2/2]
Sorry if I missed it in your posts, but on what date were HMG still giving Tegnell, Gupta and Heneghan a hearing?
Mid-September. It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned. Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
Kent Covid (or equivalent thereof) says hi...
Tier 4 was holding until it got going. Lockdown was inevitable once it did.
We could certainly have had fewer deaths in January but I don't think you can say that the kids would have been in school throughout.
Indeed, cases were heading down before LD2 was introduced. LD2 made no sense, apart from in the context of Kent Covid. It was massively unfortunate for the UK that one of the more transmissable variants emerged within its borders.
Interesting thread. Thanks. He is very in favour of the vaccine plans. On the other hand a vaccine specialist I saw speaking on a video the other day seemed to be saying we were making a massive mistake as what he called "prophylactic vaccine" should not be used in the middle of a pandemic. It was a bit technical for me, but seemed to be along the lines that the virus will be under intense pressure and so mutate and our innate general purpose immune defences will be lot less useful against mutation as the defences 'created' by the vaccine would kind of override them (or get there first) and these would be evaded.
Frankly, sometimes experts in very narrow fields can talk total nonsense, simply because it makes sense in their narrow view, but not in the big picture*.
So, we are to let tens of millions needlessly die by not vaccinating, to protect against the possibility of the virus adapting to the vaccine.
In any case, I think he is wrong. As the evolutionary virologists are showing, there is only so much evolutionary room for the virus in relation to its epitopes - the parts of the spike protein that binds to the ACE2 receptor - before that evolution makes the virus unable to infect.
* Edit. He is right to the extent that in an ideal world, you'd have the vaccine before the pandemic, and have the world's population vaccinated before the virus was widespread, and that would reduce the virus' ability to achieve vaccine escape as there would simply be fewer virions around to mutate. But that is simply not where we are and his arguments are 'surprising' given that the vaccine can save millions of people.
I agree that he's likely talking nonsense - and he also ignores the manner in which the immune system develops a diversity of T-Cell response after challenge with a particular antigen.
There's a good paper here which deals with the similar argument over delayed second dose strategies, and addresses some of the issues raise over immune escape through viral evolution.
I wholeheartedly agree with this piece of the conclusion, particularly the bit I've bolded: ...The pandemic forces difficult choices under scientific uncertainty. There is a risk that appeals to improve the scientific basis of decision-making will inadvertently equate the absence of precise information about a particular scenario with complete ignorance, and thereby dismiss decades of accumulated and relevant scientific knowledge. Concerns about vaccine-induced evolution are often associated with worry about departing from the precise dosing intervals used in clinical trials. Although other intervals were investigated in earlier immunogenicity studies, for mRNA vaccines, these intervals were partly chosen for speed and have not been completely optimized. They are not the only information on immune responses. Indeed, arguments that vaccine efficacy below 95% would be unacceptable under dose sparing of mRNA vaccines imply that campaigns with the other vaccines estimated to have a lower efficacy pose similar problems. Yet few would advocate these vaccines should be withheld in the thick of a pandemic, or rollouts slowed to increase the number of doses that can be given to a smaller group of people. We urge careful consideration of scientific evidence to minimize lives lost...
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
We have Whitty soundbiting* extra surges later in the year some time. The govt has been following the science and is bound by data, not dates. I mean I've no idea if they would or they wouldn't, but everything is in place for the data and the science to dictate that June is too early.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
*apols for verbing "soundbite".
Its worth listening to what Whitty says in full. He's saying there will be extra surges later but that they will need to be lived with and the vaccine will prevent deaths.
To clarify I'm not saying the June one is too late. The June one includes reopening nightclubs etc and that should be done perhaps three weeks after all adults have been vaccinated, including 18-21 year olds going clubbing. So June might be right for that. Maybe it should be brought forwards, but its a bit early to answer that definitively yet.
The one I think is ridiculous is reopening indoor hospitality in May. That should be done with the outdoor hospitality in April.
There is a world of difference in reopening a restaurant, and reopening a nightclub.
Yes. Whitty says the ratio of cases to deaths will be hugely different on account of the vaccinations. But he also says that it will occur in those unvaccinated. Hence the surge.
The building blocks are in place for the govt to "follow the science" by saying we can't afford a surge.
And your ridiculous might be, say, @FrancisUrquhart or @Andy_Cooke's too early (you'll of course have to ask them - @Andy is online now I think). Given the past year there will always be people who are happy to sit out and wait longer. Plenty of them on PB.
I think the current timeline is either pretty close to right, or even may have the potential to be brought earlier - depending on how cases and hospitalisations go. The acid test on that will be the next three weeks. If R craters even with schools back (which isn't impossible), we could be very much on the sunny side of what's possible. Let's see.
In addition - it's rather important to note that Whitty is saying that this may happen and we shouldn't overreact; we can't get zero covid, we're going to have to live with it.
It was impossible to predict exactly how many would die, Prof Whitty said.
He said it would be a "significant number", though nothing like we had seen over the past year.
"The ratio of cases to deaths will go right down as a result of vaccination - but not right down to zero unfortunately," he said.
But he pointed out this was already the case for flu, saying in a bad winter 20,000 people could die.
And while Covid was expected to become seasonal, with future surges in the autumn and winter, he could not rule out a rise in cases in the summer.
So I'm not sure why the lockdown sceptics are pouring scorn on.
They are just shooting the messenger, in this case the messenger explaining why restrictions can't be lifted sooner.
This is lucky is it not........... Records of meetings between Nicola Sturgeon, permanent secretary Leslie Evans and the Scottish Government’s legal counsel about the investigation into Alex Salmond cannot be found, John Swinney has confirmed. https://bit.ly/2N6wz20
This is lucky is it not........... Records of meetings between Nicola Sturgeon, permanent secretary Leslie Evans and the Scottish Government’s legal counsel about the investigation into Alex Salmond cannot be found, John Swinney has confirmed. https://bit.ly/2N6wz20
If Labour do poorly in the locals surely a leadership challenge could be expected from the left of the party. After all Corbyn faced one after less than a year of his leadership reign. Could the left muster 20% of Lab MPs? possibly just about. Could they win the membership vote? - Harder to say, but with Starmer having been a big disapointment so far who is to say the centrist membership along with those on the left who hoped they backed a future election winner in 2020 would support him again?
In this scenario, those MPs critical of Starmer with a bit of punch, those who hate the Tories and have a fair bit of popular support amongst Momentum could oust him in the right conditions.
Clive Lewis at 33/1 and John Mcdonnell at 100/1 seem like petty good outside shouts of becoming next leader IMO and repesent far better odds than the likes of Khan and Burnham with no obvious route into parliament.
It may do but I doubt it would get any further than Tony Benn's challenge to Kinnock in the 1980s.
Regardless Starmer will almost certainly gain seats in the county elections anyway given how poorly Corbyn did in them in 2017
You have 2016 and 2017 seats coming up in May. In 2016 the vote was Labour 31%, Cons 30%, LibDems 15%. Labour look to get hammered on 2016 seats if YouGov is close.
Even on 2017, that YouGov gives a 1% swing Lab to Cons. Anyone expecting the locals to come to Starmer's aid needs to do some digging into the numbers.
In 2016 Labour got just 31%, in 2017 Labour got just 27%.
Every poll, even Yougov has Labour polling higher than that.
So Labour will still make gains from the LDs even on the 2016 numbers as well as the 2017 numbers, even if Labour only make gains from the Tories on the 2017 numbers in the county elections
As I said, on YouGov, Labour are LOSING seats to the Tories on 2017 numbers. It is a 1% swing from Labour to the Conservatives.
Now, YouGov is probably overly favourable tot he Tories. But set against that, you have weeks of voters being given the vaccine, shops reopening, meeting up with friends and family in small groups. If there is such a thing as post-Covid feelgood, it is likely to be kicking in about when we go to vote.
Yougov is likely an outlier as the thread suggests, the latest Opinium for example has Labour on 36%.
Starmer is also more likely to get tactical votes from LD voters to beat the Tories in Labour v Tory marginal wards than Corbyn was.
In any case Labour will also still pick up seats from the LDs on 2016 and 2017, as will the Tories on the current polling.
The LDs got 18% in 2017 and 15% in 2016
It is fair to say hat the LDs invariably boost their vote share at Local Elections relative to the national polls and a GE.
This is lucky is it not........... Records of meetings between Nicola Sturgeon, permanent secretary Leslie Evans and the Scottish Government’s legal counsel about the investigation into Alex Salmond cannot be found, John Swinney has confirmed. https://bit.ly/2N6wz20
It's not going very well for Starmer, some of them taking Markle's side in the Palace wars won't help either.
The Corbynites must be very restless. At least their man had a narrative?
He did. Do you think Starmer would lose by more than 80? Even I would hardly expect that.
Depends. I don't think there's any enthusiasm among Labour circles for an election any time soon. An unmotivated opposition is not likely to be successful. Of course plenty can change in a few years...
Why is Whitty not challenged with evidence from America that the link between covid and lockdown is not what he and the rest of the SAGE committee manifestly assume it is? ie a thermostatic central heating link?
Or on the models. Why did they get Sweden so utterly wrong if the model is an accurate reflection of real life?
The models are (if correctly specified) an accurate (within predictable uncertainty) reflection of what happens if the assumptions underlying the model are true.
The models from early on set out predictions on what would happen if various actions were taken/not taken. They assumed, largely, that in the absence of legal restrictions, people would behave as normal. Sweden diverged from the models because although few restrictions were put in early on the government did ask people to reduce doing certain things and the Swedes, being Swedes, did so (the model may still have been wrong in many ways, but results in Sweden being less bad than a modelled scenario of life as usual is not evidence for the model being wrong when life and actions were far from usual.
Early on, that's more or less what you can do - model what happens if you mostly stop certain activities and what happens in you carry on. You could of course model assuming that you ban nothing, but levels of x decrease by 40% anyway due to people taking precautions, but there's no real evidence base to get that 40%.
What we've seen so far will probably help to fine tune "worst case" models in future as we'll have a better idea of how bad things can get before people self-impose restrictions and avert the naive worst case.
@rcs1000 is always saying, when discussing formal lockdowns, that, and I paraphrase: "the people will do it anyway". And he says it to prove that one way or another there will be lockdown, whether legislatively or voluntarily.
But this is to miss the point. Given the huge restriction of our freedoms imposed upon us by the government, I would be much happier with a voluntary one. Would it work? Not sure. That is the crux of the govt action. They don't trust us. Not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, just that they don't trust us to do the "right" thing.
"Many states are fully open because well it's the States and freedom trumps everything else."
I don't know if he realised the irony of his post because it could be read as disparaging - but that's the thing - freedom trumps if not everything then a hell of a lot.
The difference between an official lock down and an unofficial one is that the government can be reasonably expected make some effort to compensate businesses and workers affected by the former while in the latter case many more will just go bust.
That is very true. Plus being bloody-minded Brits we are as likely as not to ignore it.
But there is something that sits very uneasily with legislative restrictions on behaviour.
I'm not happy with the government legislating over who can enter my private home. But this is an abstract unhappiness, since I'm not inclined to let anyone in anyway due to the pandemic.
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
I think *deep breath* that Steve Baker has spoken a lot of sense about this. He has, in essence, been saying vaccinate the vulnerable and then ease the restrictions - not been following closely enough to determine to what extent/details, etc but that seems about right.
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
Unless something goes catastrophically wrong it is going to be virtually impossible for the Government to resile from its latest roadmap.
What do you base that assumption on? The government could easily get away with an extension. Huge numbers of people, including voices such as yourself, are foursquare behind their strategy. The logic of that strategy facilitates an extension.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
Not a chance could they extend without any data to justify it.
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
We have Whitty soundbiting* extra surges later in the year some time. The govt has been following the science and is bound by data, not dates. I mean I've no idea if they would or they wouldn't, but everything is in place for the data and the science to dictate that June is too early.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
*apols for verbing "soundbite".
Its worth listening to what Whitty says in full. He's saying there will be extra surges later but that they will need to be lived with and the vaccine will prevent deaths.
To clarify I'm not saying the June one is too late. The June one includes reopening nightclubs etc and that should be done perhaps three weeks after all adults have been vaccinated, including 18-21 year olds going clubbing. So June might be right for that. Maybe it should be brought forwards, but its a bit early to answer that definitively yet.
The one I think is ridiculous is reopening indoor hospitality in May. That should be done with the outdoor hospitality in April.
There is a world of difference in reopening a restaurant, and reopening a nightclub.
Yes. Whitty says the ratio of cases to deaths will be hugely different on account of the vaccinations. But he also says that it will occur in those unvaccinated. Hence the surge.
The building blocks are in place for the govt to "follow the science" by saying we can't afford a surge.
And your ridiculous might be, say, @FrancisUrquhart or @Andy_Cooke's too early (you'll of course have to ask them - @Andy is online now I think). Given the past year there will always be people who are happy to sit out and wait longer. Plenty of them on PB.
I think the current timeline is either pretty close to right, or even may have the potential to be brought earlier - depending on how cases and hospitalisations go. The acid test on that will be the next three weeks. If R craters even with schools back (which isn't impossible), we could be very much on the sunny side of what's possible. Let's see.
In addition - it's rather important to note that Whitty is saying that this may happen and we shouldn't overreact; we can't get zero covid, we're going to have to live with it.
It was impossible to predict exactly how many would die, Prof Whitty said.
He said it would be a "significant number", though nothing like we had seen over the past year.
"The ratio of cases to deaths will go right down as a result of vaccination - but not right down to zero unfortunately," he said.
But he pointed out this was already the case for flu, saying in a bad winter 20,000 people could die.
And while Covid was expected to become seasonal, with future surges in the autumn and winter, he could not rule out a rise in cases in the summer.
So I'm not sure why the lockdown sceptics are pouring scorn on.
They are just shooting the messenger, in this case the messenger explaining why restrictions can't be lifted sooner.
--AS
I'm a lockdown sceptic, and I didn't really find much to complain about in what Chris Whitty said. It was pretty factual - 'the modelling shows another surge' etc. Now we might disbelieve the modelling, but he wouldn't be doing his job if he didn't report what it was saying.
And I wouldn't expect deaths to go down to zero. The point is to see deaths in the right context.
This is lucky is it not........... Records of meetings between Nicola Sturgeon, permanent secretary Leslie Evans and the Scottish Government’s legal counsel about the investigation into Alex Salmond cannot be found, John Swinney has confirmed. https://bit.ly/2N6wz20
Job application question: do people think it's better to "tone down" experience when applying for "entry level" positions?
No. Play it up for all you can.
The problem with recruiting entry level positions is that you are to a large extent gambling that theoretical ability will eventually translate into actual performance. I find any evidence that a candidate has already proven themselves to be incredibly reassuring.
The worry is being overlooked due to fear of a desire to "move on" too quickly.
That’s always my concern. But aren’t you a career changer?
Would it be useful to say that you have recently bought a house to stay in the area?
I’m not a lawyer so don’t know the career path. But my assumption is that anyone with a law degree working as a paralegal is a temporary hire because they want to progress
Oh dear, I see Piers Moron, so popular with the twitterati over the past year, not so popular now. Now calling for his sacking, and an online petition of course.
This is lucky is it not........... Records of meetings between Nicola Sturgeon, permanent secretary Leslie Evans and the Scottish Government’s legal counsel about the investigation into Alex Salmond cannot be found, John Swinney has confirmed. https://bit.ly/2N6wz20
Oh dear, I see Piers Moron, so popular with the twitterati over the past year, not so popular now. Now calling for his sacking, and an online petition of course.
This polling is contrary to the comments of many on this forum and it seems the more Boris is attacked the more popular he becomes.
Mind you, Starmer is not helping himself with some of the positions he is taking but the 50% preferring Boris is a higher figure than many expected
You always say this but it simply isn't true. Very few people on here have said anything other than that they have expected a Boris vaccine bounce.
That doesn't mean he cant be criticised. Just because someone may be popular it doesn't mean they are perfect.
When have I said Boris is perfect and cannot be criticised
Indeed, I would prefer Rishi in place now but you cannot hide the fact that labour and Starmer are going backwards
But nobody is saying that Labour and Starmer are doing anything other than going backwards.
Yet you make out like everyone here is constantly ramping the opposite - "This polling is contrary to the comments of many on this forum" – no it isn't.
This is lucky is it not........... Records of meetings between Nicola Sturgeon, permanent secretary Leslie Evans and the Scottish Government’s legal counsel about the investigation into Alex Salmond cannot be found, John Swinney has confirmed. https://bit.ly/2N6wz20
Oh dear, I see Piers Moron, so popular with the twitterati over the past year, not so popular now. Now calling for his sacking, and an online petition of course.
Comments
https://twitter.com/smicht/status/1369292193635180546?s=21
The British ratings were very impressive though.
Id say the laws we are enforcing are about right, but the laws we are not enforcing should be guidance and/or peoples own judgment calls.
https://twitter.com/number10cat/status/1369212413808099329?s=21
The Queen is Queen of the UK not the USA
Clearly this is a supply issue, which we were warned about and which we were told would be fixed in mid-March
I think there has been decades of governments creating new crimes to an excessive degree, so perhaps it should not be surprising that their response to a pandemic is to reach for the law, rather than to use the power of persuasion and leadership to encourage people to follow advice.
It's very unfortunate that every public figure I am aware of who has argued against the government legislating on access to my home has done so by talking complete and dangerous cobblers about the virus.
So, we are to let tens of millions needlessly die by not vaccinating, to protect against the possibility of the virus adapting to the vaccine.
In any case, I think he is wrong. As the evolutionary virologists are showing, there is only so much evolutionary room for the virus in relation to its epitopes - the parts of the spike protein that binds to the ACE2 receptor - before that evolution makes the virus unable to infect.
* Edit. He is right to the extent that in an ideal world, you'd have the vaccine before the pandemic, and have the world's population vaccinated before the virus was widespread, and that would reduce the virus' ability to achieve vaccine escape as there would simply be fewer virions around to mutate. But that is simply not where we are and his arguments are 'surprising' given that the vaccine can save millions of people.
"Nicholas Davies, an assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who sits on the government’s Spi-M modelling committee, said his colleagues were not consulted about the new rule, or indeed about Eat Out to Help Out. “They seemed to be making decisions and it wasn’t really clear what the rationale for them was,” he said."
...
"On September 16, Whitty and Vallance urged the prime minister — who had firmly ruled out a second lockdown that afternoon — to impose a two-week circuit breaker lockdown to bring R under control. Hospital admissions for the virus had increased by 100 per cent since the beginning of the month. Without a drastic intervention, they argued, the country was now on track for 200 to 500 deaths a day by early November.
The grim reality of the situation began to dawn on the prime minister. “That was the moment when he knew we needed to do something,” one aide told The Sunday Times."
...
"The proposal for the two-week lockdown went before the Cabinet Office’s Covid-19 operation committee that day. Hancock and Gove were said to be in favour of the tougher measures, but one key member was not onside. Sunak later met with Johnson to express deep concern about the damage a lockdown would do to business and jobs. Rumours circulated afterwards that Sunak had threatened to resign if there was a lockdown, but this has been denied."
...
"Three of the four academics who had been invited to speak were advocates of letting the virus run its course with the use of lighter restrictions. One was Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s top epidemiologist, viewed across the world as the poster boy for herd immunity. His presence said much about the way the prime minister and his chancellor were thinking, and it opened them up to accusations that they were re-engaging with the “herd immunity” strategy which had proved unpopular back in March."
...
[1/2]
@GlennBBC
·
Hearing harassment complaints committee is looking to use Holyrood’s section 23 power to secure release of documents from @AlexSalmond
lawyers - material he said they’d be happy to handover
...
"Vallance gave an example of what might happen if the current levels of infections were allowed to carry on doubling every week — as they appeared to be doing. This, he said, would lead to around 200-plus deaths per day by the middle of November. It was a shocking prediction that drew scathing criticism — one newspaper quoted an unnamed Tory MP describing them as Messrs “Witless and Unbalanced” for exaggerating the figures. In fact, Vallance had hugely downplayed the predicted November death figures, which would be nearer the 500 daily fatalities upper estimate he had given Johnson a few days earlier. "
...
"On October 30, the operation committee met again in Downing Street. Johnson, Sunak, Gove and Hancock were all present to listen to a presentation from Sir Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, who delivered an unequivocal message: hospitals would be overrun in every part of England within weeks if nothing was done.
The prime minister had no choice. He had to finally give in — despite everything he and his chancellor had said about their determination to avoid locking down. A decision was taken to announce a lockdown after the weekend. But fearing that Johnson might wobble again, someone in the prime minister’s close circle leaked the news to the The Times. The prime minister was forced to call a press conference the next day."
------------
Jesus.
The thing is, we all saw this coming at the time.
(The other two academics at that meeting other than Tegnell were Gupta and Heneghan. Such a surprise.)
It's only looking back that we can recall just how forecasts of 200 deaths a day were so thoroughly mocked by the lockdown sceptics. We went above that on the 21st of October and we are JUST about to drop below a 200-a-day seven day average now for the first time since then. We were past 350 a day on the 1st of November and past 400 a day by the end of the first week in November.
Thanks a bunch, Heneghan, Tegnell, Gupta, Sunak, and the Lockdown Sceptics.
And by paying the price of those thousands upon thousands of bereaved families... they ended up fucking up the economy with an even longer and deeper lockdown, anyway. Thanks to the moronic denialists.
[2/2]
But also, when faced with the government's behaviour, it is imo right and proper that we should also have polemicists even such as Toby and JHB (and of course our very own contrarian). When it comes to freedom it is all hands on deck.
So they are saying it will be 4.8m a week or so... 700k a day average.... which is not far off a "year" of the population per day.
When the leading "lockdown skeptics" are people who can't get any basic facts right they undermine what they're saying. Quite frankly lockdown skepticism would be better served if the likes of Toby, JHB etc shut up and we paid more attention to the others speaking.
We should be completed vaccinating the over 50s and doing 40-somethings before the end of March. Add 3 weeks for middle of April and there's no excuse not to open indoors by then.
The problem is they're less strident in their skepticism, since they approach it from a perspective of realism, sanity and philosophy rather than sticking your head in the sand and denying there's an issue, so they get ignored for the siren voices of the lunatics.
If the lunatics weren't there, then the sane skeptics would be the "balance" the media uses instead.
Holding the government to account involves you relying on those people you and many on here have heaped scorn on for a year.
But that pressure is to select out those strains that reproduce the most effectively, which is a complex mix of factors, including:
- binding more efficiently with host cells
- being ejected more efficiently from hosts after replication (causing upper respiratory tract infections that lead to sneezing, coughing)
- causing longer infections so extending the period during which a host is infectious
- survivability in the environment between hosts
- low infectious dose so that aerosols infect
- evading the host's immune defenses at every level so that the virus can infect, replicate and be released for onward transmission
- effectively hijacking the infected cell's production machinery to increase the number of copies made.
Note that causing severe disease or host death is not one of those selective pressures
“ Virus will surge at some point - either in the summer after the gradual easing of lockdown - or as a result of the seasonal effect, in autumn and winter.”
How’s that happen then?
The only question is if they resist bringing the end to lockdown forward as I think they should and they're currently resisting. There's no chance at all of it going back. There's no call for it, no evidence for it, no demand for it.
It was thanks to them that the "circuit breaker" lockdown for early October got canned.
Leading to the full-on second wave, letting it get out of control, and needing drastic measures to bring it back under control.
They and the Lockdown Sceptics pressure (via the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs) against any restrictions (so it always got worse and needed more and more restrictions) are why we've had such a hell of a winter, and why we've been in lockdown so long.
In an alternate timeline, where they weren't listened to, we locked down in October, saw off the rise, went with tougher Tiers, and kept it all under control without kids missing one day of school or the need for any full-on lockdown.
This is the Sunak/Gupta/Heneghan lockdown - needed thanks to their idiocy.
We will just have to live with it, as he said and explained.
Wales tried the circuit break, it was a miserable failure.
Other nations around the globe have tried circuit breaks. Not one of them has succeeded.
So other than that, good point, well done.
(1) globally lockdown until the virus stops transmitting. Not possible given that it would have to involve all jurisdictions to be effective.
(2) let it run riot until the population gets herd immunity that way. Not ethical.
(3) vaccinate our way out of trouble.
The UK is locally combining 1 and 3 (although I suspect there is a temptation to let it run through the very young population even now - meaning there is an element of 2 in there). It is incredibly unlikely that the vaccines stop being effective at all. The best layman's explainer that I can find is here -
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/02/vaccines-should-end-the-pandemic-despite-the-variants-say-experts/
That article from Harvard appears to chime with what the postdoc whose thread I post above is saying. Over time, as we get more and more exposed to the virus, mutations are likely to begin to evade antibody immunity, but the T-Cells contain better memories of the infection. That's what has happened to the currently existing coronaviruses - indeed survivors of SARS were found to have T-Cell reactions 17 years later. Mutations might happen, and they might mean we are all f**ked, but it appears very unlikely that a mutation so extreme will happen that renders the virus completely unrecognisable to the immune system. Coronaviruses are more stable than, say, influenza viruses.
Fucking hell.
As I said, my $0.02 is that it is unlikely, but given the free ride the govt has had to date it's not beyond the realms of the possible.
Take the current planned end to lockdown. June. Too late, say you. Just right, say many others. Same if it was September. Too late you would say. Just right, we're following the data/science would say millions of others.
*apols for verbing "soundbite".
To clarify I'm not saying the June one is too late. The June one includes reopening nightclubs etc and that should be done perhaps three weeks after all adults have been vaccinated, including 18-21 year olds going clubbing. So June might be right for that. Maybe it should be brought forwards, but its a bit early to answer that definitively yet.
The one I think is ridiculous is reopening indoor hospitality in May. That should be done with the outdoor hospitality in April.
There is a world of difference in reopening a restaurant, and reopening a nightclub.
--AS
The building blocks are in place for the govt to "follow the science" by saying we can't afford a surge.
And your ridiculous might be, say, @FrancisUrquhart or @Andy_Cooke's too early (you'll of course have to ask them - @Andy is online now I think). Given the past year there will always be people who are happy to sit out and wait longer. Plenty of them on PB.
The four week circuit break in November brought it down.
The nine weeks since early January has worked as well.
Call it what you like; we're talking about applying lockdown rules for a given period to bring down infection rates. And every time we've done this, infection rates have dropped.
Tier 4 was holding until it got going. Lockdown was inevitable once it did.
We could certainly have had fewer deaths in January but I don't think you can say that the kids would have been in school throughout.
There will be no accountability.
The second you lift the "circuit break" cases instantly start rising again. And if its only 2 weeks that achieves squat since people party "last night of freedom" before the 2 weeks, then party "wahay free again" afterwards counteracting the whole point of just 2 weeks which isn't long enough to do much.
So you can't point to today's lockdown and act as if it would have all been avoidable had we just wished it away with a 2 week circuit break. 2 weeks doesn't work.
If you want a lockdown, fair enough, but then don't complain about having a lockdown. The idea a lockdown could be avoided if we'd just done one for 2 weeks then got back to normal is farcical wishful thinking.
If the 4 weeks in November worked then you can't blame today's lockdown on not having a 2 week one in October.
I have the utmost sympathy for the government. There are no easy options when considering the other harms of lockdown. But in this case, with vaccines coming shortly, we should have stayed in a much tighter lockdown through December.
Ah - hindsight, my old friend. (I know some of you will say it was obvious at the time, but I think the Kent variant has played a huge role in the UK, and is now exerting its baleful effects on Europe).
Surely the wall-to-wall coverage of his wall-to-wall coverage was meant to have finished him off by now?!
(Also, more worryingly, is turnout going to be even worse than usual, and mostly the vaccinated elderly?)
The acid test on that will be the next three weeks. If R craters even with schools back (which isn't impossible), we could be very much on the sunny side of what's possible.
Let's see.
This polling is contrary to the comments of many on this forum and it seems the more Boris is attacked the more popular he becomes.
Mind you, Starmer is not helping himself with some of the positions he is taking but the 50% preferring Boris is a higher figure than many expected
Which is after all the point of the whole exercise.
There's a good paper here which deals with the similar argument over delayed second dose strategies, and addresses some of the issues raise over immune escape through viral evolution.
Concerns about SARS-CoV-2 evolution should not hold back efforts to expand vaccination
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/37366988/Dose_sparing_evolution.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
I wholeheartedly agree with this piece of the conclusion, particularly the bit I've bolded:
...The pandemic forces difficult choices under scientific uncertainty. There is a risk that appeals to improve the scientific basis of decision-making will inadvertently equate the absence of precise information about a particular scenario with complete ignorance, and thereby dismiss decades of accumulated and relevant scientific knowledge. Concerns about vaccine-induced evolution are often associated with worry about departing from the precise dosing intervals used in clinical trials. Although other intervals were investigated in earlier immunogenicity studies, for mRNA vaccines, these intervals were partly chosen for speed and have not been completely optimized. They are not the only information on immune responses. Indeed, arguments that vaccine efficacy below 95% would be unacceptable under dose sparing of mRNA vaccines imply that campaigns with the other vaccines estimated to have a lower efficacy pose similar problems. Yet few would advocate these vaccines should be withheld in the thick of a pandemic, or rollouts slowed to increase the number of doses that can be given to a smaller group of people. We urge careful consideration of scientific evidence to minimize lives lost...
They are just shooting the messenger, in this case the messenger explaining why restrictions can't be lifted sooner.
--AS
That doesn't mean he cant be criticised. Just because someone may be popular it doesn't mean they are perfect.
Records of meetings between Nicola Sturgeon, permanent secretary Leslie Evans and the Scottish Government’s legal counsel about the investigation into Alex Salmond cannot be found, John Swinney has confirmed. https://bit.ly/2N6wz20
It appears that Austria will blow up the EU-Mercosaur Trade Deal.
https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1369215177120509955
--AS
I'm a lockdown sceptic, and I didn't really find much to complain about in what Chris Whitty said. It was pretty factual - 'the modelling shows another surge' etc. Now we might disbelieve the modelling, but he wouldn't be doing his job if he didn't report what it was saying.
And I wouldn't expect deaths to go down to zero. The point is to see deaths in the right context.
Why? Because for some people there is no lower limit to the ok number of Covid deaths.
You'd have to be a particular kind of naive not to include it in your list of scenarios.
Indeed, I would prefer Rishi in place now but you cannot hide the fact that labour and Starmer are going backwards
Cases still down on last week...
Yet you make out like everyone here is constantly ramping the opposite - "This polling is contrary to the comments of many on this forum" – no it isn't.