My 29 year old colleague got a jab of AZ at the weekend. She has been volunteering in a vaccination centre in Manchester and was able to get a left over dose at the end of the day.
She said there had been quite a few no-shows. Hopefully not linked to the blood clot bollocks.
More likely just people forgetting/life getting in the way I expect. ~ 30% of people never vote - I expect the number doing that out of principle in that group is quite low most just won't be bothered. So first jabs will be going on for some time after all adults have been vaxxed.
We're approaching the point where we really won't care if it's a 29 year old or a 42 year old getting the jab.
Because Dick is saying "You TOLD me I had one over-riding priority: protect the lockdown. So I did."
The correct response is "Yeah - but not like THAT."
Did nobody even consider the optics of having male Met coppers piling in to arrest and cuff women on a vigil - a vigil for a woman kidnapped and murdered by a male Met copper?
They should still let go of Dick.
That Cretin Shaun Bailey is campaigning on Khan's failure with regards to a Commissioner who reports into the Home Secretary. Whilst Dick (and Khan) should resign, they won't. Dick says "I'm doing what you [Patel] told me to. Patel openly thinks more coppers should twat more protesters round the head, and besides which if Dick remains in place unfired by her, the party can campaign against Khan's shameful failure to fire her.
As I understand things the law is very clear that both the Mayor of London and the Home Secretary have no direct control of operational decisions made by the police. There are very strong controls & separation of powers in place, and for good reasons.
Also, (again, as I understand things) legally neither is able to call for the resignation of Cressida Dick - there’s a weird dance of letters between the Mayor & the Home Secretary & the Police that has to happen before either of them is legally able to call for her resignation.
So any criticism of either Khan or Patel over the actions of the MET on Saturday night is simply political opportunism. Neither had the power to control what the police chose to do, so long as it was within their legal powers (and it seems pretty clear that their actions were probably lawful, even if woefully misguided).
They do have Dame Cressida's telephone number though, don't they? It seems fairly clear that a major issue was the fact that the Police refused to have a dialogue with Reclaim These Streets and instead had a court battle then threatened large fines.
But this was a completely unrealistic strategy given emotions were running high, people were going to congregate, and the Police had a goodwill problem, in part because of the circumstances of the case. So they needed to be working with a responsible organising group, offering to provide volunteer marshals and so on, to keep it orderly.
Patel and/or Khan could have had that discussion with Dick. As politicians, they are actually very well placed to judge the public mood and see that the alternative to an organised vigil was not no vigil but a disorganised event. She might have ignored them and said "I'm the professional copper here". But it looks as if they either didn't have concerns over a pretty surprising Police strategy to say the least, or didn't raise them.
On Police strategy while the event was going on, totally agree that Patel and Khan realistically can't contribute. But there was a build up to this over several days, and the danger was fairly clear.
We know that there were at the very least general discussions between the Home Office ministers and Dick prior to the vigil, about the application of the law, from what Kit Malthouse said on R4 this morning.
Because Dick is saying "You TOLD me I had one over-riding priority: protect the lockdown. So I did."
The correct response is "Yeah - but not like THAT."
Did nobody even consider the optics of having male Met coppers piling in to arrest and cuff women on a vigil - a vigil for a woman kidnapped and murdered by a male Met copper?
They should still let go of Dick.
That Cretin Shaun Bailey is campaigning on Khan's failure with regards to a Commissioner who reports into the Home Secretary. Whilst Dick (and Khan) should resign, they won't. Dick says "I'm doing what you [Patel] told me to. Patel openly thinks more coppers should twat more protesters round the head, and besides which if Dick remains in place unfired by her, the party can campaign against Khan's shameful failure to fire her.
Yep the politics of this is shit. Bailey has confirmed what everyone thought about him and done no-one any favours including himself. Kahn seems to have taken a sensible line as does the Government at the moment.
In the end, whilst obviously the politicians set the tone, operational decisions rest with Dick and her subordinates. Someone has to answer for making such a complete and utter fuck up of this - it may not even be Dick. I doubt she personally told the operational commander to go in hard, well not unless she is completely mad I I don't believe she is. Personally I suspect the responsibility for this cluster rightly lies with someone below Dick. The important point now is they should properly be held responsible.
"someone below Dick" = Dick.
And of course Dick = HS.
It would be very poor form if Gold, or even Silver on the day are booted out. They don't operate in a vacuum. Especially now and especially at such an event now.
I would absolutely put my hand up and say I don't know enough about police organisation to disagree with you on that. All I would say is I am surprised that someone as high up in the command chain is making decisions on how individual events ae policed and the actions tat are taken.
But again I am not knowledgeable enough to argue the case.
I think it's the point that @Dura made. Whoever made the decsion at whatever strategic (Gold) or tactical (Silver) level it is Dick and ultimately of course the HS who is responsible.
Cressida Dick was a completely bizarre choice for the Met. Her career should have ended in ignominy after the killing of de Menezes and the appalling lies that were told to justify that. But, having slept on it, I don't think her career will be ended by this. Cops have been wildly inconsistent in enforcing the law around protest and this was stupid, heavy handed and unnecessary. But no one died and the law was enforced. Whatever the "optics" the cops did their job.
If people want the police not to enforce stupid laws they should not allow politicians to pass them.
It looks to me as though the Met have been ruthlessly consistent over the last few months. As you say, the politicians are responsible for the law.
BLM? Extinction Rebellion? I really don't agree.
Before the law change. As was pointed out earlier, those women ought to count themselves grateful for not getting a £10,000 fine. The police have been handing those out like confetti for months.
Who exactly was the organiser? That's your £10,000.
There was no organiser - that is the point.
As the court decision prior to the event made clear, it was entirely within the discretion of the police to allow the vigil to go ahead (indeed the local force reportedly wished to do so). Had that happened, it would have been stewarded, and the dangers of socially distanced and masked people on the wide spaces of Clapham Common would have been minimal - and police conditions agreed with organisers, who were more than prepared to discuss them with the police, might have rendered them even less so.
It ought to have been reasonably clear that some sort of unorganised protest would still happen, and the consequences of subsequent police intervention ought to have been equally foreseeable.
It's important to remember that supporting the idea that protests shouldn't be allowed at the moment is not the same as supporting the manner in which the Police "shut down" the vigil.
Perhaps not, and opinion is just that.
The problem is that the police have to treat everyone and every situation equally in terms of who they are policing. They can't go easy on these young women because the optics would be bad.
The politicians should understand this and their pandering to (un)popular opinion is disgraceful.
Firstly, the treatment of Rangers fans celebrating their win rather suggests situations are NOT being treated equally (different force of course).
Secondly, the whole point of the court decision on Friday is that there isn't a blanket rule. It essentially said that the "lawful excuse" reason to be outside was complex in the case of protest and it's for the police to carry out a proportionality assessment based on all the circumstances.
Different force is a very important point, in my opinion. We'll never know because Arsenal fans are far too middle class to break the law, but we'd have got the treatment from the Met if we'd celebrated our FA Cup win last August.
As for the High Court decision, well, the police have been taking a zero tolerance approach. Now, you might disagree with that, but we cannot have the police allowing some protests on the grounds of the cause. No, just no.
The police make such decisions based on all the evidence. It would be entirely appropriate for them to allow some protests and not others to go ahead, based on sensible risk assessments. That indeed is the basis of the court decision on the issue.
I'm not sure if that is her, but all I see are people arguing not violence.
Unless you are one of those who thinks that words are "literal violence".
Shouting with your face close to someone else, in the time of Covid, comes quite close to that.
They all have masks on and who approached whom? That's not on the video?
If she was there first and the officer has approached her then can't really complain that its close to someone else. The officer could have kept his distance. If she's approached him then that's weird but that doesn't seem to be what anyone has said from any side yet.
Apparently the Dutch have cancelled 43,000 appointments due to the pause on AstraZeneca. Crazy.
That is lost lives, right there
Precautionary Principle Arithmetic The vaccine either causes the thrombolitic events recorded or it does not (put aside for the moment the fact that the rate of them is no higher in the vaccinated)
IF it turned out that the vaccine did cause the thrombolitic events, then the one fatality out of the 10 million people dosed would, in fact, have been caused by the vaccine and the death rate is one in ten million. The above is what they are concerned about and why they are pausing to assess.
The IFR of covid across all populations is very close to 0.7% (one in 140). The rate of infection of those turned away would have to be below one in 70,000 in the period of suspension, otherwise the death rate caused by the suspension would automatically be greater than if no suspension occurred (AND, contrary to all the evidence, it DID end up causing the death).
(Also NB - there was a single death from the same cause in the 10 million Pfizer-jabbed as well)
The suspension can ONLY be justifiable if and only if the daily case rate in the countries in question is below 0.2 per 100,000 people.
Both Netherlands and Ireland have confirmed daily case rates (and they test far less than us, so they are picking up a smaller proportion of actual infections) far far higher than that (10 per 100,000 for Ireland, reflecting a probably 30-80 per 100,000 actual infections; 31 per 100,000 for the Netherlands, reflecting a probably 100-300 per 100,000 actual infections).
Conclusion: the countries in question are causing unnecessary deaths to the tune of 200-1000 times as many people as the precaution could possibly save.
I am completely with you on the absurdity of this but are you not working on the basis that those people never get vaccinated? The risk factor is really that they are not vaccinated for another couple of weeks so you would need to look at the risk that those affected catch the disease and then die within that timescale.
It's something I have been thinking about in other contexts. It seems that the EU are likely to be somewhere between 3 and 6 months slower than us in universal vaccination. How many additional lives will that actually cost? If you take France they are currently losing between 100-300 a day so the extra deaths of a 3 month delay will be somewhere between 10k and 30k. Somewhat less than the extra we lost in January.
Its still a lot of unnecessary deaths and adding to it is madness but in the overall scheme of the pandemic it seems unlikely to be the most decisive factor in how hard the virus hit particular countries.
" If you take France they are currently losing between 100-300 a day so the extra deaths of a 3 month delay will be somewhere between 10k and 30k. Somewhat less than the extra we lost in January."
Would take issue with you use of "extra" we lost in January. There is no suggestion that total was avoidable. Some perhaps. But Covid would have found a way as it has across Europe this winter.
The French numbers WERE avoidable, by vaccinating.
Oh I agree and if Kent really takes off in France the numbers could really take off, just as they did here. The longer your population is vulnerable the greater risks that you run.
I am just pointing out that our speed of vaccine, though commendable, will not stop us from having one of the higher death rates overall. There are a lot of other factors that will determine the butcher's bill.
It will do when you look at the factual butcher's bill as the excess death toll as opposed to the reported death toll.
We're already not one of the higher death rates via excess deaths but are comparable to a number of EU countries on that metric. But our excess deaths have stopped, theirs are continuing. Sadly the butchers bill hasn't been written in full yet.
I reckon everyone on here will have heard of anecdotes where people who were clearly not killed by Covid have had Covid written on the death certificate to avoid an "unnecessary" post-mortem.
It's easy to see that our Covid death figures may be over estimates rather than underestimates and that the only comparison which may provide meaningful comparison figures is excess deaths
Such anecdotes are not believable. They require a doctor to lie on a death certificate - career ending and legal problems on top....
That is not the problem. The problem is that someone dying of cancer who has a +ve covid test within 28 days of death "counts" whether they would have died in that period or not. Unless we eliminate it completely we will never reduce Covid deaths to nil on such a basis, even if they are not actually dying of Covid.
I don't think anyone sane is suggesting that this is some conspiracy by the medical profession, are they?
We can always cross-check the approximate number. A total of 530,841 people died in England and Wales in 2019 out of about 59,440,000 people. That's a rate of about 24.5 per million per day.
In any random 28 day period, we would therefore expect 686 deaths per million of a randomly selected population; in any random 60 day period, we would therefore expect 1,470 deaths per million.
If we were to randomly select those who had positive covid tests by a given date, we would expect around 686 x (number of millions of positive tests) as random deaths within 28 days of that test, and around 1470 x (number of millions of positive tests) as random deaths within 60 days of that test.
(Of course, there will be a considerable volatility about this figure by random selection of population and time, but if the difference is huge (as it is), it's pretty emphatic)
We can get the numbers within 28 days and 60 days from the coronavirus dashboard (and remember to look back 28 days from now for the number of tests to do the 28-day calculation and to look back 60 days for the 60-day calculation).
Anyone who wants to can do the cross-check very easily.
It indicates that the overwhelming percentage of 28-day deaths were indeed deaths from covid (or something that coincidentally happened at exactly the same time as the covid positive test), but that there should be a few thousand non-covid deaths. You can also approximate how many deaths from covid between 28-60 days are missed by that figure (which is larger than the few thousand non-covid deaths in the 28 day figure).
Conclusion is that we are likely undercounting covid deaths by a few thousand, and that countries that show a bigger discrepancy between excess deaths and covid deaths than us are certainly undercounting by a considerably greater amount.
This blood cot thing is an interesting variant of the Trolley Problem.
The runaway trolley is not heading towards anyone, and yet half the countries in the EU have switched the points so that it collides with a few thousand.
I'm not sure if that is her, but all I see are people arguing not violence.
Unless you are one of those who thinks that words are "literal violence".
Shouting with your face close to someone else, in the time of Covid, comes quite close to that.
They all have masks on and who approached whom? That's not on the video?
If she was there first and the officer has approached her then can't really complain that its close to someone else. The officer could have kept his distance. If she's approached him then that's weird but that doesn't seem to be what anyone has said from any side yet.
I'm not making any judgments either way. I'd just note that she's shouting with such abandon that her mask slips continually - and the woman at the end of the clip has no mask at all.
There was also the case pushed hard by the BBC and Guardian about rail worker who died after it was claimed she was spat at / coughed on. Numerous inquiries were held that determined no evidence that the incident like that, but still big pressure from the media to do something.
Apparently the Dutch have cancelled 43,000 appointments due to the pause on AstraZeneca. Crazy.
That is lost lives, right there
Precautionary Principle Arithmetic The vaccine either causes the thrombolitic events recorded or it does not (put aside for the moment the fact that the rate of them is no higher in the vaccinated)
IF it turned out that the vaccine did cause the thrombolitic events, then the one fatality out of the 10 million people dosed would, in fact, have been caused by the vaccine and the death rate is one in ten million. The above is what they are concerned about and why they are pausing to assess.
The IFR of covid across all populations is very close to 0.7% (one in 140). The rate of infection of those turned away would have to be below one in 70,000 in the period of suspension, otherwise the death rate caused by the suspension would automatically be greater than if no suspension occurred (AND, contrary to all the evidence, it DID end up causing the death).
(Also NB - there was a single death from the same cause in the 10 million Pfizer-jabbed as well)
The suspension can ONLY be justifiable if and only if the daily case rate in the countries in question is below 0.2 per 100,000 people.
Both Netherlands and Ireland have confirmed daily case rates (and they test far less than us, so they are picking up a smaller proportion of actual infections) far far higher than that (10 per 100,000 for Ireland, reflecting a probably 30-80 per 100,000 actual infections; 31 per 100,000 for the Netherlands, reflecting a probably 100-300 per 100,000 actual infections).
Conclusion: the countries in question are causing unnecessary deaths to the tune of 200-1000 times as many people as the precaution could possibly save.
I am completely with you on the absurdity of this but are you not working on the basis that those people never get vaccinated? The risk factor is really that they are not vaccinated for another couple of weeks so you would need to look at the risk that those affected catch the disease and then die within that timescale.
It's something I have been thinking about in other contexts. It seems that the EU are likely to be somewhere between 3 and 6 months slower than us in universal vaccination. How many additional lives will that actually cost? If you take France they are currently losing between 100-300 a day so the extra deaths of a 3 month delay will be somewhere between 10k and 30k. Somewhat less than the extra we lost in January.
Its still a lot of unnecessary deaths and adding to it is madness but in the overall scheme of the pandemic it seems unlikely to be the most decisive factor in how hard the virus hit particular countries.
" If you take France they are currently losing between 100-300 a day so the extra deaths of a 3 month delay will be somewhere between 10k and 30k. Somewhat less than the extra we lost in January."
Would take issue with you use of "extra" we lost in January. There is no suggestion that total was avoidable. Some perhaps. But Covid would have found a way as it has across Europe this winter.
The French numbers WERE avoidable, by vaccinating.
Oh I agree and if Kent really takes off in France the numbers could really take off, just as they did here. The longer your population is vulnerable the greater risks that you run.
I am just pointing out that our speed of vaccine, though commendable, will not stop us from having one of the higher death rates overall. There are a lot of other factors that will determine the butcher's bill.
It will do when you look at the factual butcher's bill as the excess death toll as opposed to the reported death toll.
We're already not one of the higher death rates via excess deaths but are comparable to a number of EU countries on that metric. But our excess deaths have stopped, theirs are continuing. Sadly the butchers bill hasn't been written in full yet.
I reckon everyone on here will have heard of anecdotes where people who were clearly not killed by Covid have had Covid written on the death certificate to avoid an "unnecessary" post-mortem.
It's easy to see that our Covid death figures may be over estimates rather than underestimates and that the only comparison which may provide meaningful comparison figures is excess deaths
Such anecdotes are not believable. They require a doctor to lie on a death certificate - career ending and legal problems on top....
That is not the problem. The problem is that someone dying of cancer who has a +ve covid test within 28 days of death "counts" whether they would have died in that period or not. Unless we eliminate it completely we will never reduce Covid deaths to nil on such a basis, even if they are not actually dying of Covid.
I don't think anyone sane is suggesting that this is some conspiracy by the medical profession, are they?
We can always cross-check the approximate number. A total of 530,841 people died in England and Wales in 2019 out of about 59,440,000 people. That's a rate of about 24.5 per million per day.
In any random 28 day period, we would therefore expect 686 deaths per million of a randomly selected population; in any random 60 day period, we would therefore expect 1,470 deaths per million.
If we were to randomly select those who had positive covid tests by a given date, we would expect around 686 x (number of millions of positive tests) as random deaths within 28 days of that test, and around 1470 x (number of millions of positive tests) as random deaths within 60 days of that test.
(Of course, there will be a considerable volatility about this figure by random selection of population and time, but if the difference is huge (as it is), it's pretty emphatic)
We can get the numbers within 28 days and 60 days from the coronavirus dashboard (and remember to look back 28 days from now for the number of tests to do the 28-day calculation and to look back 60 days for the 60-day calculation).
Anyone who wants to can do the cross-check very easily.
It indicates that the overwhelming percentage of 28-day deaths were indeed deaths from covid (or something that coincidentally happened at exactly the same time as the covid positive test), but that there should be a few thousand non-covid deaths. You can also approximate how many deaths from covid between 28-60 days are missed by that figure (which is larger than the few thousand non-covid deaths in the 28 day figure).
Conclusion is that we are likely undercounting covid deaths by a few thousand, and that countries that show a bigger discrepancy between excess deaths and covid deaths than us are certainly undercounting by a considerably greater amount.
Our reported Covid deaths are higher than the excess deaths in this country.
I think possibly because your reporting treats the public as random but cases aren't random. Regular testing is far more likely to be done on elderly residents in care homes for example, who as a mean average will die within 12 months so many would die within 28 days, compare to eg the number of children who get tested (prior to this testing surge).
What I don't understand is why authorities like the police continue to act towards Covid risk on the same basis they did a year ago, apparently ignoring all of the evidence that has built up since then on how it spreads and what events are most risky.
We know it does well from prolonged exposure in enclosed indoor spaces with limited ventilation, and that there are very few if any examples of superspreading events taking place outside. We also know it largely spreads through airborne droplets and possibly aerosols. Yet police around the country continue zealously to challenge people driving in their own cars for breezy walks on the beach or in the Derbyshire Dales, or protestors staging vigils on a common, and everywhere you go there's this great focus on hand sanitising.
I spent half an hour on the tube this morning going to an appointment. Far far higher chance of copping a bit of Covid-19 from that journey than any number of outdoor vigils or trips to beauty spots for a stroll.
Cressida Dick was a completely bizarre choice for the Met. Her career should have ended in ignominy after the killing of de Menezes and the appalling lies that were told to justify that. But, having slept on it, I don't think her career will be ended by this. Cops have been wildly inconsistent in enforcing the law around protest and this was stupid, heavy handed and unnecessary. But no one died and the law was enforced. Whatever the "optics" the cops did their job.
If people want the police not to enforce stupid laws they should not allow politicians to pass them.
It looks to me as though the Met have been ruthlessly consistent over the last few months. As you say, the politicians are responsible for the law.
BLM? Extinction Rebellion? I really don't agree.
Before the law change. As was pointed out earlier, those women ought to count themselves grateful for not getting a £10,000 fine. The police have been handing those out like confetti for months.
Who exactly was the organiser? That's your £10,000.
The one to watch is I think Wednesday's, which is being driven by groups such as Counterfire, as was endorsed by the 'victim' who was photographed, and who imo in this interview seems surprisingly unshocked whilst discussing strategy.
To be fair, she sounds like a nightmare. She kicked off her answers with "cis" and "trans" and then started talking about global protests 'everywhere', whilst her mates cheered her on in the background.
Worth nothing that "Counterfire is a socialist organisation committed to building the biggest possible movements against a system that is creating more and more crisis and misery", so it's not hard to see their agenda.
Don’t see why any of those things should mean she sounds like a nightmare.
Apparently the Dutch have cancelled 43,000 appointments due to the pause on AstraZeneca. Crazy.
That is lost lives, right there
Precautionary Principle Arithmetic The vaccine either causes the thrombolitic events recorded or it does not (put aside for the moment the fact that the rate of them is no higher in the vaccinated)
IF it turned out that the vaccine did cause the thrombolitic events, then the one fatality out of the 10 million people dosed would, in fact, have been caused by the vaccine and the death rate is one in ten million. The above is what they are concerned about and why they are pausing to assess.
The IFR of covid across all populations is very close to 0.7% (one in 140). The rate of infection of those turned away would have to be below one in 70,000 in the period of suspension, otherwise the death rate caused by the suspension would automatically be greater than if no suspension occurred (AND, contrary to all the evidence, it DID end up causing the death).
(Also NB - there was a single death from the same cause in the 10 million Pfizer-jabbed as well)
The suspension can ONLY be justifiable if and only if the daily case rate in the countries in question is below 0.2 per 100,000 people.
Both Netherlands and Ireland have confirmed daily case rates (and they test far less than us, so they are picking up a smaller proportion of actual infections) far far higher than that (10 per 100,000 for Ireland, reflecting a probably 30-80 per 100,000 actual infections; 31 per 100,000 for the Netherlands, reflecting a probably 100-300 per 100,000 actual infections).
Conclusion: the countries in question are causing unnecessary deaths to the tune of 200-1000 times as many people as the precaution could possibly save.
I am completely with you on the absurdity of this but are you not working on the basis that those people never get vaccinated? The risk factor is really that they are not vaccinated for another couple of weeks so you would need to look at the risk that those affected catch the disease and then die within that timescale.
It's something I have been thinking about in other contexts. It seems that the EU are likely to be somewhere between 3 and 6 months slower than us in universal vaccination. How many additional lives will that actually cost? If you take France they are currently losing between 100-300 a day so the extra deaths of a 3 month delay will be somewhere between 10k and 30k. Somewhat less than the extra we lost in January.
Its still a lot of unnecessary deaths and adding to it is madness but in the overall scheme of the pandemic it seems unlikely to be the most decisive factor in how hard the virus hit particular countries.
" If you take France they are currently losing between 100-300 a day so the extra deaths of a 3 month delay will be somewhere between 10k and 30k. Somewhat less than the extra we lost in January."
Would take issue with you use of "extra" we lost in January. There is no suggestion that total was avoidable. Some perhaps. But Covid would have found a way as it has across Europe this winter.
The French numbers WERE avoidable, by vaccinating.
Oh I agree and if Kent really takes off in France the numbers could really take off, just as they did here. The longer your population is vulnerable the greater risks that you run.
I am just pointing out that our speed of vaccine, though commendable, will not stop us from having one of the higher death rates overall. There are a lot of other factors that will determine the butcher's bill.
It will do when you look at the factual butcher's bill as the excess death toll as opposed to the reported death toll.
We're already not one of the higher death rates via excess deaths but are comparable to a number of EU countries on that metric. But our excess deaths have stopped, theirs are continuing. Sadly the butchers bill hasn't been written in full yet.
I reckon everyone on here will have heard of anecdotes where people who were clearly not killed by Covid have had Covid written on the death certificate to avoid an "unnecessary" post-mortem.
It's easy to see that our Covid death figures may be over estimates rather than underestimates and that the only comparison which may provide meaningful comparison figures is excess deaths
That is nonsense. Post mortems are only conducted in 15% of deaths, and then only if sudden or violent deaths or not seen by a doctor recently. Ordinary pneumonia, heart disease etc doesn't require a post mortem.
I think Dick survives. Real danger that sacking her releases a whole load of shit from the last 12 months.
There's a COVID inquiry to come, remember. She'll be a key witness.
I don’t see what she can add to a Covid enquiry. The police are not the ones causing the issues around civil liberties. They genuinely cannot win. People screamed for the beaches to be cleared when people went there. They screamed for the blm protests to be shut down, again because of Covid. And now they scream that ‘this’ protest must be allowed. If you believe that there was a risk of Covid spreading in the crowd on Saturday, then action was required. The action taken may have been the wrong one, but this wasnt simple.
Were the beaches cleared? I don't recall that.
Were the BLM protests shut down? I don't recall that.
Why was this one, when women were protesting the way they're treated in part by the Police and the murder allegedly by a Police Officer, why was this one suddenly the one to be draconian?
My poin5 Philip is that people wanted the beaches cleared and criticised the police. They wanted blm shut down and criticised the police. Now they wanted this protest/vigil to go ahead. I’m not defending the actions taken, but I can understand why action was taken. If you believe in the right to protest, even in the current times, then fine. I think the vigil could have been proper lay accommodated and policed. But then when piers Corbin wants to protest against lockdown, he too should have that right.
Or it's different people doing the criticism. Take any action at all and there'll be someone holding a different opinion waiting to criticise it.
I've supported the right to protest for the past year. Yes even for Corbyn. If Corbyn wants to be an idiot and protest be should have that right, to take that away takes it away from everyone.
But the Police haven't reacted like this against mass gatherings at all for the last year. So why this one?
Even more relevantly, there were a number of peaceful socially distanced vigils in other cities. No reason why the one in Clapham could not have been the same.
Cressida Dick was a completely bizarre choice for the Met. Her career should have ended in ignominy after the killing of de Menezes and the appalling lies that were told to justify that. But, having slept on it, I don't think her career will be ended by this. Cops have been wildly inconsistent in enforcing the law around protest and this was stupid, heavy handed and unnecessary. But no one died and the law was enforced. Whatever the "optics" the cops did their job.
If people want the police not to enforce stupid laws they should not allow politicians to pass them.
It looks to me as though the Met have been ruthlessly consistent over the last few months. As you say, the politicians are responsible for the law.
BLM? Extinction Rebellion? I really don't agree.
Before the law change. As was pointed out earlier, those women ought to count themselves grateful for not getting a £10,000 fine. The police have been handing those out like confetti for months.
Who exactly was the organiser? That's your £10,000.
The one to watch is I think Wednesday's, which is being driven by groups such as Counterfire, as was endorsed by the 'victim' who was photographed, and who imo in this interview seems surprisingly unshocked whilst discussing strategy.
To be fair, she sounds like a nightmare. She kicked off her answers with "cis" and "trans" and then started talking about global protests 'everywhere', whilst her mates cheered her on in the background.
Worth nothing that "Counterfire is a socialist organisation committed to building the biggest possible movements against a system that is creating more and more crisis and misery", so it's not hard to see their agenda.
Don’t see why any of those things should mean she sounds like a nightmare.
Young, socialist, female and articulate is CR's nightmare.
Did anyone notice what Ed Davey had to say? I didnt. The problem lies higher than Cressida Dick uninspiring leader of the Met as she is. The police were trying to enforce laws which shouldn't exist. That they have done this heavy handedly and inconsistently is another story.
The mistake was made when they refused to discuss compromise options and banned the vigil. The Met should have better judged the mood and agreed to some suitably socially distanced outside gathering.
A properly stewatded and socially distanced vigil would have been appropriate.
Later today the first reading of the new police bill that criminalises all protests, even of a single person, at the whim of the police. No not problematic at all.
A widespread practice in many countries is to file past the body of a recently deceased celebrity. Surely this could have been arranged for the symbolic body of Sarah Everard on Clapham Common.
Cressida Dick was a completely bizarre choice for the Met. Her career should have ended in ignominy after the killing of de Menezes and the appalling lies that were told to justify that. But, having slept on it, I don't think her career will be ended by this. Cops have been wildly inconsistent in enforcing the law around protest and this was stupid, heavy handed and unnecessary. But no one died and the law was enforced. Whatever the "optics" the cops did their job.
If people want the police not to enforce stupid laws they should not allow politicians to pass them.
It looks to me as though the Met have been ruthlessly consistent over the last few months. As you say, the politicians are responsible for the law.
BLM? Extinction Rebellion? I really don't agree.
Before the law change. As was pointed out earlier, those women ought to count themselves grateful for not getting a £10,000 fine. The police have been handing those out like confetti for months.
Who exactly was the organiser? That's your £10,000.
The one to watch is I think Wednesday's, which is being driven by groups such as Counterfire, as was endorsed by the 'victim' who was photographed, and who imo in this interview seems surprisingly unshocked whilst discussing strategy.
To be fair, she sounds like a nightmare. She kicked off her answers with "cis" and "trans" and then started talking about global protests 'everywhere', whilst her mates cheered her on in the background.
Worth nothing that "Counterfire is a socialist organisation committed to building the biggest possible movements against a system that is creating more and more crisis and misery", so it's not hard to see their agenda.
Don’t see why any of those things should mean she sounds like a nightmare.
What has cis and trans got to do with any of it (I had to look up cis)? It immediately devalued the point being made.
Cressida Dick was a completely bizarre choice for the Met. Her career should have ended in ignominy after the killing of de Menezes and the appalling lies that were told to justify that. But, having slept on it, I don't think her career will be ended by this. Cops have been wildly inconsistent in enforcing the law around protest and this was stupid, heavy handed and unnecessary. But no one died and the law was enforced. Whatever the "optics" the cops did their job.
If people want the police not to enforce stupid laws they should not allow politicians to pass them.
It looks to me as though the Met have been ruthlessly consistent over the last few months. As you say, the politicians are responsible for the law.
BLM? Extinction Rebellion? I really don't agree.
Before the law change. As was pointed out earlier, those women ought to count themselves grateful for not getting a £10,000 fine. The police have been handing those out like confetti for months.
Who exactly was the organiser? That's your £10,000.
The one to watch is I think Wednesday's, which is being driven by groups such as Counterfire, as was endorsed by the 'victim' who was photographed, and who imo in this interview seems surprisingly unshocked whilst discussing strategy.
To be fair, she sounds like a nightmare. She kicked off her answers with "cis" and "trans" and then started talking about global protests 'everywhere', whilst her mates cheered her on in the background.
Worth nothing that "Counterfire is a socialist organisation committed to building the biggest possible movements against a system that is creating more and more crisis and misery", so it's not hard to see their agenda.
Don’t see why any of those things should mean she sounds like a nightmare.
What has cis and trans got to do with any of it (I had to look up cis)? It immediately devalued the point being made.
It’s most likely an effort to be inclusive of all women.
I often evaluate this sort of question by posing a different situation which resembles the problem under discussion.
Contrast the reaction to "women at risk from men" to "white men at risk from black men"
Both cases deal with low probability events. Both use the same generalization of groups. Both have low level statistical correlations. Both can only be effectively policed reactively, not preemptively.
Then you can focus on the proposals, not the slogans. For example -- Would the Labour politicians who are suggesting curfews for men suggest curfews for black men?
Comments
It would be entirely appropriate for them to allow some protests and not others to go ahead, based on sensible risk assessments. That indeed is the basis of the court decision on the issue.
If she was there first and the officer has approached her then can't really complain that its close to someone else. The officer could have kept his distance. If she's approached him then that's weird but that doesn't seem to be what anyone has said from any side yet.
A total of 530,841 people died in England and Wales in 2019 out of about 59,440,000 people. That's a rate of about 24.5 per million per day.
In any random 28 day period, we would therefore expect 686 deaths per million of a randomly selected population; in any random 60 day period, we would therefore expect 1,470 deaths per million.
If we were to randomly select those who had positive covid tests by a given date, we would expect around 686 x (number of millions of positive tests) as random deaths within 28 days of that test, and around 1470 x (number of millions of positive tests) as random deaths within 60 days of that test.
(Of course, there will be a considerable volatility about this figure by random selection of population and time, but if the difference is huge (as it is), it's pretty emphatic)
We can get the numbers within 28 days and 60 days from the coronavirus dashboard (and remember to look back 28 days from now for the number of tests to do the 28-day calculation and to look back 60 days for the 60-day calculation).
Anyone who wants to can do the cross-check very easily.
It indicates that the overwhelming percentage of 28-day deaths were indeed deaths from covid (or something that coincidentally happened at exactly the same time as the covid positive test), but that there should be a few thousand non-covid deaths. You can also approximate how many deaths from covid between 28-60 days are missed by that figure (which is larger than the few thousand non-covid deaths in the 28 day figure).
Conclusion is that we are likely undercounting covid deaths by a few thousand, and that countries that show a bigger discrepancy between excess deaths and covid deaths than us are certainly undercounting by a considerably greater amount.
The runaway trolley is not heading towards anyone, and yet half the countries in the EU have switched the points so that it collides with a few thousand.
I'd just note that she's shouting with such abandon that her mask slips continually - and the woman at the end of the clip has no mask at all.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-52133380
There was also the case pushed hard by the BBC and Guardian about rail worker who died after it was claimed she was spat at / coughed on. Numerous inquiries were held that determined no evidence that the incident like that, but still big pressure from the media to do something.
I think possibly because your reporting treats the public as random but cases aren't random. Regular testing is far more likely to be done on elderly residents in care homes for example, who as a mean average will die within 12 months so many would die within 28 days, compare to eg the number of children who get tested (prior to this testing surge).
As if.....
We know it does well from prolonged exposure in enclosed indoor spaces with limited ventilation, and that there are very few if any examples of superspreading events taking place outside. We also know it largely spreads through airborne droplets and possibly aerosols. Yet police around the country continue zealously to challenge people driving in their own cars for breezy walks on the beach or in the Derbyshire Dales, or protestors staging vigils on a common, and everywhere you go there's this great focus on hand sanitising.
I spent half an hour on the tube this morning going to an appointment. Far far higher chance of copping a bit of Covid-19 from that journey than any number of outdoor vigils or trips to beauty spots for a stroll.
Contrast the reaction to "women at risk from men" to "white men at risk from black men"
Both cases deal with low probability events.
Both use the same generalization of groups.
Both have low level statistical correlations.
Both can only be effectively policed reactively, not preemptively.
Then you can focus on the proposals, not the slogans. For example -- Would the Labour politicians who are suggesting curfews for men suggest curfews for black men?