No, we can’t allow theatres, concert halls and nightclubs to reopen. They must remain CLOSED so that we can all be FREE
But they're imposing the social distancing rules making them uneconomic. It's a completelg circular argument. They're making it impossible for these venues to operate normally and then saying that the vaccine passport is the way out of it, not just junking the social distancing rules. It's the government regulations on social distancing that need to be binned forever.
It depends what the bug does, dunnit?
If by June we are down to near zero covid (we will never hit zero) with no pressure on the NHS, cases minimal, a few deaths a day, then of course we must open up. Everything. I will burn my masks in a fearsome ritual.
From what I can tell there is a big debate WITHIN govt as to what will happen in the summer. Some SAGE pessimists are predicting a 4th wave nearly as bad as January. To me that seems highly unlikely because vaccines. But these people are boffins so we can’t completely dismiss them
The confusion on vaxports probably stems from this fierce internal HMG debate between the vaccine optimists and the 4th wave pessimists
Those sage pessimists put efficacy of 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses into their model. We know actual observed efficacy of a single dose of either Pfizer or AZ is 80% and for two doses it's over 99% for AZ and over 99.9% for Pfizer on the cumulative hospitalisations measure.
Who is the fourth wave going to present itself in?
If we're patient for another month, then probably not.
Yes, I'm not suggesting we do away with social distancing tomorrow or have nightclubs open again next week. I'm saying that in June after the last unlockdown date the case for a vaccine passport system is zero. We're on track to have offered almost all adults their first dose by then and the majority of adults both doses. There's no scenario that having a massive state tracking system on people's movements will make any difference other than hand the state a load of tracking data they will use to hand out fines and tell us to stop drinking.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
Yes, he should have invented his own advice like a Proper Politician rather than hiding behind medical decisions of the national regulator.
WOW that really is funny,
Correct me if I'm wrong but if Boris had done a Ron de Santis and told the scientists where to go at any stage over the past year, I reckon I would still have been able to hear your voice over the more general screeching about recklessness, following the science, people dying, lockdown harder, isn;t Italy great, isn;t Belgium wonderful etc.
Every man is an island, etc. It is sad but understandable that people (here on PB and more broadly) are very happy with any and every illiberal measure and only get upset or angry when their own red lines are crossed.
We all have our red lines, and not just on this issue. I gave up on the idea that we lived in a genuinely liberal society once we accepted without a murmur that people could be sent to prison for speech crimes like posting the wrong thing on Twitter. Ever since the nation failed to rise up en masse against that kind of authoritarianism, most other measures just merit a shrug from me.
Yes that was another egregious assault on liberty. Perhaps this being something that affects everyone means that govts will take note.
Hence my dragging out this issue on here this morning. Noise needs to be made.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
That is quite right. I've done more than my fair share of mathematical modelling in my career and if a consultant presented me with the modelling SAGE have got, I would refuse to pay for it. The last model they relied on fell apart as soon as it was published too.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
I would argue it does matter as we don't know the long term consequences / effects of Covid. However that doesn't excuse using inaccurate values by assumption (and I'm being generous there) when accurate scientifically tested ones are available. It invalidates the model and if this model is wrong it's time to wonder how inaccurate the other ones were.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
Blair was referred to as Tony a lot of the time.
People used to describe Mrs Thatcher as "Thatcher" specifically to insult her. It was very ungentlemanly/unladylike to be so disrespectful. Female Labour MP's were among the worst offenders.
Isn't there a takeup argument for under 30s with vaxports ? Could nudge it higher perhaps ? They might never have to be introduced if takeup is sufficient but it's potentially a handy stick to have.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
National Trust is accused of asking school children to 'denigrate their own history' by writing poems lamenting the British Empire
Isn't there a takeup argument for under 30s with vaxports ? Could nudge it higher perhaps ? They might never have to be introduced if takeup is sufficient but it's potentially a handy stick to have.
Why are we trying to fix a problem that we don't know is a problem yet?
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
Nope - I would be trying to get them as accurate as possible because once you've got evidence to show something is knowingly wrong you can start to completely rip into the other assumptions.
And if you decide to argue that you didn't know the assumptions were wrong I can ask how many other bits of scientific evidence you failed to read / confirm...
Isn't there a takeup argument for under 30s with vaxports ? Could nudge it higher perhaps ? They might never have to be introduced if takeup is sufficient but it's potentially a handy stick to have.
For international travel, they’ll all be getting quickly vaccinated anyway. The number of refuseniks likely to be budged by any domestic use (short of being like China, checking into every building and vehicle) is going to be tiny.
Isn't there a takeup argument for under 30s with vaxports ? Could nudge it higher perhaps ? They might never have to be introduced if takeup is sufficient but it's potentially a handy stick to have.
Sorry but we need to be more coldhearted about this. The vaccines give the individual who takes the vaccine almost 100% protection against serious disease or death as well as aiding herd immunity.
If a minority don't get the vaccine and then get sick as a result then quite frankly that's on them.
We don't need to take away civil liberties to protect those who refuse to get vaccinated from getting sick.
The 10,000 a day / week argument we had last week about Stade de France "mega" vaccination centre....
One of the biggest so-called vaccinodromes opened on Tuesday morning at the national stadium, the Stade de France, just outside Paris. It aims to provide some 10,000 vaccinations a week.
Thinking more about Charles Michel's comment that the EU would sprint across the marathon line while the UK would be crawling, I am ever more convinced he's got it the wrong way around unless vaccine hesitancy in the EU changes considerably.
If the UK are seeing 90+% acceptance rates across the population, and 70+% in even the most vaccine-hesitant communities, then the UK shall indeed be able to sprint across the finish line to herd immunity, given the new vaccine supply streams coming on line.
It is going to be those countries with the highest vaccine hesitancy rates (I am looking at you, France) who will sprint until they have vaccinated all the willing, and then crawl to the finish line as they try to browbeat the unwilling into being vaccinated.
"Children are warned old tweets could ruin their lives: Police are recording thousands as non-crime 'hate incidents'
Figures show more than 2,000 non-crime hate incident recorded against youths Non-crime hate incidents involve hostility toward a person with no proof of hate Despite not being a crime, the incidents are recorded in police systems for years They can show up on a person's enhanced DBS checks during job applications Conservative MP Sir John Hayes told Telegraph stats showed 'disturbing trend' "
Isn't there a takeup argument for under 30s with vaxports ? Could nudge it higher perhaps ? They might never have to be introduced if takeup is sufficient but it's potentially a handy stick to have.
Why are we trying to fix a problem that we don't know is a problem yet?
Of all the criticisms that can be laid against this Government (or, indeed, any Government), is "too pro-active" really the one you want to go with?
Yes, he should have invented his own advice like a Proper Politician rather than hiding behind medical decisions of the national regulator.
WOW that really is funny,
Correct me if I'm wrong but if Boris had done a Ron de Santis and told the scientists where to go at any stage over the past year, I reckon I would still have been able to hear your voice over the more general screeching about recklessness, following the science, people dying, lockdown harder, isn;t Italy great, isn;t Belgium wonderful etc.
Every man is an island, etc. It is sad but understandable that people (here on PB and more broadly) are very happy with any and every illiberal measure and only get upset or angry when their own red lines are crossed.
It is interesting that people are able to differentiate between medical advice from a regulator, based on observed, per reviewed, published data (such as vaccination efficacy and safety), and the estimates/advice of an organisation such as SAGE.
I also find it interesting that Scott'n-Paste was implying that the PM should have done a Macaroon and rolled his own vaccine advice.
Oh, and my position on vaccines and politicians has long been that when asked about efficacy, safety of medicines in general, the politicians should refer the question to the advice of the regulator.
"Children are warned old tweets could ruin their lives: Police are recording thousands as non-crime 'hate incidents'
Figures show more than 2,000 non-crime hate incident recorded against youths Non-crime hate incidents involve hostility toward a person with no proof of hate Despite not being a crime, the incidents are recorded in police systems for years They can show up on a person's enhanced DBS checks during job applications Conservative MP Sir John Hayes told Telegraph stats showed 'disturbing trend' "
How is this within the legal limits? Wasn't there a court case a couple of years ago, where it was ruled actual crimes that resulted in a conviction, if low level enough had to be wiped from the record as a few years?
The 10,000 a day / week argument we had last week about Stade de France "mega" vaccination centre....
One of the biggest so-called vaccinodromes opened on Tuesday morning at the national stadium, the Stade de France, just outside Paris. It aims to provide some 10,000 vaccinations a week.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Boris is a lot more recognisable. There's only one Boris (at least outside Russia). There are lots of Johnsons such as the former postman and ripper of Jon Lansman.
Maybe what the low figures over the last few days show is that Easter is a rather more important event in this country than a lot of people thought it was. People use it for family events and don't want to do anything else during those 3 or 4 days.
The 10,000 a day / week argument we had last week about Stade de France "mega" vaccination centre....
One of the biggest so-called vaccinodromes opened on Tuesday morning at the national stadium, the Stade de France, just outside Paris. It aims to provide some 10,000 vaccinations a week.
Maybe what the low figures over the last few days show is that Easter is a rather more important event in this country than a lot of people thought it was. People use it for family events and don't want to do anything else during those 3 or 4 days.
Yes, he should have invented his own advice like a Proper Politician rather than hiding behind medical decisions of the national regulator.
WOW that really is funny,
Correct me if I'm wrong but if Boris had done a Ron de Santis and told the scientists where to go at any stage over the past year, I reckon I would still have been able to hear your voice over the more general screeching about recklessness, following the science, people dying, lockdown harder, isn;t Italy great, isn;t Belgium wonderful etc.
Every man is an island, etc. It is sad but understandable that people (here on PB and more broadly) are very happy with any and every illiberal measure and only get upset or angry when their own red lines are crossed.
We all have our red lines, and not just on this issue. I gave up on the idea that we lived in a genuinely liberal society once we accepted without a murmur that people could be sent to prison for speech crimes like posting the wrong thing on Twitter. Ever since the nation failed to rise up en masse against that kind of authoritarianism, most other measures just merit a shrug from me.
Yes that was another egregious assault on liberty. Perhaps this being something that affects everyone means that govts will take note.
Hence my dragging out this issue on here this morning. Noise needs to be made.
D'you know one of the less obvious reasons why I'm a Tory, and favour their current populist incarnation? Because they're the only party and form of the party that could ever conceivably pass a Freedom of Speech Act that would roll back just about every onerous legal constraint on thought and speech that has accumulated over time (with a few obvious exceptions, tedious shouting-fire-in-a-crowded-theatre fans).
I don't hold out much hope - there's maybe a 5-10% chance it'll happen in my lifetime. But the lesson I learnt long ago is that the public will accept far more in the way of restrictions than any libertarian-minded individual will be willing to concede, and so the current debate on how exactly we emerge from the pandemic simply doesn't move me very much.
Maybe what the low figures over the last few days show is that Easter is a rather more important event in this country than a lot of people thought it was. People use it for family events and don't want to do anything else during those 3 or 4 days.
More likely most of the vaccination hubs were shut to give the vaccinators a well deserved break.
Maybe what the low figures over the last few days show is that Easter is a rather more important event in this country than a lot of people thought it was. People use it for family events and don't want to do anything else during those 3 or 4 days.
Or that the vaccination centres gave their staff a well-earned break.
No, we can’t allow theatres, concert halls and nightclubs to reopen. They must remain CLOSED so that we can all be FREE
But they're imposing the social distancing rules making them uneconomic. It's a completelg circular argument. They're making it impossible for these venues to operate normally and then saying that the vaccine passport is the way out of it, not just junking the social distancing rules. It's the government regulations on social distancing that need to be binned forever.
It depends what the bug does, dunnit?
If by June we are down to near zero covid (we will never hit zero) with no pressure on the NHS, cases minimal, a few deaths a day, then of course we must open up. Everything. I will burn my masks in a fearsome ritual.
From what I can tell there is a big debate WITHIN govt as to what will happen in the summer. Some SAGE pessimists are predicting a 4th wave nearly as bad as January. To me that seems highly unlikely because vaccines. But these people are boffins so we can’t completely dismiss them
The confusion on vaxports probably stems from this fierce internal HMG debate between the vaccine optimists and the 4th wave pessimists
Those sage pessimists put efficacy of 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses into their model. We know actual observed efficacy of a single dose of either Pfizer or AZ is 80% and for two doses it's over 99% for AZ and over 99.9% for Pfizer on the cumulative hospitalisations measure.
Who is the fourth wave going to present itself in?
You are not comparing like with like. The 32% figure (which was only used in one of three models) was for infection, not symptomatic infection, let alone serious.
And please can I have a citation for the 99% and 99.9% figures? I find them implausible.
Good news, both of my parents got their second dose appointments booked for later this week. Mum is Pfizer and dad is AZ, huge relief for us for both of them to be fully protected from it.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
"Children are warned old tweets could ruin their lives: Police are recording thousands as non-crime 'hate incidents'
Figures show more than 2,000 non-crime hate incident recorded against youths Non-crime hate incidents involve hostility toward a person with no proof of hate Despite not being a crime, the incidents are recorded in police systems for years They can show up on a person's enhanced DBS checks during job applications Conservative MP Sir John Hayes told Telegraph stats showed 'disturbing trend' "
How is this within the legal limits? Wasn't there a court case a couple of years ago, where it was ruled actual crimes that resulted in a conviction, if low level enough had to be wiped from the record as a few years?
Some have already mentioned the fun that social media provides when interviewing new recruits, in banking
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
Maybe what the low figures over the last few days show is that Easter is a rather more important event in this country than a lot of people thought it was. People use it for family events and don't want to do anything else during those 3 or 4 days.
An extra long weekend leads to people taking time off? Especially one, where people now are (or at least feel) more free to visit relatives? No, that's impossible. Now back to Fake COVID.....
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
One would expect them to be giving plausible but pretty cautious estimates. Their numbers are no longer plausible or consistent with real world data.
An important caveat is we are not seeing the latest advice from SAGE, which might be quite different to what is publicly available. Presumably this is because the govt don't want us to see it, given Whitty has said he is happy for advice to be publicly available in real time.
"Children are warned old tweets could ruin their lives: Police are recording thousands as non-crime 'hate incidents'
Figures show more than 2,000 non-crime hate incident recorded against youths Non-crime hate incidents involve hostility toward a person with no proof of hate Despite not being a crime, the incidents are recorded in police systems for years They can show up on a person's enhanced DBS checks during job applications Conservative MP Sir John Hayes told Telegraph stats showed 'disturbing trend' "
Isn't there a takeup argument for under 30s with vaxports ? Could nudge it higher perhaps ? They might never have to be introduced if takeup is sufficient but it's potentially a handy stick to have.
Why are we trying to fix a problem that we don't know is a problem yet?
Of all the criticisms that can be laid against this Government (or, indeed, any Government), is "too pro-active" really the one you want to go with?
Pro-active isn't the word I would use. Authoritarian, Busybody, Privacy invading and scope creep would be better phrases. Alongside trying to introduce an ID card by stealth.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
(I'd be interested to a link on something on the models so I can see more).
If I was doing this (and I've done similar) then I'd have a range of models with different assumptions. One of those would be cautious as hell (worst casr, if you like). If that one says we can do x, y and z at fixed time points not too far away an still be ok for no significant new wave of deaths/hospitalisations then that's the one I'd be trumpeting. Everything else is uncertainties, not entirely predictable uncertainties.
Again, not seen the models, but the efficacies, as Richard N says, are probably not that terrible for transmission (although still maybe cautious) particularly when taking new variants into account.
No, we can’t allow theatres, concert halls and nightclubs to reopen. They must remain CLOSED so that we can all be FREE
But they're imposing the social distancing rules making them uneconomic. It's a completelg circular argument. They're making it impossible for these venues to operate normally and then saying that the vaccine passport is the way out of it, not just junking the social distancing rules. It's the government regulations on social distancing that need to be binned forever.
It depends what the bug does, dunnit?
If by June we are down to near zero covid (we will never hit zero) with no pressure on the NHS, cases minimal, a few deaths a day, then of course we must open up. Everything. I will burn my masks in a fearsome ritual.
From what I can tell there is a big debate WITHIN govt as to what will happen in the summer. Some SAGE pessimists are predicting a 4th wave nearly as bad as January. To me that seems highly unlikely because vaccines. But these people are boffins so we can’t completely dismiss them
The confusion on vaxports probably stems from this fierce internal HMG debate between the vaccine optimists and the 4th wave pessimists
Those sage pessimists put efficacy of 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses into their model. We know actual observed efficacy of a single dose of either Pfizer or AZ is 80% and for two doses it's over 99% for AZ and over 99.9% for Pfizer on the cumulative hospitalisations measure.
Who is the fourth wave going to present itself in?
You are not comparing like with like. The 32% figure (which was only used in one of three models) was for infection, not symptomatic infection, let alone serious.
And please can I have a citation for the 99% and 99.9% figures? I find them implausible.
--AS
I have already posted a link showing efficacy against infection for both Pfizer and Moderna being 90+% after two shots, and 80-85% after one shot. The 32% was an early British study of AZN. I believe even that figure has already been revised up, but have to do some real work now, so I'll leave someone else to dig out the citation.
Christ, there’s some nonsense spoken on here. The main reason the authorities will want to revert to something like normal just as quickly as we do is that the public health teams will want to get back to a 40 hour week and non-Ops tempo. Nobody wants to retain this stuff longer than necessary.
Good news, both of my parents got their second dose appointments booked for later this week. Mum is Pfizer and dad is AZ, huge relief for us for both of them to be fully protected from it.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
You use the most cautious assumptions you can justify.
The issue is that you can't justify the 32% figure - which means you have a problem....
Good news, both of my parents got their second dose appointments booked for later this week. Mum is Pfizer and dad is AZ, huge relief for us for both of them to be fully protected from it.
You are NOT fully protected after 2 jabs.. ..
But will expect to achieve maximum protection about 14 days after the second shot.
Max knows this well. I suspect what he meant is he is glad his parents now need nothing further than time for full protection
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
People are still voting to support the Boris Brexit that has directly provoked the fire bombs. There could have been a different flavour of Brexit where we didn't thrown Norniron off the buss, but that got rejected.
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
No, we can’t allow theatres, concert halls and nightclubs to reopen. They must remain CLOSED so that we can all be FREE
But they're imposing the social distancing rules making them uneconomic. It's a completelg circular argument. They're making it impossible for these venues to operate normally and then saying that the vaccine passport is the way out of it, not just junking the social distancing rules. It's the government regulations on social distancing that need to be binned forever.
It depends what the bug does, dunnit?
If by June we are down to near zero covid (we will never hit zero) with no pressure on the NHS, cases minimal, a few deaths a day, then of course we must open up. Everything. I will burn my masks in a fearsome ritual.
From what I can tell there is a big debate WITHIN govt as to what will happen in the summer. Some SAGE pessimists are predicting a 4th wave nearly as bad as January. To me that seems highly unlikely because vaccines. But these people are boffins so we can’t completely dismiss them
The confusion on vaxports probably stems from this fierce internal HMG debate between the vaccine optimists and the 4th wave pessimists
Those sage pessimists put efficacy of 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses into their model. We know actual observed efficacy of a single dose of either Pfizer or AZ is 80% and for two doses it's over 99% for AZ and over 99.9% for Pfizer on the cumulative hospitalisations measure.
Who is the fourth wave going to present itself in?
You are not comparing like with like. The 32% figure (which was only used in one of three models) was for infection, not symptomatic infection, let alone serious.
And please can I have a citation for the 99% and 99.9% figures? I find them implausible.
--AS
I have already posted a link showing efficacy against infection for both Pfizer and Moderna being 90+% after two shots, and 80-85% after one shot. The 32% was an early British study of AZN. I believe even that figure has already been revised up, but have to do some real work now, so I'll leave someone else to dig out the citation.
Yes, it's worth bearing in mind that the 32% figure was for infection (not symptomatic infection). I don't know if we have up-to-date estimates for that number.
But yes, low 90% for Pfizer and Moderna and something a little lower for AZN all sound plausible to me, and in line with the original trials.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
(I'd be interested to a link on something on the models so I can see more).
If I was doing this (and I've done similar) then I'd have a range of models with different assumptions. One of those would be cautious as hell (worst casr, if you like). If that one says we can do x, y and z at fixed time points not too far away an still be ok for no significant new wave of deaths/hospitalisations then that's the one I'd be trumpeting. Everything else is uncertainties, not entirely predictable uncertainties.
Again, not seen the models, but the efficacies, as Richard N says, are probably not that terrible for transmission (although still maybe cautious) particularly when taking new variants into account.
As you can see, they did try a range of models with different assumptions, and they considered what happens if some of the later stages of the planned re-opening were skipped. I think they were asking the right questions. They used a range of vaccine effectiveness numbers which might have been a bit on the cautious side (but not out of line with observed data).
--AS
Edit: oops, combined two replies, oh well I'll just leave it like that.
Christ, there’s some nonsense spoken on here. The main reason the authorities will want to revert to something like normal just as quickly as we do is that the public health teams will want to get back to a 40 hour week and non-Ops tempo. Nobody wants to retain this stuff longer than necessary.
That is an excellent point and needs repeating more often.
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
People are still voting to support the Boris Brexit that has directly provoked the fire bombs. There could have been a different flavour of Brexit where we didn't thrown Norniron off the buss, but that got rejected.
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
There has never been any point at which the DUP has made it clear what sort of Brexit would be acceptable, except in undeliverable abstractions. And they were against both May and Boris's deal. The DUP+ the nature of reality threw NI off the bus. The sanest answer in this post religious bigotry world is a single Ireland.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
Somebody I spoke to yesterday was saying "Keep the run-up to May 2023 clear...."
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
You use the most cautious assumptions you can justify.
The issue is that you can't justify the 32% figure - which means you have a problem....
Well, maybe. Justifying inherently uncertain estimates is always a bit of a mess.
But the point is that they may prefer deliberately pessimistic estimates that they can't justify over realistic ones that they can. If the former are too pessimistic, the downside in terms of their reputations is manageable. if the latter are too optimistic, someone gets thrown under a bus, regardless of whether they were doing the right thing at the time or not.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
There surely must not be an early election before the boundary changes are ratified. Having an 80 seat majority but another election on old boundaries would be insane.
Though having said that, given the Tories ever increasing progress in the North, I wonder whether boundary changes mean as much as they used to?
What timescale allows the new boundaries to be ratified and then an early election? I could see the case for a May 2023 election as the limit otherwise is 2024.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
You use the most cautious assumptions you can justify.
The issue is that you can't justify the 32% figure - which means you have a problem....
Well, maybe. Justifying inherently uncertain estimates is always a bit of a mess.
But the point is that they may prefer deliberately pessimistic estimates that they can't justify over realistic ones that they can. If the former are too pessimistic, the downside in terms of their reputations is manageable. if the latter are too optimistic, someone gets thrown under a bus, regardless of whether they were doing the right thing at the time or not.
You can justify a 32% assumed figure when there is zero evidence that points at a better figure.
When evidence points out the figure should be nearer 80% (as is the case now) you have a problem and given that someone is looking to pass on any blame they can you better have a good reason to justify the assumption.
Thinking more about Charles Michel's comment that the EU would sprint across the marathon line while the UK would be crawling, I am ever more convinced he's got it the wrong way around unless vaccine hesitancy in the EU changes considerably.
If the UK are seeing 90+% acceptance rates across the population, and 70+% in even the most vaccine-hesitant communities, then the UK shall indeed be able to sprint across the finish line to herd immunity, given the new vaccine supply streams coming on line.
It is going to be those countries with the highest vaccine hesitancy rates (I am looking at you, France) who will sprint until they have vaccinated all the willing, and then crawl to the finish line as they try to browbeat the unwilling into being vaccinated.
Without going to any length, Charles Michel is a prat.
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
People are still voting to support the Boris Brexit that has directly provoked the fire bombs. There could have been a different flavour of Brexit where we didn't thrown Norniron off the buss, but that got rejected.
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
Nope.
The movement needed is for the NI to abolish the Protocol and reintegrate with the UK outside the EEA and CU.
The EU's red lines? They're their problem not ours.
Fire bombs? They're the problem of anyone using them, not us.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
It's like those on the left have no understanding of the concept of cognitive dissonance. If you tell people they are something that they do not believe themselves to be, they will stop listening to everything else you say.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
There surely must not be an early election before the boundary changes are ratified. Having an 80 seat majority but another election on old boundaries would be insane.
Though having said that, given the Tories ever increasing progress in the North, I wonder whether boundary changes mean as much as they used to?
What timescale allows the new boundaries to be ratified and then an early election? I could see the case for a May 2023 election as the limit otherwise is 2024.
No theory will trump Boris's need to win an election when he can, if there comes a time when he can win it, get away with its timing, and avoid risk down the line
Maybe what the low figures over the last few days show is that Easter is a rather more important event in this country than a lot of people thought it was. People use it for family events and don't want to do anything else during those 3 or 4 days.
More likely most of the vaccination hubs were shut to give the vaccinators a well deserved break.
Hopefully soon to be busier than they ever have......
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Boris is a lot more recognisable. There's only one Boris (at least outside Russia). There are lots of Johnsons such as the former postman and ripper of Jon Lansman.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
He is not known as Boris in private life - by his family and close friends. His real name is Alexander or Alex.
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
People are still voting to support the Boris Brexit that has directly provoked the fire bombs. There could have been a different flavour of Brexit where we didn't thrown Norniron off the buss, but that got rejected.
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
There has never been any point at which the DUP has made it clear what sort of Brexit would be acceptable, except in undeliverable abstractions. And they were against both May and Boris's deal. The DUP+ the nature of reality threw NI off the bus. The sanest answer in this post religious bigotry world is a single Ireland.
Rochdale is acting from a mythological and arrogant assumption that the EU's red lines must survive contact with reality but nobody else's can.
The sanest answer is for both parties to compromise and dump their "red lines". Unless or until the EU is prepared to do so, the UK must look after its own interests because nobody else is planning to do so.
Be interesting to know what number he thinks represents the pandemic being over in a country.
And what is the number we should be counting in that regard? My guess it should be total current infectious cases/million of population - i.e. it should exclude non-infectious long COVID, and current recovery cases which are past the point of infectivity, but should include those long COVID cases in the immune-compromised where the patient is still infectious.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
He is not known as Boris in private life - by his family and close friends. His real name is Alexander or Alex.
So what? I'm not his close family or friends, are you?
He is known as Boris in public life and it is his name.
I know plenty of people with names or nicknames that are acceptable to be used by family and close friends, but not by others. Its none of your business frankly.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
National Trust is accused of asking school children to 'denigrate their own history' by writing poems lamenting the British Empire
Why aren't they being encouraged to write the new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering, but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain?
No, we can’t allow theatres, concert halls and nightclubs to reopen. They must remain CLOSED so that we can all be FREE
But they're imposing the social distancing rules making them uneconomic. It's a completelg circular argument. They're making it impossible for these venues to operate normally and then saying that the vaccine passport is the way out of it, not just junking the social distancing rules. It's the government regulations on social distancing that need to be binned forever.
It depends what the bug does, dunnit?
If by June we are down to near zero covid (we will never hit zero) with no pressure on the NHS, cases minimal, a few deaths a day, then of course we must open up. Everything. I will burn my masks in a fearsome ritual.
From what I can tell there is a big debate WITHIN govt as to what will happen in the summer. Some SAGE pessimists are predicting a 4th wave nearly as bad as January. To me that seems highly unlikely because vaccines. But these people are boffins so we can’t completely dismiss them
The confusion on vaxports probably stems from this fierce internal HMG debate between the vaccine optimists and the 4th wave pessimists
Those sage pessimists put efficacy of 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses into their model. We know actual observed efficacy of a single dose of either Pfizer or AZ is 80% and for two doses it's over 99% for AZ and over 99.9% for Pfizer on the cumulative hospitalisations measure.
Who is the fourth wave going to present itself in?
You are not comparing like with like. The 32% figure (which was only used in one of three models) was for infection, not symptomatic infection, let alone serious.
And please can I have a citation for the 99% and 99.9% figures? I find them implausible.
--AS
I have already posted a link showing efficacy against infection for both Pfizer and Moderna being 90+% after two shots, and 80-85% after one shot. The 32% was an early British study of AZN. I believe even that figure has already been revised up, but have to do some real work now, so I'll leave someone else to dig out the citation.
Yes, it's worth bearing in mind that the 32% figure was for infection (not symptomatic infection). I don't know if we have up-to-date estimates for that number.
But yes, low 90% for Pfizer and Moderna and something a little lower for AZN all sound plausible to me, and in line with the original trials.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
(I'd be interested to a link on something on the models so I can see more).
If I was doing this (and I've done similar) then I'd have a range of models with different assumptions. One of those would be cautious as hell (worst casr, if you like). If that one says we can do x, y and z at fixed time points not too far away an still be ok for no significant new wave of deaths/hospitalisations then that's the one I'd be trumpeting. Everything else is uncertainties, not entirely predictable uncertainties.
Again, not seen the models, but the efficacies, as Richard N says, are probably not that terrible for transmission (although still maybe cautious) particularly when taking new variants into account.
As you can see, they did try a range of models with different assumptions, and they considered what happens if some of the later stages of the planned re-opening were skipped. I think they were asking the right questions. They used a range of vaccine effectiveness numbers which might have been a bit on the cautious side (but not out of line with observed data).
--AS
Edit: oops, combined two replies, oh well I'll just leave it like that.
Great, thank you.
I agree and I don't understand the excitement on here. There are lots of uncertainties. If all the models say everything is great (on some central assumptions about vaccine efficacy) and we did then get another wave then everyone would be blaming the scientists - and rightly so.
This is a set of scenarios based on explicit assumptions. Now it's up to the politicians to decide how much Covid risk they'll stomach for given amounts of upside or, to put it a different way, to weigh up the Covid risks against the significant risks of an unnecesary long imposition of restrictions.
Oh goody, are we back to re-weighting polls again?
Could be poor sampling, but I'd suggest those unweighted figures are not good news for Labour.
It strongly implies that both Tories and Labour have been oversampled in this poll - the Tories particularly so. Other parties have been undersampled - particularly 2019 Brexit voters.
"There is a “clear link” between the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and extremely rare blood clotting events, according to a senior official at the European Medicines Agency.
Marco Cavaleri, head of vaccines strategy at the EMA, told an Italian newspaper that the agency did not know the mechanism, but now believed that the jab was indeed causing the clotting, which seems to affect mainly younger people."
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
You use the most cautious assumptions you can justify.
The issue is that you can't justify the 32% figure - which means you have a problem....
Well, maybe. Justifying inherently uncertain estimates is always a bit of a mess.
But the point is that they may prefer deliberately pessimistic estimates that they can't justify over realistic ones that they can. If the former are too pessimistic, the downside in terms of their reputations is manageable. if the latter are too optimistic, someone gets thrown under a bus, regardless of whether they were doing the right thing at the time or not.
You can justify a 32% assumed figure when there is zero evidence that points at a better figure.
When evidence points out the figure should be nearer 80% (as is the case now) you have a problem and given that someone is looking to pass on any blame they can you better have a good reason to justify the assumption.
OK, I give up, since you're clearly not even bothering to read my posts.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
Somebody I spoke to yesterday was saying "Keep the run-up to May 2023 clear...."
Looking into it that would be on old boundaries - again (!)
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
People are still voting to support the Boris Brexit that has directly provoked the fire bombs. There could have been a different flavour of Brexit where we didn't thrown Norniron off the buss, but that got rejected.
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
There has never been any point at which the DUP has made it clear what sort of Brexit would be acceptable, except in undeliverable abstractions. And they were against both May and Boris's deal. The DUP+ the nature of reality threw NI off the bus. The sanest answer in this post religious bigotry world is a single Ireland.
Rochdale is acting from a mythological and arrogant assumption that the EU's red lines must survive contact with reality but nobody else's can.
The sanest answer is for both parties to compromise and dump their "red lines". Unless or until the EU is prepared to do so, the UK must look after its own interests because nobody else is planning to do so.
Rochdale is working from the assumption that the EU has to treat us exactly the same way as they treat other third party countries (as that is what we wish to be).
Which means that until we start to agree compromises with the EU there is nothing the EU can do (if they wish to follow WTO rules) than implement the checks they are currently implementing.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
There surely must not be an early election before the boundary changes are ratified. Having an 80 seat majority but another election on old boundaries would be insane.
Though having said that, given the Tories ever increasing progress in the North, I wonder whether boundary changes mean as much as they used to?
What timescale allows the new boundaries to be ratified and then an early election? I could see the case for a May 2023 election as the limit otherwise is 2024.
Your occasional important reminder that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is still very much in force, albeit repealing it ought to be straightforward once the Government decides/is able to devote some time to doing so.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
There surely must not be an early election before the boundary changes are ratified. Having an 80 seat majority but another election on old boundaries would be insane.
Though having said that, given the Tories ever increasing progress in the North, I wonder whether boundary changes mean as much as they used to?
What timescale allows the new boundaries to be ratified and then an early election? I could see the case for a May 2023 election as the limit otherwise is 2024.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
There surely must not be an early election before the boundary changes are ratified. Having an 80 seat majority but another election on old boundaries would be insane.
Though having said that, given the Tories ever increasing progress in the North, I wonder whether boundary changes mean as much as they used to?
What timescale allows the new boundaries to be ratified and then an early election? I could see the case for a May 2023 election as the limit otherwise is 2024.
Earliest date for the new boundaries will be Autumn 2023.
I think even for infection and infectiousness rates, at least for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, the model is way too cautious. The last study I saw from the US implied that these two vaccines produce much higher levels against infection (90% after 2 shots, 80-85%% for a single dose of Pfizer), and almost 100% against infectiousness.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
You use the most cautious assumptions you can justify.
The issue is that you can't justify the 32% figure - which means you have a problem....
Well, maybe. Justifying inherently uncertain estimates is always a bit of a mess.
But the point is that they may prefer deliberately pessimistic estimates that they can't justify over realistic ones that they can. If the former are too pessimistic, the downside in terms of their reputations is manageable. if the latter are too optimistic, someone gets thrown under a bus, regardless of whether they were doing the right thing at the time or not.
You can justify a 32% assumed figure when there is zero evidence that points at a better figure.
When evidence points out the figure should be nearer 80% (as is the case now) you have a problem and given that someone is looking to pass on any blame they can you better have a good reason to justify the assumption.
OK, I give up, since you're clearly not even bothering to read my posts.
Assumptions have to some reason behind them - you can't just say we used these figures because we wanted a pessimistic outlook when there is no justification for it.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
You use the most cautious assumptions you can justify.
The issue is that you can't justify the 32% figure - which means you have a problem....
Well, maybe. Justifying inherently uncertain estimates is always a bit of a mess.
But the point is that they may prefer deliberately pessimistic estimates that they can't justify over realistic ones that they can. If the former are too pessimistic, the downside in terms of their reputations is manageable. if the latter are too optimistic, someone gets thrown under a bus, regardless of whether they were doing the right thing at the time or not.
You can justify a 32% assumed figure when there is zero evidence that points at a better figure.
When evidence points out the figure should be nearer 80% (as is the case now) you have a problem and given that someone is looking to pass on any blame they can you better have a good reason to justify the assumption.
OK, I give up, since you're clearly not even bothering to read my posts.
Assumptions have to some reason behind them - you can't just say we used these figures because we wanted a pessimistic outlook when there is no justification for it.
And you want to centre your sensitivity analysis around what you consider the most likely outcomes, not skewed just in one direction.
Having spent decades in biosecurity, I was heartily sick of the constant search for the worst possible worst case scenario to fuel budget lines for people working in biosecurity. Guess what - the worst possible worst case scenario is always when every one dies a horrible death.
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
People are still voting to support the Boris Brexit that has directly provoked the fire bombs. There could have been a different flavour of Brexit where we didn't thrown Norniron off the buss, but that got rejected.
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
There has never been any point at which the DUP has made it clear what sort of Brexit would be acceptable, except in undeliverable abstractions. And they were against both May and Boris's deal. The DUP+ the nature of reality threw NI off the bus. The sanest answer in this post religious bigotry world is a single Ireland.
Rochdale is acting from a mythological and arrogant assumption that the EU's red lines must survive contact with reality but nobody else's can.
The sanest answer is for both parties to compromise and dump their "red lines". Unless or until the EU is prepared to do so, the UK must look after its own interests because nobody else is planning to do so.
Rochdale is working from the assumption that the EU has to treat us exactly the same way as they treat other third party countries (as that is what we wish to be).
Which means that until we start to agree compromises with the EU there is nothing the EU can do (if they wish to follow WTO rules) than implement the checks they are currently implementing.
That's fine but then we can treat them as any other third party would.
And we can "implement" the Protocol in the most minimalist and irritating way we can imagine that suits us, not them. Since that's our responsibility, not theirs.
The sage pessimists are already wrong. They're putting in unnecessarily pessimistic inputs into their model to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil. This was the same idiotic team that predicted a peak of 4k deaths per day (with a lockdown) by simply inputting unrealistic R values into their model.
They have an agenda, they will do whatever it takes to push it, this time they are downgrading the vaccine efficacy from 80% for a single dose and over 99% for two doses to 32% for a single dose and 62% for two doses.
There is no reason to do that. Literally, no reason. They are doing it so SAGE and these other public health bodies can hold onto this enormous power they have over the public at large.
You are being very silly. Of course they're not trying 'to achieve their goal of scaring unwitting rubes into believing vaccine passports are a necessary evil'. For heaven's sake, get a grip!
On the substantive point, yes I agree their assumptions look over-cautious, provided that we don't get hit by vaccine-resistant variants. However, isn't the efficacy they've assumed that which refers to whether a vaccinated person can infect someone else? You are quoting the efficacy on symptomatic cases, which is potentially a very different number. There's not much data on the former.
Over cautious is a huge understatement. It's simply wrong. Their model is trying to forwards project the hospitalisation rate and they've used incorrect values on hospitalisation efficacy of the two main vaccines in use in this country. They've adjusted their inputs to try and get the outcome they wanted, I see data modellers do it all the time and it's always bad practice. They want to tell a certain story and now that the data no longer helps them tell it they've simply changed the data.
Again, I'll put it quite simply, does it matter if 1m people per day get infected if only 100 of those end up in hospital? Even at the top end of any projection we're looking at maybe 50k infections per day, with the known efficacy of two doses for over 50s even if all 50k were in those more vulnerable groups we're looking at 10 hospitalisations per day from vaccinated people.
You're being incredibly naïve if you truly believe that these now all powerful scientists and public health people will willingly give up all of these interesting new tools they have at their disposal. They are trying to browbeat the public and politicians into giving them a permanent say in how we live with doom mongering data models that only a very small number of people will understand.
To be fair to them, if I knew a public inquiry was 100% definitely coming in which all my actions, assumptions and communications would be scrutinised (and then misrepresented/twisted way out of context by the press), I'd probably lowball the efficacy rates in my model as well.
No, you'd surely use the best available data. That way when the questions are asked you can say "our model used the best available data from real world observations". Right now they have no answer to Steve Baker or Charles Walker when they inevitably get asked why they used such low efficacy values as inputs.
Unusually naive from you. A bunch of people are going to get thrown under the bus at some point, and politicians are millions of times better at passing blame around than analysts. In this situation, I would definitely use the most cautious assumptions I could reasonably justify and audit trail the hell out of everything.
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
You use the most cautious assumptions you can justify.
The issue is that you can't justify the 32% figure - which means you have a problem....
Well, maybe. Justifying inherently uncertain estimates is always a bit of a mess.
But the point is that they may prefer deliberately pessimistic estimates that they can't justify over realistic ones that they can. If the former are too pessimistic, the downside in terms of their reputations is manageable. if the latter are too optimistic, someone gets thrown under a bus, regardless of whether they were doing the right thing at the time or not.
You can justify a 32% assumed figure when there is zero evidence that points at a better figure.
When evidence points out the figure should be nearer 80% (as is the case now) you have a problem and given that someone is looking to pass on any blame they can you better have a good reason to justify the assumption.
OK, I give up, since you're clearly not even bothering to read my posts.
Assumptions have to some reason behind them - you can't just say we used these figures because we wanted a pessimistic outlook when there is no justification for it.
Yes, I know that. I'm sure they have a justification of some sorts, even if it's right on (or even significantly below) the low end of the range of reasonable best estimates.
The anti-vaxxerss say: "Chile is vaccinating with Sinovac and it doesn't work for them, that's why they are in lockdown"
However: ICU hospitalisations are in free fall in patients> 60 years old, prioritized in vaccination
Very interesting. That points very strongly indeed to them simply having reopened too quickly/not locked down hard enough and obtaining a massive surge in the unvaccinated that leads to hospitalisations and deaths in the lower risk groups (because "lower" is not "no")
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
People are still voting to support the Boris Brexit that has directly provoked the fire bombs. There could have been a different flavour of Brexit where we didn't thrown Norniron off the buss, but that got rejected.
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
There has never been any point at which the DUP has made it clear what sort of Brexit would be acceptable, except in undeliverable abstractions. And they were against both May and Boris's deal. The DUP+ the nature of reality threw NI off the bus. The sanest answer in this post religious bigotry world is a single Ireland.
Rochdale is acting from a mythological and arrogant assumption that the EU's red lines must survive contact with reality but nobody else's can.
The sanest answer is for both parties to compromise and dump their "red lines". Unless or until the EU is prepared to do so, the UK must look after its own interests because nobody else is planning to do so.
Rochdale is working from the assumption that the EU has to treat us exactly the same way as they treat other third party countries (as that is what we wish to be).
Which means that until we start to agree compromises with the EU there is nothing the EU can do (if they wish to follow WTO rules) than implement the checks they are currently implementing.
That's fine but then we can treat them as any other third party would.
And we can "implement" the Protocol in the most minimalist and irritating way we can imagine that suits us, not them. Since that's our responsibility, not theirs.
And we should be but we currently aren't because if we did our supermarket shelves may be a bit empty - as we aren't currently in a position to be doing the inspections we should be doing.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
There surely must not be an early election before the boundary changes are ratified. Having an 80 seat majority but another election on old boundaries would be insane.
Though having said that, given the Tories ever increasing progress in the North, I wonder whether boundary changes mean as much as they used to?
What timescale allows the new boundaries to be ratified and then an early election? I could see the case for a May 2023 election as the limit otherwise is 2024.
Excellent as always from Matthew Goodwin, and as we stand today, correct; but he fails to capture what politics would be like as and when Boris's wheels come off. There is a perfectly plausible scene in which however humdrum SKS is, by not being Boris, not being Tory, and by and having no affirmative policies he becomes the only possible PM.
At least five routes are already visible: VaxID; unemployment; public finances; a Brexit fail; inflation.
"Only last week, voters looked on as Keir Starmer and a number of his MPs rejected a nuanced report on racial and ethnic disparities and instead implied that Britain, and by extension the British people, are inherently racist. Every day that radical left Labour MPs Clive Lewis and activists like professor Priyamvada Gopal are in the news, screaming about racist Britain, is a good day for Boris Johnson."
A spot on quote. SKS is doing little to help his position, though I suppose this sort of nonsense shores up the party a bit while being unnoticed by normal people.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
There surely must not be an early election before the boundary changes are ratified. Having an 80 seat majority but another election on old boundaries would be insane.
Though having said that, given the Tories ever increasing progress in the North, I wonder whether boundary changes mean as much as they used to?
What timescale allows the new boundaries to be ratified and then an early election? I could see the case for a May 2023 election as the limit otherwise is 2024.
Earliest date for the new boundaries will be Autumn 2023.
Tactical reasons it may be in the Tories' interests to have an election on the old boundaries: 1) They have a lot of new MPs yet to benefit from a first-term incumbency boost. A boundary change risks diluting this. 2) Conceivably, the UK population pattern upon which the boundary review was carried out represented a maxima in city population: over the first five years of this decade, it is entirely possible that cities will shrink relative to small towns and shires. Potentially, therefore, a review in a few years' time will be more favourable to the Conservatives than the current one. 3) The advantages of calling an election in Spring rather than Autumn 2023 may be much greater than the advantage in new boundaries.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
He is not known as Boris in private life - by his family and close friends. His real name is Alexander or Alex.
So what? I'm not his close family or friends, are you?
He is known as Boris in public life and it is his name.
I know plenty of people with names or nicknames that are acceptable to be used by family and close friends, but not by others. Its none of your business frankly.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
He is not known as Boris in private life - by his family and close friends. His real name is Alexander or Alex.
So what? I'm not his close family or friends, are you?
He is known as Boris in public life and it is his name.
I know plenty of people with names or nicknames that are acceptable to be used by family and close friends, but not by others. Its none of your business frankly.
But it is a nickname which happens to have caught on with many people. That does not oblige everybody to use it!
I read in The Grocer that there is some Good News for exporters. The ludicrous position where a pack of Chocolate Digestives needed a vet certificate has been avoided. The UK and EU governments had a discussion about (I kid you not) the acceptable heat-treatment of dairy content in shelf-stable composite products. A way forward has been found, with alignment now reached between the UK's new divergent position and the EU's / UK's previous and in reality current postion.
Sadly no such agreement has yet been reached for other food categories that include dairy. Which makes it really hard and expensive to ship things like Cheesecake to Norniron and elsewhere once the new 3rd country regulations are activated next month. The UK has not diverged from EU standards. The UK insists it isn't going to diverge downwards on food safety. Yet the UK insists on the *right* to diverge and to be a 3rd country and thats why we remain fucked on basics like import / export.
Common sense is needed. Unfortunately wazzocks in places like Hartlepools expect Britain to defeat the forrin threat and if that means petrol bombings on the streets of Derry thats clearly the fault of some other forrin like the Irish.
Nice example of how in the referendum and aftermath there was no right answer, showing that we had gone too far down an EU track without being asked the question much earlier. Also how many of the problems can be solved for both sides.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
People are still voting to support the Boris Brexit that has directly provoked the fire bombs. There could have been a different flavour of Brexit where we didn't thrown Norniron off the buss, but that got rejected.
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
There has never been any point at which the DUP has made it clear what sort of Brexit would be acceptable, except in undeliverable abstractions. And they were against both May and Boris's deal. The DUP+ the nature of reality threw NI off the bus. The sanest answer in this post religious bigotry world is a single Ireland.
Rochdale is acting from a mythological and arrogant assumption that the EU's red lines must survive contact with reality but nobody else's can.
The sanest answer is for both parties to compromise and dump their "red lines". Unless or until the EU is prepared to do so, the UK must look after its own interests because nobody else is planning to do so.
Rochdale is working from the assumption that the EU has to treat us exactly the same way as they treat other third party countries (as that is what we wish to be).
Which means that until we start to agree compromises with the EU there is nothing the EU can do (if they wish to follow WTO rules) than implement the checks they are currently implementing.
That's fine but then we can treat them as any other third party would.
And we can "implement" the Protocol in the most minimalist and irritating way we can imagine that suits us, not them. Since that's our responsibility, not theirs.
And we should be but we currently aren't because if we did our supermarket shelves may be a bit empty - as we aren't currently in a position to be doing the inspections we should be doing.
Not doing the checks is minimalist. Its the right thing to do. We have no interest or incentive to do the checks.
We should continue to not do the checks. If the EU want checks done they can do them in their territory, not ours.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
He is not known as Boris in private life - by his family and close friends. His real name is Alexander or Alex.
This sort of thing really riles a certain sort of left winger, doesn't it? I remember the same immense irritation at George Osborne being known as George rather than Gideon.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
He is not known as Boris in private life - by his family and close friends. His real name is Alexander or Alex.
So what? I'm not his close family or friends, are you?
He is known as Boris in public life and it is his name.
I know plenty of people with names or nicknames that are acceptable to be used by family and close friends, but not by others. Its none of your business frankly.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
Calling Johnson "Boris" of course is also ridiculous. He is Johnson, just as Theresa was May, Tony was Blair etc
He's Boris, its his name.
Just like in Blair's day he was often called Tony, in Cameron's day he was often called Dave, Sturgeon is often called Nicola. Trump was often called Donald, even Biden has sometimes been called Jo.
Starmer is sometimes called Keith.
It happens. We don't live in a prim and proper 19th century society when people can only use surnames.
He is not known as Boris in private life - by his family and close friends. His real name is Alexander or Alex.
So what? I'm not his close family or friends, are you?
He is known as Boris in public life and it is his name.
I know plenty of people with names or nicknames that are acceptable to be used by family and close friends, but not by others. Its none of your business frankly.
But it is a nickname which happens to have caught on with many people. That does not oblige everybody to use it!
Write out 1000 times:
James Gordon Brown James Gordon Brown James Gordon Brown...
Leonard James Callaghan Leonard James Callaghan Leonard James Callaghan...
James Harold Wilson James Harold Wilson James Harold Wilson...
James Keir Hardie James Keir Hardie James Keir Hardie...
Comments
Hence my dragging out this issue on here this morning. Noise needs to be made.
They might never have to be introduced if takeup is sufficient but it's potentially a handy stick to have.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9440117/National-Trust-slammed-asking-children-write-poems-lamenting-British-Empire.html
And if you decide to argue that you didn't know the assumptions were wrong I can ask how many other bits of scientific evidence you failed to read / confirm...
If a minority don't get the vaccine and then get sick as a result then quite frankly that's on them.
We don't need to take away civil liberties to protect those who refuse to get vaccinated from getting sick.
One of the biggest so-called vaccinodromes opened on Tuesday morning at the national stadium, the Stade de France, just outside Paris. It aims to provide some 10,000 vaccinations a week.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/uk-56646554
In comparison I remember one in Scotland doing 4000 in a day.
If the UK are seeing 90+% acceptance rates across the population, and 70+% in even the most vaccine-hesitant communities, then the UK shall indeed be able to sprint across the finish line to herd immunity, given the new vaccine supply streams coming on line.
It is going to be those countries with the highest vaccine hesitancy rates (I am looking at you, France) who will sprint until they have vaccinated all the willing, and then crawl to the finish line as they try to browbeat the unwilling into being vaccinated.
Figures show more than 2,000 non-crime hate incident recorded against youths
Non-crime hate incidents involve hostility toward a person with no proof of hate
Despite not being a crime, the incidents are recorded in police systems for years
They can show up on a person's enhanced DBS checks during job applications
Conservative MP Sir John Hayes told Telegraph stats showed 'disturbing trend' "
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9440167/Children-warned-old-tweets-harm-career-prospects-2-000-non-crime-hate-incidents-recorded.html
I also find it interesting that Scott'n-Paste was implying that the PM should have done a Macaroon and rolled his own vaccine advice.
Oh, and my position on vaccines and politicians has long been that when asked about efficacy, safety of medicines in general, the politicians should refer the question to the advice of the regulator.
I don't hold out much hope - there's maybe a 5-10% chance it'll happen in my lifetime. But the lesson I learnt long ago is that the public will accept far more in the way of restrictions than any libertarian-minded individual will be willing to concede, and so the current debate on how exactly we emerge from the pandemic simply doesn't move me very much.
And please can I have a citation for the 99% and 99.9% figures? I find them implausible.
--AS
The key consideration is not to be the guy the press end up blaming for deaths being higher than they absolutely needed to be. Being blamed for (arguable and difficult to quantify) economic damage is very much the safer option.
There is no solution to the island of Ireland given current red lines. The question is whose red lines shift and when. To suggest that the good people of Hartlepool are mysteriously linked with petrol bombs in Ireland is off beam and needs rethinking.
What is this shit ?
An important caveat is we are not seeing the latest advice from SAGE, which might be quite different to what is publicly available. Presumably this is because the govt don't want us to see it, given Whitty has said he is happy for advice to be publicly available in real time.
If I was doing this (and I've done similar) then I'd have a range of models with different assumptions. One of those would be cautious as hell (worst casr, if you like). If that one says we can do x, y and z at fixed time points not too far away an still be ok for no significant new wave of deaths/hospitalisations then that's the one I'd be trumpeting. Everything else is uncertainties, not entirely predictable uncertainties.
Again, not seen the models, but the efficacies, as Richard N says, are probably not that terrible for transmission (although still maybe cautious) particularly when taking new variants into account.
The issue is that you can't justify the 32% figure - which means you have a problem....
Max knows this well. I suspect what he meant is he is glad his parents now need nothing further than time for full protection
As for red lines, the EU red lines have been there since before the referendum was a twinkle in Farage's eye. Why would they change now? We have chosen to leave the EEA and CU in such a way as to screw part of our own country. The movement needed is the UK back towards practicality as opposed to fantasy.
But all this will do SKS no harm if (and only if) Boris, the Tories and/or Boris's successor come unstuck in one or more of the elephant pits that are opening up. For the simple reason that SKS does not have to beat truth, justice, reason or any other ontological abstraction. In a two horse race for who will be PM he only has to be ahead of the Tory. The chance that he can be is less than evens but should not be underestimated.
Therefore the chance of Boris finding a reason for an early election should not be overlooked either.
But yes, low 90% for Pfizer and Moderna and something a little lower for AZN all sound plausible to me, and in line with the original trials.
--AS This is the SPI-M-O summary of the models and their outputs https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/975909/S1182_SPI-M-O_Summary_of_modelling_of_easing_roadmap_step_2_restrictions.pdf
As you can see, they did try a range of models with different assumptions, and they considered what happens if some of the later stages of the planned re-opening were skipped. I think they were asking the right questions. They used a range of vaccine effectiveness numbers which might have been a bit on the cautious side (but not out of line with observed data).
--AS
Edit: oops, combined two replies, oh well I'll just leave it like that.
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1379290591406661634
https://twitter.com/fact_covid/status/1379400593001828353
https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1379292360333422595
But the point is that they may prefer deliberately pessimistic estimates that they can't justify over realistic ones that they can. If the former are too pessimistic, the downside in terms of their reputations is manageable. if the latter are too optimistic, someone gets thrown under a bus, regardless of whether they were doing the right thing at the time or not.
Though having said that, given the Tories ever increasing progress in the North, I wonder whether boundary changes mean as much as they used to?
What timescale allows the new boundaries to be ratified and then an early election? I could see the case for a May 2023 election as the limit otherwise is 2024.
https://twitter.com/DarrenGBNews/status/1379419299597709312?s=20
When evidence points out the figure should be nearer 80% (as is the case now) you have a problem and given that someone is looking to pass on any blame they can you better have a good reason to justify the assumption.
The movement needed is for the NI to abolish the Protocol and reintegrate with the UK outside the EEA and CU.
The EU's red lines? They're their problem not ours.
Fire bombs? They're the problem of anyone using them, not us.
So my estimate was 10k off on first doses and massively off on second. England moves up to a 75 day dose gap.
The sanest answer is for both parties to compromise and dump their "red lines". Unless or until the EU is prepared to do so, the UK must look after its own interests because nobody else is planning to do so.
And what is the number we should be counting in that regard? My guess it should be total current infectious cases/million of population - i.e. it should exclude non-infectious long COVID, and current recovery cases which are past the point of infectivity, but should include those long COVID cases in the immune-compromised where the patient is still infectious.
He is known as Boris in public life and it is his name.
I know plenty of people with names or nicknames that are acceptable to be used by family and close friends, but not by others. Its none of your business frankly.
I agree and I don't understand the excitement on here. There are lots of uncertainties. If all the models say everything is great (on some central assumptions about vaccine efficacy) and we did then get another wave then everyone would be blaming the scientists - and rightly so.
This is a set of scenarios based on explicit assumptions. Now it's up to the politicians to decide how much Covid risk they'll stomach for given amounts of upside or, to put it a different way, to weigh up the Covid risks against the significant risks of an unnecesary long imposition of restrictions.
Marco Cavaleri, head of vaccines strategy at the EMA, told an Italian newspaper that the agency did not know the mechanism, but now believed that the jab was indeed causing the clotting, which seems to affect mainly younger people."
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/clear-link-between-blood-clots-and-astrazeneca-vaccine-q8nvl82p5
Which means that until we start to agree compromises with the EU there is nothing the EU can do (if they wish to follow WTO rules) than implement the checks they are currently implementing.
Having spent decades in biosecurity, I was heartily sick of the constant search for the worst possible worst case scenario to fuel budget lines for people working in biosecurity. Guess what - the worst possible worst case scenario is always when every one dies a horrible death.
And we can "implement" the Protocol in the most minimalist and irritating way we can imagine that suits us, not them. Since that's our responsibility, not theirs.
1) They have a lot of new MPs yet to benefit from a first-term incumbency boost. A boundary change risks diluting this.
2) Conceivably, the UK population pattern upon which the boundary review was carried out represented a maxima in city population: over the first five years of this decade, it is entirely possible that cities will shrink relative to small towns and shires. Potentially, therefore, a review in a few years' time will be more favourable to the Conservatives than the current one.
3) The advantages of calling an election in Spring rather than Autumn 2023 may be much greater than the advantage in new boundaries.
We should continue to not do the checks. If the EU want checks done they can do them in their territory, not ours.
James Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown
James Gordon Brown...
Leonard James Callaghan
Leonard James Callaghan
Leonard James Callaghan...
James Harold Wilson
James Harold Wilson
James Harold Wilson...
James Keir Hardie
James Keir Hardie
James Keir Hardie...