You were, but the EU decided it doesn't matter about being first in the Queue
Looking at our recently revised vaccine forecasts, they might just be right ?
Tbh, it doesn't pass the sniff test. The forecasts are inputs to reach an output that predicts a horrible 3rd/4th wave. The context of everything from SAGE at the moment is "how can we scare the government into listening to us" and that can be seen on everything they're saying and briefing out. They have to use ultra pessimistic inputs to ensure the output delivers for their goal.
I know it's just the Daily Mail but Whitty and Valance apparently not wanting to let go of social distancing is what this is all about. Vaccines let us out of this nightmare. The scientists, for whatever reason, want to delay that by much longer than June 21st. Doomsday predictions and pessimistic forecasts is the easiest way to do that as politicians won't understand the data anyway.
The wording in the paper is "per cabinet office scenarios". If SAGE were pulling numbers out of their butts, then presumably government would have said so ?
I don't defend any of their other assumptions, but that did give me concern.
That's the same Cabinet Office that is run by lockdown and vaccine passport ultra Michael Gove.
Anyway, we'll just have to wait and see what the real numbers are over the next few weeks/months. We've got Moderna and Novavax coming, they will necessitate a large number of first doses and we also have enough supply of AZ and Pfizer to cover all of the second doses. Something just doesn't add up.
If I was being charitable I'd say that the official forecasts may not include Novavax and J&J until they have received MHRA approval.
It seems quite difficult to get any hard information - but you could well be right about the as yet unapproved (by MHRA) vaccines.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Mildly encouraging, but there's still a very long way to go. Besides anything else, there still aren't nearly enough Tory rebels to win a vote, assuming (given that this is, AIUI, an England only measure) that the Northern Irish MPs and the Scots and Welsh Nats sit on their hands.
Given discussions about this are apparently going on between the UK administrations, i wouldn't be surprised that if the Govt decides to go ahead then they will have SNP support in the Commons. On the grounds that it really needs to be a UK wide scheme to make sense.
BBC News leading on predictions of a third wave of Covid-19 after all restrictions are lifted.
Like what happened in Israel? oh wait.........
The problem in the UK will be that in June when restrictions are due for full lifting, we will not have fully vaccinated a large proportion of our under 50s. This appears to be due to our slowdown in vaccine supply.
The Kent strain is more virulent than the strains in Israel and so more under 50s will be affected and even a very small percentage of deaths in that group will still be pretty large. Although nowhere near like previous waves.
How do you know that
My 49 year old daughter and 45 year old son have both been vaccinated
Well bully for them. I don't suppose we have the necessary statistics available, but take out the people already in priority groups e.g. healthcare workers and I would imagine that the number of under 50s who have been vaccinated, in England at least, is very small. Clinicians have, indeed, expressly been told to go searching for all the outstanding over 50s and not to attempt to move on to the younger cohorts for the time being.
Nobody who has not had their first dose plus the three weeks for it to take effect can be considered protected come June 21st (if the last step of the plan is executed then, which now has to be in serious doubt.) That means everyone who hasn't been vaccinated by the end of May. At the rate things are going, we may very well have failed to finish the over 40s by the end of May, and all the remaining adults will still, of course, be waiting. And it'll be July before the second doses for Phase One begin to seriously tail off.
Bully for them is unfair and as a matter of fact neither had any underlining conditions
They progressed through their GP practice list and were vaccinated in Venue Cymru in Llandudno in the last ten days
The practice is now vaccinating the under 50s as well as second doses
Sorry, I wasn't setting out to be rude. It's purely envy. I think that most of us who are still waiting are impatient to get our turn before we end up catching this bloody thing, because you just know if it happens to you you're going to end up as one of these wretched Long Covid invalids.
Once again, I don't know how the Welsh NHS is doing it (perhaps, unbeknown to most of us, the second coming of Christ happened in Llandrindod Wells circa 1990, and he's now going around making all the vials miraculously multiply,) but if it wasn't for the fact that I've recently found I'm entitled to prioritisation I might still be waiting for mine in June. It's very disheartening.
I appreciate your comments and hope you will be vaccinated asap
Mildly encouraging, but there's still a very long way to go. Besides anything else, there still aren't nearly enough Tory rebels to win a vote, assuming (given that this is, AIUI, an England only measure) that the Northern Irish MPs and the Scots and Welsh Nats sit on their hands.
I think though, that Boris will only move forward with an agreed approach with the other nations....??
On topic, I've found an easy way to make money as far as football betting is concerned.
Whenever a goal is scored, sentiment moves far too far in favour of the team that's just scored compared to any rational assessment of the situation. You can take advantage of that to make money, usually by cashing out.
I shouldn't really be giving my betting strategies away, but since it's PB I don't mind.
And more generally, bet into - and opposite to - immediate overreactions to "drama".
Example: Johnson into hozzie with the Covid, went VERY short to "exit" within 2 months. Great lay, until they suspended the market.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
The hidden discussion in all this is the protection given by having already had the virus - even if the antibody effect has worn off. Something that will only become apparent if we have another wave but few of the unvaccinated fall ill.
Need to speak to Drakeford who seems to be onside with the concept
Drakeford has no MPs in the Commons.
He has Labour mps in Wales and if true about Labour voting against they are going to be in conflict with their Welsh government going into the Senedd election
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Mildly encouraging, but there's still a very long way to go. Besides anything else, there still aren't nearly enough Tory rebels to win a vote, assuming (given that this is, AIUI, an England only measure) that the Northern Irish MPs and the Scots and Welsh Nats sit on their hands.
Given discussions about this are apparently going on between the UK administrations, i wouldn't be surprised that if the Govt decides to go ahead then they will have SNP support in the Commons. On the grounds that it really needs to be a UK wide scheme to make sense.
The Scots and Welsh news both indicate in favour of vaccine passports as a concept, but they all seem to agree the detail needs to be agreed UK wide
Taken with the Australian vaccine news, I reckon the EU has simply impounded all contracted AZ exports, including, perhaps, some of ours. I will hold off on nuking them until I get further proof, but I am close to calling it
How does news of an impounding of Australian exports get out but not news of this alleged impounding of exports to the UK? Serious question?
Theory:
Because this news about the 3.1m jabs seems to have come from the Aussie government (it may not be true, of course). The Oz government has an incentive to leak this info, as it explains their faltering vax drive. And the Oz govt has no way of retaliating anyway
I have read reports that the EU has gamed the UK end of this, and decided that if it blocked AZ shipments to the UK, the UK would not retaliate (eg by blocking lipid exports) because ultimately everyone would suffer (and we wouldn't get our Pfizer jabs from the EU)
However the only way the UK government could resist enormous public pressure to retaliate would be by taking it on the chin, and staying quiet, so voters never find out. So the news has NOT leaked from HMG, unlike Canberra
Likely? No. Impossible? Also no
The EU has been behaving like a crazed drunk for several months. Their politicians live in fear of the voters taking revenge. eg Macron
The only thing we DO know is that the UK has downgraded its forecast vaccine supplies AGAIN, and they won't say why, yet
Maybe we're about to stop using AZ for the U40s. That would evidently have a major impact on our short term ability to vaccinate everyone.
Hadn't thought of that. Interesting possibility (albeit depressing).
It would be nice if the government just told us, to end this speculation. They eventually told us about the Indian shortfall and the bad AZ batch, and tho the news was a bit bleak, it was better than the mad conspiracy theories (which I am happily multiplying, obvs)
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
By definition you are not putting on a hedge to win or lose. You are doing it to keep yourself neutral whatever the outcome.
A City boy like you should not have forgotten that.
The emotional hedge, Topping. It's a sophisticated iteration.
You get either betting win + emotional pain, or betting loss + emotional ecstasy. If you stake such that the equivalent £££ value of your pain or ecstasy = your betting result you are perfectly hedged.
No reason we can't launch this as a new OTC product if you're prepared to do the legwork in the square mile (which I can't face these days).
You said at first that it was bad practice but now say it's perfect and want to launch it as a product.
You are confused.
One of us certainly is!
But, ok, I'll take that as a no. I'll find another bagman.
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
I think emotional hedge is an excellent term.
- Cheers. Chest puffs out - because you are not one to pander.
Whilst everyone is panicking about how a shortage of doses might lead to a "third wave" it is surely worth considering that if that third wave is almost entirely concentrated in the U50s then it is quite likely that it will not result in a large number of deaths, and possibly not a too high level of hospitalisations.
It is worth considering that what we arguably have at the moment is a situation where we could put into practice some of the ideas from the "lockdown sceptics" without the downsides (ie. lock up the old and vulnerable, and let the virus spread through the young). With the bonus that you don't actually have to lock up the old and vulnerable.
That thought occurred to me too. Lockdown and social distancing measures had the effect of avoiding reaching herd immunity naturally because of the terrible cost it would entail, but if there is no longer a terrible cost...
Yes. A friend of mine (who as a diabetic has been vaccinated already in Scotland) posted about the trouble she had navigating this process for her elderly parents in Germany. Nightmare and labyrinthine don't do it justice.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Relax. Last summer we had much lower acquired immunity and no one vaccinated. And pubs were happily open indoors without it causing much harm until the autumn. We could open up all guns blazing on 21st June with no restrictions and still avoid a public health event, as the vaccination programme slowly but surely does the rest of its work.
Covid is over in this country as a health event, thankfully. We just have to wait for the government and public to recover from their PTSD.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
The hidden discussion in all this is the protection given by having already had the virus - even if the antibody effect has worn off. Something that will only become apparent if we have another wave but few of the unvaccinated fall ill.
There are reasons why pandemics rarely last more than a year or so, with the consequences of the virus becoming weaker over time. Because more and more of the population build up, if not immunity, then protection against serious illness. Arguably the widespread lockdowns of this pandemic may have lengthened the natural course of the virus, but this is likely countered by the unprecedented speed of the production of the vaccine.
Which is why i suspect all this stuff from the scientists about some anti Covid measures lasting "years" is just nonsense (excepting some societal change like voluntary wearing of masks on crowded public transport etc). Why should this pandemic be any different those those which have gone before?
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Yes, you have a point. How does the government's insistence it can do all adults with one dose (at least) by the end of July (repeated again today) square with the new lower vax supply forecasts, which actually go DOWN after July? The two things are not compatible
Something is not right.
Also, why does supply actually DECREASE after the end of July, to 2m a week, when until now all the forecasters were predicting an absolute glut by then, as other vaccines come on stream?
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
The hidden discussion in all this is the protection given by having already had the virus - even if the antibody effect has worn off. Something that will only become apparent if we have another wave but few of the unvaccinated fall ill.
There are reasons why pandemics rarely last more than a year or so, with the consequences of the virus becoming weaker over time. Because more and more of the population build up, if not immunity, then protection against serious illness. Arguably the widespread lockdowns of this pandemic may have lengthened the natural course of the virus, but this is likely countered by the unprecedented speed of the production of the vaccine.
Which is why i suspect all this stuff from the scientists about some anti Covid measures lasting "years" is just nonsense (excepting some societal change like voluntary wearing of masks on crowded public transport etc). Why should this pandemic be any different those those which have gone before?
Indeed. I’m mystified by the talk of “living with covid the way we do flu”. It’s bollocks. Vaccine uptake is so high in the UK and the potential mutation pathways for Sars-COV2 sufficiently limited, that covid will prove to be a limited event, rather than a new paradigm.
It’s a shame so few people realise this because it would a) cheer them up, b) mean the British state would not get to satiate its lust for illiberalism.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Yes, you have a point. How does the government's insistence it can do all adults with one dose (at least) by the end of July (repeated again today) square with the new lower vax supply forecasts, which actually go DOWN after July? The two things are not compatible
Something is not right.
Also, why does supply actually DECREASE after the end of July, to 2m a week, when until now all the forecasters were predicting an absolute glut by then, as other vaccines come on stream?
Perplexing
Perhaps the forecasts are only with approved vaccines, whereas the pundits are taking those still to be approved into account?
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Yes, you have a point. How does the government's insistence it can do all adults with one dose (at least) by the end of July (repeated again today) square with the new lower vax supply forecasts, which actually go DOWN after July? The two things are not compatible
Something is not right.
Also, why does supply actually DECREASE after the end of July, to 2m a week, when until now all the forecasters were predicting an absolute glut by then, as other vaccines come on stream?
Perplexing
Moderna. Scotland took delivery of a large batch today, according to Sturgeon's news conference.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Relax. Last summer we had much lower acquired immunity and no one vaccinated. And pubs were happily open indoors without it causing much harm until the autumn. We could open up all guns blazing on 21st June with no restrictions and still avoid a public health event, as the vaccination programme slowly but surely does the rest of its work.
Covid is over in this country as a health event, thankfully. We just have to wait for the government and public to recover from their PTSD.
Quite. It defies logic to say that a virus which, largely, does not cause serious illness in health people in younger age groups, should cause a serious health crisis just because those age groups aren't vaccinated (although many will have anyway acquired protection through prior infection). Whilst nobody can say for certainty that things won't change it is reasonable to think that the main limiting factor on widespread opening up will not actually be public health risk, but Government caution. But absent obvious evidence of the former the economic and business pressures on the Government to discard caution will be enormous.
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
I think emotional hedge is an excellent term.
- Cheers. Chest puffs out - because you are not one to pander.
But sometimes emotional hedges can win, can't they?
Take me. As a passionate Leeds United fan, I've been desperate for them to be promoted to the PL. Since 2010, I've bet against them being promoted, despite them being favourites or near favourites most years. So for 10 years I grieved but won. Then in 2020 I lost but was ecstatic. So I've done quite well out of my emotional hedge, haven't I? (I'm not so miserable that I bet on them being relegated this year, thank god).
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Yes, you have a point. How does the government's insistence it can do all adults with one dose (at least) by the end of July (repeated again today) square with the new lower vax supply forecasts, which actually go DOWN after July? The two things are not compatible
Something is not right.
Also, why does supply actually DECREASE after the end of July, to 2m a week, when until now all the forecasters were predicting an absolute glut by then, as other vaccines come on stream?
Perplexing
Perhaps the forecasts are only with approved vaccines, whereas the pundits are taking those still to be approved into account?
Another possibility is that a range of supply variations is being modelled of which one study has been published.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Yes, you have a point. How does the government's insistence it can do all adults with one dose (at least) by the end of July (repeated again today) square with the new lower vax supply forecasts, which actually go DOWN after July? The two things are not compatible
Something is not right.
Also, why does supply actually DECREASE after the end of July, to 2m a week, when until now all the forecasters were predicting an absolute glut by then, as other vaccines come on stream?
Perplexing
If, as suggested earlier, it doesn't include the yet-to-be-approved vaccines (Novavax and J&J) then I suppose at some point our order for Pfizer & Moderna doses will be fulfilled and we'd be down to the remaining AZ doses of our 100m dose AZ order.
On topic, I've identified a way to make money as far as football betting is concerned.
Whenever a goal is scored, sentiment moves far too far in favour of the team that's just scored compared to any rational assessment of the situation. You can take advantage of that, usually by cashing out (rather than waiting to the end of the game).
I shouldn't really be giving my betting strategies away, but since it's PB I don't mind.
BBC News leading on predictions of a third wave of Covid-19 after all restrictions are lifted.
Like what happened in Israel? oh wait.........
The problem in the UK will be that in June when restrictions are due for full lifting, we will not have fully vaccinated a large proportion of our under 50s. This appears to be due to our slowdown in vaccine supply.
The Kent strain is more virulent than the strains in Israel and so more under 50s will be affected and even a very small percentage of deaths in that group will still be pretty large. Although nowhere near like previous waves.
How do you know that
My 49 year old daughter and 45 year old son have both been vaccinated
Well bully for them. I don't suppose we have the necessary statistics available, but take out the people already in priority groups e.g. healthcare workers and I would imagine that the number of under 50s who have been vaccinated, in England at least, is very small. Clinicians have, indeed, expressly been told to go searching for all the outstanding over 50s and not to attempt to move on to the younger cohorts for the time being.
Nobody who has not had their first dose plus the three weeks for it to take effect can be considered protected come June 21st (if the last step of the plan is executed then, which now has to be in serious doubt.) That means everyone who hasn't been vaccinated by the end of May. At the rate things are going, we may very well have failed to finish the over 40s by the end of May, so all the remaining adults will still be waiting. And it'll be July before the second doses for Phase One begin to seriously tail off.
This is nonsense. See my message above. I know so many people in their 30s who have been added to Cat 6 in just the last few weeks it’s become more a case of “what sucker left on this whatsapp group still hasn’t been jabbed”.
How have they managed to get onto Cat 6? My wife is 46 and wants her jab!
I'm 45 and still waiting!
On the other hand, Mum has had a her second dose (scheduled for later this month) brought forward by a few days.
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
I think emotional hedge is an excellent term.
As in emotional support hedge?
"Sir, why are you trying to bring that boxwood onto the airplane?"
"This is my emotional support hedge, Steward. I'll just keep it on my lap."
What happens if your hedge overindulges on the little bottles of spirits during the flight and becomes both tired and emotional? This needs more thought...
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
I think emotional hedge is an excellent term.
- Cheers. Chest puffs out - because you are not one to pander.
But sometimes emotional hedges can win, can't they?
Take me. As a passionate Leeds United fan, I've been desperate for them to be promoted to the PL. Since 2010, I've bet against them being promoted, despite them being favourites or near favourites most years. So for 10 years I grieved but won. Then in 2020 I lost but was ecstatic. So I've done quite well out of my emotional hedge, haven't I? (I'm not so miserable that I bet on them being relegated this year, thank god).
Yes. In this case you've won money to "hedge" your utter 'sick to the stomach' misery at them continually missing out.
Only you can say if it balanced out. If it didn't you got your stake wrong.
My Yorkshire team is Owls. Sleeping Giant. With emphasis on the sleeping.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
Yes, you have a point. How does the government's insistence it can do all adults with one dose (at least) by the end of July (repeated again today) square with the new lower vax supply forecasts, which actually go DOWN after July? The two things are not compatible
Something is not right.
Also, why does supply actually DECREASE after the end of July, to 2m a week, when until now all the forecasters were predicting an absolute glut by then, as other vaccines come on stream?
Perplexing
It's the 12 week gap -
We don't need as many doses to do 7 million firsts in July as 1 million firsts this month.
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 know this has been addressed, but it really is worth reflecting that that is an even sillier criticism that some people make of him being known as Boris (though I don't think you are making it as a criticism). Someone with your exhaustive knowledge of historical politics will have no trouble listing the many PMs and politicians who did not go by their first or 'real' names. Some altered their surnames at various points in their lives too.
The solution is for everyone to call him "Bozzybear" like what that Carrie Symonds does.
A neutral name, implying neither approval or abjuration
Anything is better than Shagger, which one poster on PB insists on using. Really annoys me, that one.
You shouldn't be so intrusive about private grief. Jealousy is ugly in all its forms.
Taken with the Australian vaccine news, I reckon the EU has simply impounded all contracted AZ exports, including, perhaps, some of ours. I will hold off on nuking them until I get further proof, but I am close to calling it
How does news of an impounding of Australian exports get out but not news of this alleged impounding of exports to the UK? Serious question?
I don't believe that EU number.
*If* they have all the the vaccines they have by the end of Q2, it is only 110 million + 360 million. *If* nothing is delayed (past record?). At the end of March they had 110m jabs, but only 76m had been injected.
For full vaccination of adults they need 700 million. Plus a month to inject and become active.
IMO this is setting up in-country distribution logistics as the next scapegoat.
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
I think emotional hedge is an excellent term.
As in emotional support hedge?
"Sir, why are you trying to bring that boxwood onto the airplane?"
"This is my emotional support hedge, Steward. I'll just keep it on my lap."
What happens if your hedge overindulges on the little bottles of spirits during the flight and becomes both tired and emotional? This needs more thought...
Novel take from you earlier!
So hacked off about the freedom to emit hate speech being trashed that you can't summon a care about ID cards for the pub.
Or were you just bending over backwards to avoid a tumble with a fellow Conservative?
I'm not sure what the issue is here? She has a seat, on the couch. They're socially distancing.
There's one seniority seat by the flag and Michel took that, leaving the couch for VDL. Who is the actual President of the EU - Michel or von der Leyen? The EU don't seem to have actually answered that question or officially confirmed who has seniority have they?
Though the EU's website does say that Michel represents the EU externally on foreign and security issues so it seems reasonable he's the one by the flag?
Seems to be an over passionate thread to me. We all need to calm down a bit.
And no one has mentioned that Moderna is nearly here, and Novavax in May now I think.
Indeed and Labour saying, if they have, they will vote against a vaccine passport before any details are known, the four nations are in joint discussions over them, and the EU is producing its own vaccine passport
And not to understand that away from twitter, they have considerable support even with the young
Time for everyone, and especially the idiotic media, to calm down and as Boris has said, they will not be involved before the 17th May decision
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
I think emotional hedge is an excellent term.
As in emotional support hedge?
"Sir, why are you trying to bring that boxwood onto the airplane?"
"This is my emotional support hedge, Steward. I'll just keep it on my lap."
What happens if your hedge overindulges on the little bottles of spirits during the flight and becomes both tired and emotional? This needs more thought...
Novel take from you earlier!
So hacked off about the freedom to emit hate speech being trashed that you can't summon a care about ID cards for the pub.
Or were you just bending over backwards to avoid a tumble with a fellow Conservative?
Nope - as usual, I mean what I say, and you just refuse to believe me. Once we as a nation gave up on the legal protection of the most essential liberties, namely freedom of thought and speech, the subsequent erosion of lesser freedoms has failed to shock me very much.
But of course there's no chance of ID cards in the pub - a renowned superforecaster has assured me that that won't happen...
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
AIUI the *possible* squeeze is only for April. Moderna and Novavax are coming for two.
You were, but the EU decided it doesn't matter about being first in the Queue
Looking at our recently revised vaccine forecasts, they might just be right ?
Tbh, it doesn't pass the sniff test. The forecasts are inputs to reach an output that predicts a horrible 3rd/4th wave. The context of everything from SAGE at the moment is "how can we scare the government into listening to us" and that can be seen on everything they're saying and briefing out. They have to use ultra pessimistic inputs to ensure the output delivers for their goal.
I know it's just the Daily Mail but Whitty and Valance apparently not wanting to let go of social distancing is what this is all about. Vaccines let us out of this nightmare. The scientists, for whatever reason, want to delay that by much longer than June 21st. Doomsday predictions and pessimistic forecasts is the easiest way to do that as politicians won't understand the data anyway.
Wait, so the Cabinet Office produced pessimistic vaccination forecasts to enable SAGE to produce pessimistic models to enable us all to be kept locked down forever? So do we blame the Cabinet Office or SAGE, or both?
Max, I respect your contributions on vaccine efforts a great deal (and many of your posts in general) but I do think you need to take a deep breath here and think about why. Even if you believe in evil power-crazed scientists, they've already, thanks to Covid, secured massive increases in future funding and the ear of senor politicians whenever they want. Why would they want to prolong lockdown restrictions, which are a real pain in the arse for science and scientists. Trust me, we're all zoomed-out and we want our foreign conferences back!
I do think (some on) SAGE are worried about the government cocking this up and getting everyone partying in pubs before the vaccination levels are high enough. Possibly too worried, but they'll have a better idea of what the government is thinking, so maybe not... But if they really want another lockdown/longer restrictions then the most effective way to do it would be to engineer another wave by opening up too fast. Pessimistic models can buy weeks to a month or two before they're ovetaken by reality, another wave could get us months of lovely lockdowns with Whitty and co on the tellybox.
I just have completely lost any trust in SAGE and the government scientists. They churn out incorrect model after incorrect model and continue to expect the people to (literally) live and die by them. There is no peer review process, none of them are made properly public, we're essentially just told to "trust the process" and even after they're proved to be hopelessly pessimistic they keep using the same broken models to churn out yet more garbage.
I could understand using models that weren't properly up to date when this all started, it's not something we're going to be prepared for. We're now over a year into the pandemic and yet the same government advisors are still using barely modified versions of the same models that didn't work very well the first time around. I either have to put that down to basic incompetence or some purposeful misdirection by the scientists to continue keeping the population under lock and key. The first actually seems less likely than the second scenario.
Like the government there is a complete lack of scrutiny of the scientific advice that is going into the decision making process. They've had a year to open everything up and yet we're still basically just left hoping that either the model leaks or they decide to release it.
@MaxPB, I was going to say what @Selebian said, but he said it first and better.
Can I beg you to consider the following piece of meta-advice: it's difficult for any of us to make good predictions when we are angry. Take some time, and come back to it from first principles in a couple of weeks.
I share some of your concerns about the models but I see this as a reflection of poor rigor (sorry @Selebian!) in epidemiology in general rather than particular defects in this work. I think it's fair to say that the SPI-M process is that the various research groups do the modelling, and then the committee functions as a kind of peer review.
--AS
It boils down to trust, AS, I don't trust the government scientists to mark their own homework as you are suggesting the process is. At work I don't mark my own homework, all PRs need to be reviewed before merging.
For the whole year their agenda has been to lock everyone up. Time and again they have pushed data modelling that doesn't stand up to scrutiny to justify locking everyone up forever.
The government has linked unlockdown to hospitalisations and suddenly these scientists have a shiny new model that shows that unlockdown will result in some unrealistic number based on data inputs that are simply false.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit and it is just basic incompetence, however modelling hospitalisations from the known data on our two main vaccines and mode of dosage is not very difficult because we know what the current rate of hospitalisation is by age group and we know the cumulative reduction on the hospitalisation rate with one or two doses of either vaccine and we know how big the pool of unvaccinated people and by how much it will go down and to what extent rhe cumulative rate of hospitalisation reduction will be based on the vaccine programme. I'm a data person and I do it for a living, I can instantly see that they've produced a GIGO model intended to get headlines.
You were, but the EU decided it doesn't matter about being first in the Queue
Looking at our recently revised vaccine forecasts, they might just be right ?
Tbh, it doesn't pass the sniff test. The forecasts are inputs to reach an output that predicts a horrible 3rd/4th wave. The context of everything from SAGE at the moment is "how can we scare the government into listening to us" and that can be seen on everything they're saying and briefing out. They have to use ultra pessimistic inputs to ensure the output delivers for their goal.
I know it's just the Daily Mail but Whitty and Valance apparently not wanting to let go of social distancing is what this is all about. Vaccines let us out of this nightmare. The scientists, for whatever reason, want to delay that by much longer than June 21st. Doomsday predictions and pessimistic forecasts is the easiest way to do that as politicians won't understand the data anyway.
Wait, so the Cabinet Office produced pessimistic vaccination forecasts to enable SAGE to produce pessimistic models to enable us all to be kept locked down forever? So do we blame the Cabinet Office or SAGE, or both?
Max, I respect your contributions on vaccine efforts a great deal (and many of your posts in general) but I do think you need to take a deep breath here and think about why. Even if you believe in evil power-crazed scientists, they've already, thanks to Covid, secured massive increases in future funding and the ear of senor politicians whenever they want. Why would they want to prolong lockdown restrictions, which are a real pain in the arse for science and scientists. Trust me, we're all zoomed-out and we want our foreign conferences back!
I do think (some on) SAGE are worried about the government cocking this up and getting everyone partying in pubs before the vaccination levels are high enough. Possibly too worried, but they'll have a better idea of what the government is thinking, so maybe not... But if they really want another lockdown/longer restrictions then the most effective way to do it would be to engineer another wave by opening up too fast. Pessimistic models can buy weeks to a month or two before they're ovetaken by reality, another wave could get us months of lovely lockdowns with Whitty and co on the tellybox.
I just have completely lost any trust in SAGE and the government scientists. They churn out incorrect model after incorrect model and continue to expect the people to (literally) live and die by them. There is no peer review process, none of them are made properly public, we're essentially just told to "trust the process" and even after they're proved to be hopelessly pessimistic they keep using the same broken models to churn out yet more garbage.
I could understand using models that weren't properly up to date when this all started, it's not something we're going to be prepared for. We're now over a year into the pandemic and yet the same government advisors are still using barely modified versions of the same models that didn't work very well the first time around. I either have to put that down to basic incompetence or some purposeful misdirection by the scientists to continue keeping the population under lock and key. The first actually seems less likely than the second scenario.
Like the government there is a complete lack of scrutiny of the scientific advice that is going into the decision making process. They've had a year to open everything up and yet we're still basically just left hoping that either the model leaks or they decide to release it.
@MaxPB, I was going to say what @Selebian said, but he said it first and better.
Can I beg you to consider the following piece of meta-advice: it's difficult for any of us to make good predictions when we are angry. Take some time, and come back to it from first principles in a couple of weeks.
I share some of your concerns about the models but I see this as a reflection of poor rigor (sorry @Selebian!) in epidemiology in general rather than particular defects in this work. I think it's fair to say that the SPI-M process is that the various research groups do the modelling, and then the committee functions as a kind of peer review.
--AS
It boils down to trust, AS, I don't trust the government scientists to mark their own homework as you are suggesting the process is. At work I don't mark my own homework, all PRs need to be reviewed before merging.
For the whole year their agenda has been to lock everyone up. Time and again they have pushed data modelling that doesn't stand up to scrutiny to justify locking everyone up forever.
The government has linked unlockdown to hospitalisations and suddenly these scientists have a shiny new model that shows that unlockdown will result in some unrealistic number based on data inputs that are simply false.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit and it is just basic incompetence, however modelling hospitalisations from the known data on our two main vaccines and mode of dosage is not very difficult because we know what the current rate of hospitalisation is by age group and we know the cumulative reduction on the hospitalisation rate with one or two doses of either vaccine and we know how big the pool of unvaccinated people and by how much it will go down and to what extent rhe cumulative rate of hospitalisation reduction will be based on the vaccine programme. I'm a data person and I do it for a living, I can instantly see that they've produced a GIGO model intended to get headlines.
But isn't it the case that there is not one model being used.
Rather there are numerous, independent groups providing the models and data to SAGE and government which provides the wide range of likely outcomes from the various models.
The peer review is essentially being done by having so many models and using commonalities in those outcomes.
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
I think emotional hedge is an excellent term.
As in emotional support hedge?
"Sir, why are you trying to bring that boxwood onto the airplane?"
"This is my emotional support hedge, Steward. I'll just keep it on my lap."
What happens if your hedge overindulges on the little bottles of spirits during the flight and becomes both tired and emotional? This needs more thought...
Novel take from you earlier!
So hacked off about the freedom to emit hate speech being trashed that you can't summon a care about ID cards for the pub.
Or were you just bending over backwards to avoid a tumble with a fellow Conservative?
Nope - as usual, I mean what I say, and you just refuse to believe me. Once we as a nation gave up on the legal protection of the most essential liberties, namely freedom of thought and speech, the subsequent erosion of lesser freedoms has failed to shock me very much.
But of course there's no chance of ID cards in the pub - a renowned superforecaster has assured me that that won't happen...
Yes I stick with that. Be flabbergasted if I'm wrong and it does happen. Also displeased.
Not "thought". We think what we want. You wouldn't believe some of what transpires in my bonce. It's definitely not all about fighting for social justice.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
AIUI the *possible* squeeze is only for April. Moderna and Novavax are coming for two.
I just think it is time for everyone to calm down a little and maybe less speculation, especially based on the useless media reporting, will benefit the health of the nation quite considerably
You were, but the EU decided it doesn't matter about being first in the Queue
Looking at our recently revised vaccine forecasts, they might just be right ?
Tbh, it doesn't pass the sniff test. The forecasts are inputs to reach an output that predicts a horrible 3rd/4th wave. The context of everything from SAGE at the moment is "how can we scare the government into listening to us" and that can be seen on everything they're saying and briefing out. They have to use ultra pessimistic inputs to ensure the output delivers for their goal.
I know it's just the Daily Mail but Whitty and Valance apparently not wanting to let go of social distancing is what this is all about. Vaccines let us out of this nightmare. The scientists, for whatever reason, want to delay that by much longer than June 21st. Doomsday predictions and pessimistic forecasts is the easiest way to do that as politicians won't understand the data anyway.
Wait, so the Cabinet Office produced pessimistic vaccination forecasts to enable SAGE to produce pessimistic models to enable us all to be kept locked down forever? So do we blame the Cabinet Office or SAGE, or both?
Max, I respect your contributions on vaccine efforts a great deal (and many of your posts in general) but I do think you need to take a deep breath here and think about why. Even if you believe in evil power-crazed scientists, they've already, thanks to Covid, secured massive increases in future funding and the ear of senor politicians whenever they want. Why would they want to prolong lockdown restrictions, which are a real pain in the arse for science and scientists. Trust me, we're all zoomed-out and we want our foreign conferences back!
I do think (some on) SAGE are worried about the government cocking this up and getting everyone partying in pubs before the vaccination levels are high enough. Possibly too worried, but they'll have a better idea of what the government is thinking, so maybe not... But if they really want another lockdown/longer restrictions then the most effective way to do it would be to engineer another wave by opening up too fast. Pessimistic models can buy weeks to a month or two before they're ovetaken by reality, another wave could get us months of lovely lockdowns with Whitty and co on the tellybox.
I just have completely lost any trust in SAGE and the government scientists. They churn out incorrect model after incorrect model and continue to expect the people to (literally) live and die by them. There is no peer review process, none of them are made properly public, we're essentially just told to "trust the process" and even after they're proved to be hopelessly pessimistic they keep using the same broken models to churn out yet more garbage.
I could understand using models that weren't properly up to date when this all started, it's not something we're going to be prepared for. We're now over a year into the pandemic and yet the same government advisors are still using barely modified versions of the same models that didn't work very well the first time around. I either have to put that down to basic incompetence or some purposeful misdirection by the scientists to continue keeping the population under lock and key. The first actually seems less likely than the second scenario.
Like the government there is a complete lack of scrutiny of the scientific advice that is going into the decision making process. They've had a year to open everything up and yet we're still basically just left hoping that either the model leaks or they decide to release it.
@MaxPB, I was going to say what @Selebian said, but he said it first and better.
Can I beg you to consider the following piece of meta-advice: it's difficult for any of us to make good predictions when we are angry. Take some time, and come back to it from first principles in a couple of weeks.
I share some of your concerns about the models but I see this as a reflection of poor rigor (sorry @Selebian!) in epidemiology in general rather than particular defects in this work. I think it's fair to say that the SPI-M process is that the various research groups do the modelling, and then the committee functions as a kind of peer review.
--AS
It boils down to trust, AS, I don't trust the government scientists to mark their own homework as you are suggesting the process is. At work I don't mark my own homework, all PRs need to be reviewed before merging.
For the whole year their agenda has been to lock everyone up. Time and again they have pushed data modelling that doesn't stand up to scrutiny to justify locking everyone up forever.
The government has linked unlockdown to hospitalisations and suddenly these scientists have a shiny new model that shows that unlockdown will result in some unrealistic number based on data inputs that are simply false.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit and it is just basic incompetence, however modelling hospitalisations from the known data on our two main vaccines and mode of dosage is not very difficult because we know what the current rate of hospitalisation is by age group and we know the cumulative reduction on the hospitalisation rate with one or two doses of either vaccine and we know how big the pool of unvaccinated people and by how much it will go down and to what extent rhe cumulative rate of hospitalisation reduction will be based on the vaccine programme. I'm a data person and I do it for a living, I can instantly see that they've produced a GIGO model intended to get headlines.
But isn't it the case that there is not one model being used.
Rather there are numerous, independent groups providing the models and data to SAGE and government which provides the wide range of likely outcomes from the various models.
The peer review is essentially being done by having so many models and using commonalities in those outcomes.
Not especially good over a year into the pandemic. These shouldn't exactly be secrets.
The science and models should be put online and people should be able to review it.
You were, but the EU decided it doesn't matter about being first in the Queue
Looking at our recently revised vaccine forecasts, they might just be right ?
Tbh, it doesn't pass the sniff test. The forecasts are inputs to reach an output that predicts a horrible 3rd/4th wave. The context of everything from SAGE at the moment is "how can we scare the government into listening to us" and that can be seen on everything they're saying and briefing out. They have to use ultra pessimistic inputs to ensure the output delivers for their goal.
I know it's just the Daily Mail but Whitty and Valance apparently not wanting to let go of social distancing is what this is all about. Vaccines let us out of this nightmare. The scientists, for whatever reason, want to delay that by much longer than June 21st. Doomsday predictions and pessimistic forecasts is the easiest way to do that as politicians won't understand the data anyway.
Wait, so the Cabinet Office produced pessimistic vaccination forecasts to enable SAGE to produce pessimistic models to enable us all to be kept locked down forever? So do we blame the Cabinet Office or SAGE, or both?
Max, I respect your contributions on vaccine efforts a great deal (and many of your posts in general) but I do think you need to take a deep breath here and think about why. Even if you believe in evil power-crazed scientists, they've already, thanks to Covid, secured massive increases in future funding and the ear of senor politicians whenever they want. Why would they want to prolong lockdown restrictions, which are a real pain in the arse for science and scientists. Trust me, we're all zoomed-out and we want our foreign conferences back!
I do think (some on) SAGE are worried about the government cocking this up and getting everyone partying in pubs before the vaccination levels are high enough. Possibly too worried, but they'll have a better idea of what the government is thinking, so maybe not... But if they really want another lockdown/longer restrictions then the most effective way to do it would be to engineer another wave by opening up too fast. Pessimistic models can buy weeks to a month or two before they're ovetaken by reality, another wave could get us months of lovely lockdowns with Whitty and co on the tellybox.
I just have completely lost any trust in SAGE and the government scientists. They churn out incorrect model after incorrect model and continue to expect the people to (literally) live and die by them. There is no peer review process, none of them are made properly public, we're essentially just told to "trust the process" and even after they're proved to be hopelessly pessimistic they keep using the same broken models to churn out yet more garbage.
I could understand using models that weren't properly up to date when this all started, it's not something we're going to be prepared for. We're now over a year into the pandemic and yet the same government advisors are still using barely modified versions of the same models that didn't work very well the first time around. I either have to put that down to basic incompetence or some purposeful misdirection by the scientists to continue keeping the population under lock and key. The first actually seems less likely than the second scenario.
Like the government there is a complete lack of scrutiny of the scientific advice that is going into the decision making process. They've had a year to open everything up and yet we're still basically just left hoping that either the model leaks or they decide to release it.
@MaxPB, I was going to say what @Selebian said, but he said it first and better.
Can I beg you to consider the following piece of meta-advice: it's difficult for any of us to make good predictions when we are angry. Take some time, and come back to it from first principles in a couple of weeks.
I share some of your concerns about the models but I see this as a reflection of poor rigor (sorry @Selebian!) in epidemiology in general rather than particular defects in this work. I think it's fair to say that the SPI-M process is that the various research groups do the modelling, and then the committee functions as a kind of peer review.
--AS
It boils down to trust, AS, I don't trust the government scientists to mark their own homework as you are suggesting the process is. At work I don't mark my own homework, all PRs need to be reviewed before merging.
For the whole year their agenda has been to lock everyone up. Time and again they have pushed data modelling that doesn't stand up to scrutiny to justify locking everyone up forever.
The government has linked unlockdown to hospitalisations and suddenly these scientists have a shiny new model that shows that unlockdown will result in some unrealistic number based on data inputs that are simply false.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit and it is just basic incompetence, however modelling hospitalisations from the known data on our two main vaccines and mode of dosage is not very difficult because we know what the current rate of hospitalisation is by age group and we know the cumulative reduction on the hospitalisation rate with one or two doses of either vaccine and we know how big the pool of unvaccinated people and by how much it will go down and to what extent rhe cumulative rate of hospitalisation reduction will be based on the vaccine programme. I'm a data person and I do it for a living, I can instantly see that they've produced a GIGO model intended to get headlines.
But isn't it the case that there is not one model being used.
Rather there are numerous, independent groups providing the models and data to SAGE and government which provides the wide range of likely outcomes from the various models.
The peer review is essentially being done by having so many models and using commonalities in those outcomes.
That still relies on them essentially marking their own homework. It's not a proper peer review process.
Seems to be an over passionate thread to me. We all need to calm down a bit.
And no one has mentioned that Moderna is nearly here, and Novavax in May now I think.
Indeed and Labour saying, if they have, they will vote against a vaccine passport before any details are known, the four nations are in joint discussions over them, and the EU is producing its own vaccine passport
And not to understand that away from twitter, they have considerable support even with the young
Time for everyone, and especially the idiotic media, to calm down and as Boris has said, they will not be involved before the 17th May decision
You were, but the EU decided it doesn't matter about being first in the Queue
Looking at our recently revised vaccine forecasts, they might just be right ?
Tbh, it doesn't pass the sniff test. The forecasts are inputs to reach an output that predicts a horrible 3rd/4th wave. The context of everything from SAGE at the moment is "how can we scare the government into listening to us" and that can be seen on everything they're saying and briefing out. They have to use ultra pessimistic inputs to ensure the output delivers for their goal.
I know it's just the Daily Mail but Whitty and Valance apparently not wanting to let go of social distancing is what this is all about. Vaccines let us out of this nightmare. The scientists, for whatever reason, want to delay that by much longer than June 21st. Doomsday predictions and pessimistic forecasts is the easiest way to do that as politicians won't understand the data anyway.
The wording in the paper is "per cabinet office scenarios". If SAGE were pulling numbers out of their butts, then presumably government would have said so ?
I don't defend any of their other assumptions, but that did give me concern.
That's the same Cabinet Office that is run by lockdown and vaccine passport ultra Michael Gove.
Anyway, we'll just have to wait and see what the real numbers are over the next few weeks/months. We've got Moderna and Novavax coming, they will necessitate a large number of first doses and we also have enough supply of AZ and Pfizer to cover all of the second doses. Something just doesn't add up.
If I was being charitable I'd say that the official forecasts may not include Novavax and J&J until they have received MHRA approval.
It seems quite difficult to get any hard information - but you could well be right about the as yet unapproved (by MHRA) vaccines.
Re the (excellent) Header, I’d add in 2 specifics to avoid if you can when betting. These apply only if you care about the outcome - and therefore do apply to most of us here when it comes to politics.
First one is the dreaded Confirmation Bias. We all know about this and if we don’t “Casino Royale” will soon put us right. It’s where you so want a particular outcome that you analyse all the data looking for how it supports the outcome whilst finding ways to ignore things which indicate otherwise. A current example is how the marginalized and sulking Corbynite Left in Labour interpret everything as proof positive that Keir Starmer is a dud and Jeremy would be doing miles better. Fine, I’m tempted myself, I do miss Jeremy, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
The second one is less discussed but imo is more insidious. It’s where you do the opposite of the above. Negative Confirmation Bias, if you like, but best described as the Emotional Hedge. Here, you don’t go looking for why what you want to happen will happen, you go looking for why what you fear will happen will happen. You overestimate the likelihood of what you dread coming to pass and you bet accordingly. The idea is that if (say) as a Remainer your worst fears are justified and the country votes in a Referendum to become an insular, impoverished backwater, living in the past, pretty much doomed to irrelevance on the international stage, your anguish is cushioned by the fact that you’ve won a few quid on betfair and can take your sweetheart out for a chicken dinner. Again, fine, but if you habitually bet this way you’ll lose money.
Good example of this from recent history, how many PB Tories talked themselves into believing Corbyn might well pull off a shock hung parliament in the last GE. This wasn’t just overreliance on recent history (GE17), it was pure unadulterated, ‘wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat’ fear of the man. Fear of an actual socialist in actual power who would attack all that they hold dear – i.e. hardcoded class privilege – and possibly even remove a vestige of it. But, phew, it didn’t happen. Cons by 80. Their betting losses were a small price to pay for such a flood of relief.
So there you go, Confirmation Bias and the Emotional Hedge. Bad betting practice and very very common. You need to avoid both - and you want to be on the other side of bets made by those who succumb.
I think emotional hedge is an excellent term.
As in emotional support hedge?
"Sir, why are you trying to bring that boxwood onto the airplane?"
"This is my emotional support hedge, Steward. I'll just keep it on my lap."
What happens if your hedge overindulges on the little bottles of spirits during the flight and becomes both tired and emotional? This needs more thought...
Novel take from you earlier!
So hacked off about the freedom to emit hate speech being trashed that you can't summon a care about ID cards for the pub.
Or were you just bending over backwards to avoid a tumble with a fellow Conservative?
Nope - as usual, I mean what I say, and you just refuse to believe me. Once we as a nation gave up on the legal protection of the most essential liberties, namely freedom of thought and speech, the subsequent erosion of lesser freedoms has failed to shock me very much.
But of course there's no chance of ID cards in the pub - a renowned superforecaster has assured me that that won't happen...
Yes I stick with that. Be flabbergasted if I'm wrong and it does happen. Also displeased.
Not "thought". We think what we want. You wouldn't believe some of what transpires in my bonce. It's definitely not all about fighting for social justice.
Seems to be an over passionate thread to me. We all need to calm down a bit.
And no one has mentioned that Moderna is nearly here, and Novavax in May now I think.
Indeed and Labour saying, if they have, they will vote against a vaccine passport before any details are known, the four nations are in joint discussions over them, and the EU is producing its own vaccine passport
And not to understand that away from twitter, they have considerable support even with the young
Time for everyone, and especially the idiotic media, to calm down and as Boris has said, they will not be involved before the 17th May decision
Well we tried to tell you that the whole nation making enormous sacrifices for your comfort and safety might have implications down the line but you chose not to listen.
People were promised the return of their freedom if they played ball with the vaccine program. They have overwhelmingly played ball, and they don't have their freedom.
And when they get their freedom, it won't be the sort they enjoyed before covid struck. It very much looks like that freedom won't ever be coming back.
The only surprise is they aren't more emotive. Get used to it. Its going to get far, far more intense from here on in.
The roadmap is on course and until someone says officially it cannot be met then the UK will have done very well compared to others
You were, but the EU decided it doesn't matter about being first in the Queue
Looking at our recently revised vaccine forecasts, they might just be right ?
Tbh, it doesn't pass the sniff test. The forecasts are inputs to reach an output that predicts a horrible 3rd/4th wave. The context of everything from SAGE at the moment is "how can we scare the government into listening to us" and that can be seen on everything they're saying and briefing out. They have to use ultra pessimistic inputs to ensure the output delivers for their goal.
I know it's just the Daily Mail but Whitty and Valance apparently not wanting to let go of social distancing is what this is all about. Vaccines let us out of this nightmare. The scientists, for whatever reason, want to delay that by much longer than June 21st. Doomsday predictions and pessimistic forecasts is the easiest way to do that as politicians won't understand the data anyway.
The wording in the paper is "per cabinet office scenarios". If SAGE were pulling numbers out of their butts, then presumably government would have said so ?
I don't defend any of their other assumptions, but that did give me concern.
That's the same Cabinet Office that is run by lockdown and vaccine passport ultra Michael Gove.
Anyway, we'll just have to wait and see what the real numbers are over the next few weeks/months. We've got Moderna and Novavax coming, they will necessitate a large number of first doses and we also have enough supply of AZ and Pfizer to cover all of the second doses. Something just doesn't add up.
If I was being charitable I'd say that the official forecasts may not include Novavax and J&J until they have received MHRA approval.
It seems quite difficult to get any hard information - but you could well be right about the as yet unapproved (by MHRA) vaccines.
Some politics bets are about political knowledge (sometimes inside knowledge) - next leader etc type of markets . Most though are about numbers and analysis of them. Analysis that is beyond most casual politicos as it is not looking at it politically but mathematically. This site is great for that and following the threads around major elections will yield some genuine value punts and wins. That is politicalbetting's strength and its weakness is definitely a smugness bordering on obsessive and juvenile behaviour at times.Also when the site gets in politics rather than political betting it has a massive metro university educated white collar bias
I agree with a lot of this, though I personally think the biggest edge over the markets isn't so much deeper analysis of the polls/numbers but a broadly dispassionate analysis of them. People are just awful at separating what they want and what they expect in elections.
I don't bet a lot but when I do I tend to vote the opposite of what I actually want or think would be for the best. I am instinctively suspicious of my reasoning if what I want to happen is what I am betting on. So I was much more comfortable betting on Trump in 2016 (and, more sadly, in 2020) than I would have been the opposite.
The problem with this bias (logic is far too rational a description) is that my wife accuses me of being Eeyore on a particularly difficult day so I am far too inclined to believe the worst. Still, thanks for noticing me.
Seems to be an over passionate thread to me. We all need to calm down a bit.
And no one has mentioned that Moderna is nearly here, and Novavax in May now I think.
Indeed and Labour saying, if they have, they will vote against a vaccine passport before any details are known, the four nations are in joint discussions over them, and the EU is producing its own vaccine passport
And not to understand that away from twitter, they have considerable support even with the young
Time for everyone, and especially the idiotic media, to calm down and as Boris has said, they will not be involved before the 17th May decision
Well we tried to tell you that the whole nation making enormous sacrifices for your comfort and safety might have implications down the line but you chose not to listen.
People were promised the return of their freedom if they played ball with the vaccine program. They have overwhelmingly played ball, and they don't have their freedom.
And when they get their freedom, it won't be the sort they enjoyed before covid struck. It very much looks like that freedom won't ever be coming back.
The only surprise is they aren't more emotive. Get used to it. Its going to get far, far more intense from here on in.
The roadmap is on course and until someone says officially it cannot be met then the UK will have done very well compared to others
And no need to be personal
It isn;t a roadmap to freedom. Its a roadmap from a high security prison to an open prison.
I can guarantee you that any support for vaccine passports amongst the young is based on the Govt specifically linking them to full reopening of social venues AND the assumption that they will have access to them. If things begin to reopen before the vaccines come online then BOTH those justifications will disappear. There is no way that young people will accept the “alternative” of regular testing.
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 know this has been addressed, but it really is worth reflecting that that is an even sillier criticism that some people make of him being known as Boris (though I don't think you are making it as a criticism). Someone with your exhaustive knowledge of historical politics will have no trouble listing the many PMs and politicians who did not go by their first or 'real' names. Some altered their surnames at various points in their lives too.
The solution is for everyone to call him "Bozzybear" like what that Carrie Symonds does.
A neutral name, implying neither approval or abjuration
Anything is better than Shagger, which one poster on PB insists on using. Really annoys me, that one.
The ones that annoy me are Bozo and The Clown. Not because I am particularly averse to political insults (I may have indulged in a Tony B. Liar once or twice in the past) but that it is presented as some sort of insightful political analysis.
Gideon for Osborne was a good one, since even if people want to pretend it's not right for people to go by a second name or, in effect, a political name rather than what they are known as personally, it was not even an accurate one, as he legally changed his name from Gideon.
I always found people choosing to use Gideon in a negative sense to be antisemitic. A precursor of what was to come.
Like its insulting to have a Hebrew name.
Interesting thought. I'd never considered it. He's not Jewish is he? Or you mean just the implication.
[pause]
OK just did a bit of google-fu and thought - oh he's the son of a long line of baronets hence is def not Jewish. Then I read further and see that his mother is Jewish and hence I think that "makes" him Jewish so you could well be right.
I mean the implication.
Whether he's Jewish or not is neither here nor there, the name Gideon is a Hebrew, very Jewish, name.
By calling a Chancellor/political opponent a Hebrew name as an insult . . . its rather creepy and antisemitic. Undercurrents of "can't trust him, he's a Jew" - and whether he is or not is not the point, the very notion that a Hebrew name is being used instead of his given name to insult him is deeply unpleasant.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
AIUI the *possible* squeeze is only for April. Moderna and Novavax are coming for two.
I just think it is time for everyone to calm down a little and maybe less speculation, especially based on the useless media reporting, will benefit the health of the nation quite considerably
Asking for "calmness" and "less speculation" as we head to the crucial moment in a terrifying once-in-a-century pandemic that is slaughtering millions and destroying economies is perhaps a tad optimistic, especially on a site explicitly dedicated to over-excited speculation
On topic, I've identified a way to make money as far as football betting is concerned.
Whenever a goal is scored, sentiment moves far too far in favour of the team that's just scored compared to any rational assessment of the situation. You can take advantage of that, usually by cashing out (rather than waiting to the end of the game).
I shouldn't really be giving my betting strategies away, but since it's PB I don't mind.
Seems to be an over passionate thread to me. We all need to calm down a bit.
And no one has mentioned that Moderna is nearly here, and Novavax in May now I think.
Indeed and Labour saying, if they have, they will vote against a vaccine passport before any details are known, the four nations are in joint discussions over them, and the EU is producing its own vaccine passport
And not to understand that away from twitter, they have considerable support even with the young
Time for everyone, and especially the idiotic media, to calm down and as Boris has said, they will not be involved before the 17th May decision
Well we tried to tell you that the whole nation making enormous sacrifices for your comfort and safety might have implications down the line but you chose not to listen.
People were promised the return of their freedom if they played ball with the vaccine program. They have overwhelmingly played ball, and they don't have their freedom.
And when they get their freedom, it won't be the sort they enjoyed before covid struck. It very much looks like that freedom won't ever be coming back.
The only surprise is they aren't more emotive. Get used to it. Its going to get far, far more intense from here on in.
The roadmap is on course and until someone says officially it cannot be met then the UK will have done very well compared to others
And no need to be personal
It isn;t a roadmap to freedom. Its a roadmap from a high security prison to an open prison.
Why did you delete your last post, it was rather good?
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
AIUI the *possible* squeeze is only for April. Moderna and Novavax are coming for two.
I just think it is time for everyone to calm down a little and maybe less speculation, especially based on the useless media reporting, will benefit the health of the nation quite considerably
Asking for "calmness" and "less speculation" as we head to the crucial moment in a terrifying once-in-a-century pandemic that is slaughtering millions and destroying economies is perhaps a tad optimistic, especially on a site explicitly dedicated to over-excited speculation
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
AIUI the *possible* squeeze is only for April. Moderna and Novavax are coming for two.
Again, if the Government knows what is coming then why would they not include these in their estimates? New suppliers are coming on line, but it's of little use if we're only getting a trickle out of them, not a flood.
Seems to be an over passionate thread to me. We all need to calm down a bit.
And no one has mentioned that Moderna is nearly here, and Novavax in May now I think.
Indeed and Labour saying, if they have, they will vote against a vaccine passport before any details are known, the four nations are in joint discussions over them, and the EU is producing its own vaccine passport
And not to understand that away from twitter, they have considerable support even with the young
Time for everyone, and especially the idiotic media, to calm down and as Boris has said, they will not be involved before the 17th May decision
Well we tried to tell you that the whole nation making enormous sacrifices for your comfort and safety might have implications down the line but you chose not to listen.
People were promised the return of their freedom if they played ball with the vaccine program. They have overwhelmingly played ball, and they don't have their freedom.
And when they get their freedom, it won't be the sort they enjoyed before covid struck. It very much looks like that freedom won't ever be coming back.
The only surprise is they aren't more emotive. Get used to it. Its going to get far, far more intense from here on in.
The roadmap is on course and until someone says officially it cannot be met then the UK will have done very well compared to others
And no need to be personal
It isn;t a roadmap to freedom. Its a roadmap from a high security prison to an open prison.
Why did you delete your last post, it was rather good?
The UK was probably never in the number one position, but we get punished for having more accurate statistics than most other countries.
Indeed, according to the Economist, we were the only country to have higher official death figures than the excess death figures when they last updated the figures a few weeks ago.
Considering the amount of Stimulus chucked at it, the USA isn't that impressive.
Indeed it would be interesting to see how the others are affected by debt driven stimulus too. I wouldn't have thought a lot in the developing countries.
"A Department of Health spokesman said: "Our vaccination programme continues to make exceptional progress - with over 37 million jabs administered so far.
""Vaccine supply was always going to vary over time, but we are on course to offer a first vaccine dose to those aged 50 and over by mid-April, and all adults by the end of July.""
In England according to PHE by 01 April there were 6.3 million under 50s who had received a first dose. Spent about 2 mins teasing out some stats but I reckon that’s about a quarter of the under 50s already jabbed.
I now know so many people in their 30s who have had the first dose for spurious reasons it barely warrants a mention on the whatsapp anymore. Without this I can’t help but think the government could have declared mission accomplished ages ago for the over 50s but have some cunning plan as to why they wanted it delayed.
Whether it’s to do with supply negotiations or the behavioural scientists I don’t know. Could be as well to build a fire break within the young before the big reopening. Quite significant when added to the circa 30% with acquired immunity (less double counting).
Using the NIMIS population data, for England, the status, as of 28th March (released 1st April)
Not a bad back of envelope on my part then! It does mean that the 30s and 40s age groups will be much easier to get done than the pessimists are assuming I think.
Note that if we take 94% as the ceiling - and the wrinkles numbers have held around there for a while, we have the following number of first jabs to go, as of 28th March.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
AIUI the *possible* squeeze is only for April. Moderna and Novavax are coming for two.
I just think it is time for everyone to calm down a little and maybe less speculation, especially based on the useless media reporting, will benefit the health of the nation quite considerably
Asking for "calmness" and "less speculation" as we head to the crucial moment in a terrifying once-in-a-century pandemic that is slaughtering millions and destroying economies is perhaps a tad optimistic, especially on a site explicitly dedicated to over-excited speculation
Fair comment
This is, after all, a site that can go into total meltdown when it hears of a potential Lib Dem surge into 2nd place in a small unreliable poll of Westmoreland, so news that a global plague may or may not be ending can be expected to induce some agitated commentary
The UK was probably never in the number one position, but we get punished for having more accurate statistics than most other countries.
Indeed, according to the Economist, we were the only country to have higher official death figures than the excess death figures when they last updated the figures a few weeks ago.
Seems to be an over passionate thread to me. We all need to calm down a bit.
And no one has mentioned that Moderna is nearly here, and Novavax in May now I think.
Indeed and Labour saying, if they have, they will vote against a vaccine passport before any details are known, the four nations are in joint discussions over them, and the EU is producing its own vaccine passport
And not to understand that away from twitter, they have considerable support even with the young
Time for everyone, and especially the idiotic media, to calm down and as Boris has said, they will not be involved before the 17th May decision
Well we tried to tell you that the whole nation making enormous sacrifices for your comfort and safety might have implications down the line but you chose not to listen.
People were promised the return of their freedom if they played ball with the vaccine program. They have overwhelmingly played ball, and they don't have their freedom.
And when they get their freedom, it won't be the sort they enjoyed before covid struck. It very much looks like that freedom won't ever be coming back.
The only surprise is they aren't more emotive. Get used to it. Its going to get far, far more intense from here on in.
The roadmap is on course and until someone says officially it cannot be met then the UK will have done very well compared to others
And no need to be personal
It isn;t a roadmap to freedom. Its a roadmap from a high security prison to an open prison.
Why did you delete your last post, it was rather good?
Admirable if so. However the potentially posh bottle of water might detract
The middle ground betweens EdM's first class and Jezza dossing by the khazi - ever the centrist
"I MUST NOT REPEAT THE MISTAKES OF MY PREDECESSORS I MUST NOT REPEAT THE MISTAKES OF MY PREDECESSORS I MUST NOT REPEAT THE MISTAKES OF MY PREDECESSORS..."
"Plymouth" is on of my favourite bits of rhyming slang - my friend who sadly passed away this year used it a lot
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Example: Johnson into hozzie with the Covid, went VERY short to "exit" within 2 months. Great lay, until they suspended the market.
Twelve weeks til the end of June, in which about 26m further second doses will have to be provided
Assume new Cabinet Office estimate is correct and we only manage 2.7m per week. That's 32.4m.
That means we can only get 6.4 million first doses done in the next three months, of which about 1.6m is mopping up the remaining over 50s. That leaves enough leftover first doses to do about 4.8 million people. If we assume that each year cohort is somewhere around 900,000 people, that means we might be able to get down to 45 year olds, perhaps 44 year olds if we're lucky, by the start of July.
In short, if supply is as crap as has been forecast, then the wheels are therefore going to fall off. Big time.
Unless the court case is successful then it looks as if our trips to the pub are going to be outdoors only for a very long time. And we can all forget about holidays.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/moderna-germany-covid-coronavirus-b926664.html
But, ok, I'll take that as a no. I'll find another bagman.
I'm going to whisper this, but I agree with Drakeford and Johnson over this issue.
Covid is over in this country as a health event, thankfully. We just have to wait for the government and public to recover from their PTSD.
Which is why i suspect all this stuff from the scientists about some anti Covid measures lasting "years" is just nonsense (excepting some societal change like voluntary wearing of masks on crowded public transport etc). Why should this pandemic be any different those those which have gone before?
Something is not right.
Also, why does supply actually DECREASE after the end of July, to 2m a week, when until now all the forecasters were predicting an absolute glut by then, as other vaccines come on stream?
Perplexing
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1379164412632793090
It’s a shame so few people realise this because it would a) cheer them up, b) mean the British state would not get to satiate its lust for illiberalism.
Take me. As a passionate Leeds United fan, I've been desperate for them to be promoted to the PL. Since 2010, I've bet against them being promoted, despite them being favourites or near favourites most years. So for 10 years I grieved but won. Then in 2020 I lost but was ecstatic. So I've done quite well out of my emotional hedge, haven't I? (I'm not so miserable that I bet on them being relegated this year, thank god).
On the other hand, Mum has had a her second dose (scheduled for later this month) brought forward by a few days.
https://twitter.com/SLagodinsky/status/1379483767161622535
Only you can say if it balanced out. If it didn't you got your stake wrong.
My Yorkshire team is Owls. Sleeping Giant. With emphasis on the sleeping.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1379499695395995649?s=20
We don't need as many doses to do 7 million firsts in July as 1 million firsts this month.
Here is my model, "England" tab has the 2.7 million a week supply situation modelled
*If* they have all the the vaccines they have by the end of Q2, it is only 110 million + 360 million. *If* nothing is delayed (past record?). At the end of March they had 110m jabs, but only 76m had been injected.
For full vaccination of adults they need 700 million. Plus a month to inject and become active.
IMO this is setting up in-country distribution logistics as the next scapegoat.
So hacked off about the freedom to emit hate speech being trashed that you can't summon a care about ID cards for the pub.
Or were you just bending over backwards to avoid a tumble with a fellow Conservative?
There's one seniority seat by the flag and Michel took that, leaving the couch for VDL. Who is the actual President of the EU - Michel or von der Leyen? The EU don't seem to have actually answered that question or officially confirmed who has seniority have they?
Though the EU's website does say that Michel represents the EU externally on foreign and security issues so it seems reasonable he's the one by the flag?
https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/presidents_en
And no one has mentioned that Moderna is nearly here, and Novavax in May now I think.
And not to understand that away from twitter, they have considerable support even with the young
Time for everyone, and especially the idiotic media, to calm down and as Boris has said, they will not be involved before the 17th May decision
But of course there's no chance of ID cards in the pub - a renowned superforecaster has assured me that that won't happen...
For the whole year their agenda has been to lock everyone up. Time and again they have pushed data modelling that doesn't stand up to scrutiny to justify locking everyone up forever.
The government has linked unlockdown to hospitalisations and suddenly these scientists have a shiny new model that shows that unlockdown will result in some unrealistic number based on data inputs that are simply false.
Maybe I'm giving them too much credit and it is just basic incompetence, however modelling hospitalisations from the known data on our two main vaccines and mode of dosage is not very difficult because we know what the current rate of hospitalisation is by age group and we know the cumulative reduction on the hospitalisation rate with one or two doses of either vaccine and we know how big the pool of unvaccinated people and by how much it will go down and to what extent rhe cumulative rate of hospitalisation reduction will be based on the vaccine programme. I'm a data person and I do it for a living, I can instantly see that they've produced a GIGO model intended to get headlines.
https://twitter.com/hannahITV/status/1379510242787069953
Rather there are numerous, independent groups providing the models and data to SAGE and government which provides the wide range of likely outcomes from the various models.
The peer review is essentially being done by having so many models and using commonalities in those outcomes.
Not "thought". We think what we want. You wouldn't believe some of what transpires in my bonce. It's definitely not all about fighting for social justice.
The science and models should be put online and people should be able to review it.
And no need to be personal
The problem with this bias (logic is far too rational a description) is that my wife accuses me of being Eeyore on a particularly difficult day so I am far too inclined to believe the worst. Still, thanks for noticing me.
Whether he's Jewish or not is neither here nor there, the name Gideon is a Hebrew, very Jewish, name.
By calling a Chancellor/political opponent a Hebrew name as an insult . . . its rather creepy and antisemitic. Undercurrents of "can't trust him, he's a Jew" - and whether he is or not is not the point, the very notion that a Hebrew name is being used instead of his given name to insult him is deeply unpleasant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjuihw2q_Ts
City 1 up
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1379515329622245385?s=20
Admirable if so. However the potentially posh bottle of water might detract
Looking at that FT graph the true horror show is in countries we have not considered. Egypt, Azerbaijan, Peru.....
Indeed, according to the Economist, we were the only country to have higher official death figures than the excess death figures when they last updated the figures a few weeks ago.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
Indeed it would be interesting to see how the others are affected by debt driven stimulus too. I wouldn't have thought a lot in the developing countries.
Edit, if you click on show all other examples appear, such as France.
Thank you
"I MUST NOT REPEAT THE MISTAKES OF MY PREDECESSORS
I MUST NOT REPEAT THE MISTAKES OF MY PREDECESSORS
I MUST NOT REPEAT THE MISTAKES OF MY PREDECESSORS..."
"Plymouth" is on of my favourite bits of rhyming slang - my friend who sadly passed away this year used it a lot