With the Cummings Commons Committee starting at 0930 – the former advisor Tweets a pic of pre-lockdown Number 10 strategy white board – politicalbetting.com
Am I stuck in some sort of virtual waiting room whilst everyone else has fun on the real version of this thread or is my paranoia just getting the better of me?
I'm not sure what he's trying to prove except that the government was looking at all the options and that it wanted to avoid the health service collapsing?
Isn't this an official secret btw or don't we care about that any more?
I wonder why looking at that white board makes me very nervous about Government brain storming and planning process generally. Eek.
Whiteboards have never produced anything good in my experience. Banal, lowest common denominator dribble is the most they can aspire to and they generally fall short.
Maybe it's just me, but I reckon the most egregious mistakes made by government were in November/December 2020 (including Christmas), leading to the catastrophic death toll in January, rather than in February/March last year. The latter was more forgivable.
Also all Govts seem to be able to waste so much money (I still can't see how they spent all that money on that press room), but they can only find a knackered whiteboard to plan the pandemic resolution.
Existing pandemic response plans did not include a lockdown (this seems like Dom thinks no lockdown = "herd immunity"). Indeed, their baseline assumption - that community spread of a flu-like virus was inevitable - was arguably in opposition to this.
He says that this is from 13 March 2020.
This was about a week (but not more) after it should have been apparent from Italy's experience that an exponential rise in cases would occur in the UK sooner or later. So we can that the government was a little bit slow there. We can also see that from 14 March 2020 the government had effectively concluded that full lockdown was needed, but it did not implement this until 23 March 2020 (although it did 'pre-brief' this, with some effect).
This is not revolutionary information. In fact it is not even surprising that the government was a bit slow to implement measures that went far beyond anything ever announced in a hundred years. Sadly, that delay cost lives, but it does not demonstrate a conspiracy.
I wonder why looking at that white board makes me very nervous about Government brain storming and planning process generally. Eek.
Whiteboards have never produced anything good in my experience. Banal, lowest common denominator dribble is the most they can aspire to and they generally fall short.
That’s cos you are in law. In tech I’d say they are indispensable.
Maybe it's just me, but I reckon the most egregious mistakes made by government were in November/December 2020 (including Christmas), leading to the catastrophic death toll in January, rather than in February/March last year. The latter was more forgivable.
But the whiteboard was wiped clean by Kate Bingham.
I wonder why looking at that white board makes me very nervous about Government brain storming and planning process generally. Eek.
Whiteboards have never produced anything good in my experience. Banal, lowest common denominator dribble is the most they can aspire to and they generally fall short.
That’s cos you are in law. In tech I’d say they are indispensable.
I was thinking this. We used whiteboards for everything in my previous engineering career.
Maybe it's just me, but I reckon the most egregious mistakes made by government were in November/December 2020 (including Christmas), leading to the catastrophic death toll in January, rather than in February/March last year. The latter was more forgivable.
Earlier than that, June when we kept the borders open with no quarantine on arrival.
The first premise, as Mike points out, is in some ways the most interesting one because it shaped other policies. As I said the other day in a world with no vaccines the government is faced with choices that are shite and worse.
In such a world lockdown is only useful to flatten the curve of infection to stop the NHS being overwhelmed. It achieves nothing else because the virus will inevitably spread again when the lockdown is released and more will die. It's one of the reasons that I think the argument about whether lockdown was too late, too early, too weak or too rigorous is frankly sterile and irrelevant. The criteria is that the NHS is not overwhelmed. That's it. Nothing else.
Of course vaccines are a game changer here because covid deferred then suddenly becomes covid survived but if the government advice was that this was not going to happen in 2020 there were no good choices, none at all. 1% of the population were going to die, it was just a matter of how quickly and what collateral damage could be avoided.
Also all Govts seem to be able to waste so much money (I still can't see how they spent all that money on that press room), but they can only find a knackered whiteboard to plan the pandemic resolution.
It is all about balancing want and need. A top quality whiteboard or gold curtains. Something had to give.
I've never done drugs, or fired a gun (excepting an air pistol and an air rifle).
If you learn history then you'll encounter gay people and bi people and all other sorts. Slicing them off into a separate segment as if you can divide the gay Sacred Band from the bi Alexander and the straight(ish) Silver Shields is a bloody odd way to carve up a historical narrative.
I remember Hadrian being described as “a member of the LGBT community” at the British Museum, something that would have bemused any elite Roman male. The essential distinction in Rome was not gay/straight but active/passive.
It's what comes of being more interested in trying to shoehorn historical figures into modern narratives, rather than trying to appreciate them and their times for what they actually were.
AFAIK the entire conception of hetero/homosexuality would've been quite alien to the classical Romans. Theirs was a culture very remote in time and conception from ours, which at the time of Hadrian was still not significantly influenced by Judaeo-Christian mores. I believe it was Suetonius who remarked upon the fact that Claudius only had sex with women and Galba with men, simply because both predilections were regarded as atypical at the time!
Mind you, I've never much liked the entire concept of LGBT (or the more extended alphabet soup acronyms) either. If we're no longer meant to be talking about the "BAME community" anymore, then maybe the concept of "LGBT(QIA+) community" can be next for the chopping block? It's really not much of a thing outside of certain activist circles.
I've never done drugs, or fired a gun (excepting an air pistol and an air rifle).
If you learn history then you'll encounter gay people and bi people and all other sorts. Slicing them off into a separate segment as if you can divide the gay Sacred Band from the bi Alexander and the straight(ish) Silver Shields is a bloody odd way to carve up a historical narrative.
I remember Hadrian being described as “a member of the LGBT community” at the British Museum, something that would have bemused any elite Roman male. The essential distinction in Rome was not gay/straight but active/passive.
It's what comes of being more interested in trying to shoehorn historical figures into modern narratives, rather than trying to appreciate them and their times for what they actually were.
AFAIK the entire conception of hetero/homosexuality would've been quite alien to the classical Romans. Theirs was a culture very remote in time and conception from ours, which at the time of Hadrian was still not significantly influenced by Judaeo-Christian mores. I believe it was Suetonius who remarked upon the fact that Claudius only had sex with women and Galba with men, simply because both predilections were regarded as atypical at the time!
Mind you, I've never much liked the entire concept of LGBT (or the more extended alphabet soup acronyms) either. If we're no longer meant to be talking about the "BAME community" anymore, then maybe the concept of "LGBT(QIA+) community" can be next for the chopping block? It's really not much of a thing outside of certain activist circles.
Yeah but if you're a kid who is confused and afraid about your sexuality, hearing that a well-known historical figure may have been the same as you is likely to be comforting.
I wonder why looking at that white board makes me very nervous about Government brain storming and planning process generally. Eek.
Whiteboards have never produced anything good in my experience. Banal, lowest common denominator dribble is the most they can aspire to and they generally fall short.
That’s cos you are in law. In tech I’d say they are indispensable.
Interesting. In law the idea that you can say anything meaningful in a brief phrase without qualifications is risible. In tech equations etc may mean that the board actually has something significant on it.
That is not an unreasonable assumption on the vaccine at the time
The number of people that had antibody protection via vaccine on the last day of 2020 was perhaps 1/2 a million. For all intents and purposes the working assumption, no vaccine in 2020 was entirely correct.
I wonder why looking at that white board makes me very nervous about Government brain storming and planning process generally. Eek.
Whiteboards have never produced anything good in my experience. Banal, lowest common denominator dribble is the most they can aspire to and they generally fall short.
That’s cos you are in law. In tech I’d say they are indispensable.
Interesting. In law the idea that you can say anything meaningful in a brief phrase without qualifications is risible. In tech equations etc may mean that the board actually has something significant on it.
We tended to use them for tracking projects, production line scheduling, 'roadblocks' — that kind of thing.
I’m not (currently) watching this. But fascinating historical irony that this testimony is almost one year to the day since the rose garden press conference.
Maybe it's just me, but I reckon the most egregious mistakes made by government were in November/December 2020 (including Christmas), leading to the catastrophic death toll in January, rather than in February/March last year. The latter was more forgivable.
Yes, imo the government must get enormous leeway for decisions in February and the first half of March, still significant leeway from then til end of April, from summer 2020 onwards they should be held to close to usual levels of scrutiny and accountability.
I wonder why looking at that white board makes me very nervous about Government brain storming and planning process generally. Eek.
Whiteboards have never produced anything good in my experience. Banal, lowest common denominator dribble is the most they can aspire to and they generally fall short.
That’s cos you are in law. In tech I’d say they are indispensable.
I was thinking this. We used whiteboards for everything in my previous engineering career.
For WFH types, Magic Whiteboards (rolls of white plastic) are excellent.
I wonder why looking at that white board makes me very nervous about Government brain storming and planning process generally. Eek.
Whiteboards have never produced anything good in my experience. Banal, lowest common denominator dribble is the most they can aspire to and they generally fall short.
That’s cos you are in law. In tech I’d say they are indispensable.
Interesting. In law the idea that you can say anything meaningful in a brief phrase without qualifications is risible. In tech equations etc may mean that the board actually has something significant on it.
It's less about equations as it is about dependencies. This is related to that. This can't happen until after the other. It can be useful to show this visually.
I would have thought you would have similar dependencies in the law.
Beth Rigby @BethRigby · 1m Quite the opening statement, and looked like Cummings emotional as he delivered it: "The truth is that senior ministers, officials, advisers - like me, fell disastrously short of the standards the public has a right to expect of its government"Beth Rigby
I've never done drugs, or fired a gun (excepting an air pistol and an air rifle).
If you learn history then you'll encounter gay people and bi people and all other sorts. Slicing them off into a separate segment as if you can divide the gay Sacred Band from the bi Alexander and the straight(ish) Silver Shields is a bloody odd way to carve up a historical narrative.
I remember Hadrian being described as “a member of the LGBT community” at the British Museum, something that would have bemused any elite Roman male. The essential distinction in Rome was not gay/straight but active/passive.
It's what comes of being more interested in trying to shoehorn historical figures into modern narratives, rather than trying to appreciate them and their times for what they actually were.
AFAIK the entire conception of hetero/homosexuality would've been quite alien to the classical Romans. Theirs was a culture very remote in time and conception from ours, which at the time of Hadrian was still not significantly influenced by Judaeo-Christian mores. I believe it was Suetonius who remarked upon the fact that Claudius only had sex with women and Galba with men, simply because both predilections were regarded as atypical at the time!
Mind you, I've never much liked the entire concept of LGBT (or the more extended alphabet soup acronyms) either. If we're no longer meant to be talking about the "BAME community" anymore, then maybe the concept of "LGBT(QIA+) community" can be next for the chopping block? It's really not much of a thing outside of certain activist circles.
Yes, the issue isn't an objection to examining history "as it actually was" the issue is putting a political judgement on that history from a Left-modernist perspective, and then preaching those conclusions at people.
Few would have a problem with unearthing new information and letting people take their own view on it.
I've never done drugs, or fired a gun (excepting an air pistol and an air rifle).
If you learn history then you'll encounter gay people and bi people and all other sorts. Slicing them off into a separate segment as if you can divide the gay Sacred Band from the bi Alexander and the straight(ish) Silver Shields is a bloody odd way to carve up a historical narrative.
I remember Hadrian being described as “a member of the LGBT community” at the British Museum, something that would have bemused any elite Roman male. The essential distinction in Rome was not gay/straight but active/passive.
Mind you, I've never much liked the entire concept of LGBT (or the more extended alphabet soup acronyms) either. If we're no longer meant to be talking about the "BAME community" anymore, then maybe the concept of "LGBT(QIA+) community" can be next for the chopping block? It's really not much of a thing outside of certain activist circles.
PS. It's Pride month next week, so prepare yourself for 4 full-on weeks (at least) of that.
Maybe it's just me, but I reckon the most egregious mistakes made by government were in November/December 2020 (including Christmas), leading to the catastrophic death toll in January, rather than in February/March last year. The latter was more forgivable.
Yes, the whole pre-Christmas period, with the ridiculous unlocking for shopping, the failed-at-the-last-minute attempt to save Christmas, and the single day back at primary school in early January, was a fiasco.
This is really looking like a damp squib isn't it? I mean the whiteboard: hardly sensational. People in power workshopping approach to an emerging crisis. It's what we'd expect them to do.
I've never done drugs, or fired a gun (excepting an air pistol and an air rifle).
If you learn history then you'll encounter gay people and bi people and all other sorts. Slicing them off into a separate segment as if you can divide the gay Sacred Band from the bi Alexander and the straight(ish) Silver Shields is a bloody odd way to carve up a historical narrative.
I remember Hadrian being described as “a member of the LGBT community” at the British Museum, something that would have bemused any elite Roman male. The essential distinction in Rome was not gay/straight but active/passive.
Mind you, I've never much liked the entire concept of LGBT (or the more extended alphabet soup acronyms) either. If we're no longer meant to be talking about the "BAME community" anymore, then maybe the concept of "LGBT(QIA+) community" can be next for the chopping block? It's really not much of a thing outside of certain activist circles.
PS. It's Pride month next week, so prepare yourself for 4 full-on weeks (at least) of that.
Oh that's OK. I don't find alphabetsoupism particularly offensive, merely nebulous and inaccurate.
Maybe it's just me, but I reckon the most egregious mistakes made by government were in November/December 2020 (including Christmas), leading to the catastrophic death toll in January, rather than in February/March last year. The latter was more forgivable.
Yes, the whole pre-Christmas period, with the ridiculous unlocking for shopping, the failed-at-the-last-minute attempt to save Christmas, and the single day back at primary school in early January, was a fiasco.
Am I stuck in some sort of virtual waiting room whilst everyone else has fun on the real version of this thread or is my paranoia just getting the better of me?
Ha, someone’s been spending too much time with Teams and WebEx.
That is not an unreasonable assumption on the vaccine at the time
The number of people that had antibody protection via vaccine on the last day of 2020 was perhaps 1/2 a million. For all intents and purposes the working assumption, no vaccine in 2020 was entirely correct.
It was my understanding that by any previous experience, a vaccine being ready to use in 2020 was something close to ridiculous.
What happened was the war-time-development* effect on process and systems - enough pressure was applied to reduce actions in the vaccine creation process to what *needed* to be done, rather than "but, traditionally..."
*In operational research, this effect is well known and rather interesting.
This is really looking like a damp squib isn't it? I mean the whiteboard: hardly sensational. People in power workshopping approach to an emerging crisis. It's what we'd expect them to do.
They might as well subtitle all the committees and investigations with the phrase "With The Benefit Of Hindsight".
Yes mistakes were undoubtedly made, but ultimately there was never any "perfect" way through. Just muddling through as best we all can balancing difficult decisions which have complex mixes of upsides and downsides. Which is essentially politics in general.
Beth Rigby @BethRigby · 1m Quite the opening statement, and looked like Cummings emotional as he delivered it: "The truth is that senior ministers, officials, advisers - like me, fell disastrously short of the standards the public has a right to expect of its government"Beth Rigby
And the journalists, Beth. Don’t forget the journalists.
Also all Govts seem to be able to waste so much money (I still can't see how they spent all that money on that press room), but they can only find a knackered whiteboard to plan the pandemic resolution.
There is a blog by Mr Cummings, while not in government, in which he pointed out that Cabinet Room is less functional than at the time of the First World War.
The fireplace has been blocked up. Which makes disposing of confidential waste harder.
EDIT: There is a semi-apocryphal story that the operations centres for the US military received massive upgrades in the wake of the film War Games. The politicians who went on tours were appalled/startled by how low tech they were, compared to the film.
I think Dom is thinking "where can I make the most money from this". He's got no chance of getting back at the heart of Government (forget all the stuff about Gove becoming PM) so he will have to do a book deal. Criticising Boris will endear him to the Guardian and make some publisher pony up some cash for his memoirs.
The 'seal off the vulnerable and let it rip through the rest of the population plan'.
In theory it could work BUT
i) You need to identify who is vulnerable - it's broadly correlated with age and comorbifity but you'll get some outliers who it kills outside those groups. ii) You need a hard cutoff if you're assuming differential action between the groups. Someone just below the shielding cut-off may have a minutely differing risk to someone above but their prescribed course of action will be completely different. iii) People above the cutoff may well have interaction, even through no fault of their own with those below. e.g. Old people need to head into hospital for things other than Covid. People in the more vulnerable group will not hermetically seal themselves off forever. iv) Even if everyone followed it 100% you'd get a certain level of mortality in the lesser vulnerable group. v) Spread through the lesser vulnerable group might lead to more transmissible mutations. This means ultimately your lesser vulnerable group isn't large enough so you need to release people from the more vulnerable group to achieve herd immunity. vii) People in the spread group may well try and err... avoid the virus by lessening their contact levels. viii) The temptation/pressure to lock everyone down as the bodies hit the floor rack up will be immense.
So you'd need perfectly defined groups; perfect spread behaviour amongst the spread group, perfect shielding behaviour amongst the shielding group, a big appetite for death...
That is not an unreasonable assumption on the vaccine at the time
The number of people that had antibody protection via vaccine on the last day of 2020 was perhaps 1/2 a million. For all intents and purposes the working assumption, no vaccine in 2020 was entirely correct.
It was my understanding that by any previous experience, a vaccine being ready to use in 2020 was something close to ridiculous.
What happened was the war-time-development* effect on process and systems - enough pressure was applied to reduce actions in the vaccine creation process to what *needed* to be done, rather than "but, traditionally..."
*In operational research, this effect is well known and rather interesting.
One of the most interesting questions for the next time from the long Cummings Twitter thread is whether we could reduce the time required to prove and approve a vaccine even further by using human challenge trials.
If we'd been able to start vaccinating people in September, or even earlier, that would have made a huge difference
The 'seal off the vulnerable and let it rip through the rest of the population plan'.
In theory it could work BUT
i) You need to identify who is vulnerable - it's broadly correlated with age and comorbifity but you'll get some outliers who it kills outside those groups. ii) You need a hard cutoff if you're assuming differential action between the groups. Someone just below the shielding cut-off may have a minutely differing risk to someone above but their prescribed course of action will be completely different. iii) People above the cutoff may well have interaction, even through no fault of their own with those below. e.g. Old people need to head into hospital for things other than Covid. People in the more vulnerable group will not hermetically seal themselves off forever. iv) Even if everyone followed it 100% you'd get a certain level of mortality in the lesser vulnerable group. v) Spread through the lesser vulnerable group might lead to more transmissible mutations. This means ultimately your lesser vulnerable group isn't large enough so you need to release people from the more vulnerable group to achieve herd immunity. vii) People in the spread group may well try and err... avoid the virus by lessening their contact levels. viii) The temptation/pressure to lock everyone down as the bodies hit the floor rack up will be immense.
So you'd need perfectly defined groups; perfect spread behaviour amongst the spread group, perfect shielding behaviour amongst the shielding group, a big appetite for death...
I think again it comes down to the infamous first academic paper that said vast majority will only suffer mild symptoms...which the author meant not need hospital treatment, not as was taken by many to mean everybody under 80 will just have a bad cold.
It set the tone as a disease that only oldies were in danger.
That is not an unreasonable assumption on the vaccine at the time
The number of people that had antibody protection via vaccine on the last day of 2020 was perhaps 1/2 a million. For all intents and purposes the working assumption, no vaccine in 2020 was entirely correct.
It was my understanding that by any previous experience, a vaccine being ready to use in 2020 was something close to ridiculous.
What happened was the war-time-development* effect on process and systems - enough pressure was applied to reduce actions in the vaccine creation process to what *needed* to be done, rather than "but, traditionally..."
*In operational research, this effect is well known and rather interesting.
One of the most interesting questions for the next time from the long Cummings Twitter thread is whether we could reduce the time required to prove and approve a vaccine even further by using human challenge trials.
If we'd been able to start vaccinating people in September, or even earlier, that would have made a huge difference
The big question is whether the mRNA technology can be used to tweak the vaccine, without requiring a full re-trial, IIRC
The 'seal off the vulnerable and let it rip through the rest of the population plan'.
In theory it could work BUT
i) You need to identify who is vulnerable - it's broadly correlated with age and comorbifity but you'll get some outliers who it kills outside those groups. ii) You need a hard cutoff if you're assuming differential action between the groups. Someone just below the shielding cut-off may have a minutely differing risk to someone above but their prescribed course of action will be completely different. iii) People above the cutoff may well have interaction, even through no fault of their own with those below. e.g. Old people need to head into hospital for things other than Covid. People in the more vulnerable group will not hermetically seal themselves off forever. iv) Even if everyone followed it 100% you'd get a certain level of mortality in the lesser vulnerable group. v) Spread through the lesser vulnerable group might lead to more transmissible mutations. This means ultimately your lesser vulnerable group isn't large enough so you need to release people from the more vulnerable group to achieve herd immunity. vii) People in the spread group may well try and err... avoid the virus by lessening their contact levels. viii) The temptation/pressure to lock everyone down as the bodies hit the floor rack up will be immense.
So you'd need perfectly defined groups; perfect spread behaviour amongst the spread group, perfect shielding behaviour amongst the shielding group, a big appetite for death...
And if we defined the vulnerable as Groups 1-9 of the JCVI charts, we're talking literally half of the population of the UK, anyway. Which makes it even harder.
The 'seal off the vulnerable and let it rip through the rest of the population plan'.
In theory it could work BUT
i) You need to identify who is vulnerable - it's broadly correlated with age and comorbifity but you'll get some outliers who it kills outside those groups. ii) You need a hard cutoff if you're assuming differential action between the groups. Someone just below the shielding cut-off may have a minutely differing risk to someone above but their prescribed course of action will be completely different. iii) People above the cutoff may well have interaction, even through no fault of their own with those below. e.g. Old people need to head into hospital for things other than Covid. People in the more vulnerable group will not hermetically seal themselves off forever. iv) Even if everyone followed it 100% you'd get a certain level of mortality in the lesser vulnerable group. v) Spread through the lesser vulnerable group might lead to more transmissible mutations. This means ultimately your lesser vulnerable group isn't large enough so you need to release people from the more vulnerable group to achieve herd immunity. vii) People in the spread group may well try and err... avoid the virus by lessening their contact levels. viii) The temptation/pressure to lock everyone down as the bodies hit the floor rack up will be immense.
So you'd need perfectly defined groups; perfect spread behaviour amongst the spread group, perfect shielding behaviour amongst the shielding group, a big appetite for death...
It doesn't work mathematically. As soon as you increase the size of the circulating population by releasing people from the shielding group you don't have herd immunity anymore. The virus spreads again.
That is not an unreasonable assumption on the vaccine at the time
The number of people that had antibody protection via vaccine on the last day of 2020 was perhaps 1/2 a million. For all intents and purposes the working assumption, no vaccine in 2020 was entirely correct.
It was my understanding that by any previous experience, a vaccine being ready to use in 2020 was something close to ridiculous.
What happened was the war-time-development* effect on process and systems - enough pressure was applied to reduce actions in the vaccine creation process to what *needed* to be done, rather than "but, traditionally..."
*In operational research, this effect is well known and rather interesting.
One of the most interesting questions for the next time from the long Cummings Twitter thread is whether we could reduce the time required to prove and approve a vaccine even further by using human challenge trials.
If we'd been able to start vaccinating people in September, or even earlier, that would have made a huge difference
The big question is whether the mRNA technology can be used to tweak the vaccine, without requiring a full re-trial, IIRC
The 'seal off the vulnerable and let it rip through the rest of the population plan'.
In theory it could work BUT
i) You need to identify who is vulnerable - it's broadly correlated with age and comorbifity but you'll get some outliers who it kills outside those groups. ii) You need a hard cutoff if you're assuming differential action between the groups. Someone just below the shielding cut-off may have a minutely differing risk to someone above but their prescribed course of action will be completely different. iii) People above the cutoff may well have interaction, even through no fault of their own with those below. e.g. Old people need to head into hospital for things other than Covid. People in the more vulnerable group will not hermetically seal themselves off forever. iv) Even if everyone followed it 100% you'd get a certain level of mortality in the lesser vulnerable group. v) Spread through the lesser vulnerable group might lead to more transmissible mutations. This means ultimately your lesser vulnerable group isn't large enough so you need to release people from the more vulnerable group to achieve herd immunity. vii) People in the spread group may well try and err... avoid the virus by lessening their contact levels. viii) The temptation/pressure to lock everyone down as the bodies hit the floor rack up will be immense.
So you'd need perfectly defined groups; perfect spread behaviour amongst the spread group, perfect shielding behaviour amongst the shielding group, a big appetite for death...
It doesn't work mathematically. As soon as you increase the size of the circulating population by releasing people from the shielding group you don't have herd immunity anymore. The virus spreads again.
It's really just a straw to cling to to support the hope that "this isn't happening/it's not really bad/I don't want to be severely impacted/can it just go away?"
Which is a very natural human impulse, but not so good for making life or death decisions. For policy-makers or pilots alike.
It might be the Great Eye of Fire! I seem to recall my late Grandmother telling me that, in her Mother's time, a yellow sphere was once observed for several hours. It was hot and bright and everyone was afraid, so they prayed and made animal sacrifices until it went away again.
Not seen over the skies of Britain since, thank goodness.
Someone has taken the lid off of our tupperware box
It's an unlicensed nuclear reactor. No planning permission, no environmental impact statements, no containment, no cooling system, no emergency cooling system, no waste disposal repository, no waste disposal plan...
A complete cowboy job. Makes "Chernobyl look like picnic".
Comments
I meant first, of course.
Isn't this an official secret btw or don't we care about that any more?
Existing pandemic response plans did not include a lockdown (this seems like Dom thinks no lockdown = "herd immunity"). Indeed, their baseline assumption - that community spread of a flu-like virus was inevitable - was arguably in opposition to this.
He says that this is from 13 March 2020.
This was about a week (but not more) after it should have been apparent from Italy's experience that an exponential rise in cases would occur in the UK sooner or later. So we can that the government was a little bit slow there. We can also see that from 14 March 2020 the government had effectively concluded that full lockdown was needed, but it did not implement this until 23 March 2020 (although it did 'pre-brief' this, with some effect).
This is not revolutionary information. In fact it is not even surprising that the government was a bit slow to implement measures that went far beyond anything ever announced in a hundred years. Sadly, that delay cost lives, but it does not demonstrate a conspiracy.
In tech I’d say they are indispensable.
6/4 Labour is still available from Ladbrokes and several of the smaller bookmakers on Oddschecker.
Best prices are unchanged for days:-
4/7 Conservative
6/4 Labour
100/1 bar
In such a world lockdown is only useful to flatten the curve of infection to stop the NHS being overwhelmed. It achieves nothing else because the virus will inevitably spread again when the lockdown is released and more will die. It's one of the reasons that I think the argument about whether lockdown was too late, too early, too weak or too rigorous is frankly sterile and irrelevant. The criteria is that the NHS is not overwhelmed. That's it. Nothing else.
Of course vaccines are a game changer here because covid deferred then suddenly becomes covid survived but if the government advice was that this was not going to happen in 2020 there were no good choices, none at all. 1% of the population were going to die, it was just a matter of how quickly and what collateral damage could be avoided.
To govern is to choose, and to choose in health matters is usually to decide whom to save and whom to let die.
AFAIK the entire conception of hetero/homosexuality would've been quite alien to the classical Romans. Theirs was a culture very remote in time and conception from ours, which at the time of Hadrian was still not significantly influenced by Judaeo-Christian mores. I believe it was Suetonius who remarked upon the fact that Claudius only had sex with women and Galba with men, simply because both predilections were regarded as atypical at the time!
Mind you, I've never much liked the entire concept of LGBT (or the more extended alphabet soup acronyms) either. If we're no longer meant to be talking about the "BAME community" anymore, then maybe the concept of "LGBT(QIA+) community" can be next for the chopping block? It's really not much of a thing outside of certain activist circles.
But fascinating historical irony that this testimony is almost one year to the day since the rose garden press conference.
|e|o ??
I would have thought you would have similar dependencies in the law.
@BethRigby
·
1m
Quite the opening statement, and looked like Cummings emotional as he delivered it: "The truth is that senior ministers, officials, advisers - like me, fell disastrously short of the standards the public has a right to expect of its government"Beth Rigby
FPT - who do we NOT save:
https://www.nice.org.uk/process/pmg6/chapter/assessing-cost-effectiveness
Why would that be a surprising thing to ask?
judgement on that history from a Left-modernist perspective, and then preaching those conclusions at people.
Few would have a problem with unearthing new information and letting people take their own view on it.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/culture-wars-in-the-uk-how-the-public-understand-the-debate.pdf
What happened was the war-time-development* effect on process and systems - enough pressure was applied to reduce actions in the vaccine creation process to what *needed* to be done, rather than "but, traditionally..."
*In operational research, this effect is well known and rather interesting.
Yes mistakes were undoubtedly made, but ultimately there was never any "perfect" way through. Just muddling through as best we all can balancing difficult decisions which have complex mixes of upsides and downsides. Which is essentially politics in general.
Cummings did not go to Cobra nor advised Boris to go either
The fireplace has been blocked up. Which makes disposing of confidential waste harder.
EDIT: There is a semi-apocryphal story that the operations centres for the US military received massive upgrades in the wake of the film War Games. The politicians who went on tours were appalled/startled by how low tech they were, compared to the film.
In theory it could work BUT
i) You need to identify who is vulnerable - it's broadly correlated with age and comorbifity but you'll get some outliers who it kills outside those groups.
ii) You need a hard cutoff if you're assuming differential action between the groups. Someone just below the shielding cut-off may have a minutely differing risk to someone above but their prescribed course of action will be completely different.
iii) People above the cutoff may well have interaction, even through no fault of their own with those below. e.g. Old people need to head into hospital for things other than Covid. People in the more vulnerable group will not hermetically seal themselves off forever.
iv) Even if everyone followed it 100% you'd get a certain level of mortality in the lesser vulnerable group.
v) Spread through the lesser vulnerable group might lead to more transmissible mutations. This means ultimately your lesser vulnerable group isn't large enough so you need to release people from the more vulnerable group to achieve herd immunity.
vii) People in the spread group may well try and err... avoid the virus by lessening their contact levels.
viii) The temptation/pressure to lock everyone down as the bodies hit the floor rack up will be immense.
So you'd need perfectly defined groups; perfect spread behaviour amongst the spread group, perfect shielding behaviour amongst the shielding group, a big appetite for death...
"I'm not smart"
"I'm not technical. I don't understand the models"
Jeez christ.
If we'd been able to start vaccinating people in September, or even earlier, that would have made a huge difference
Weird.
It set the tone as a disease that only oldies were in danger.
Other than Gove who would trust him now?
Keir?
theweatherincamdentown.com
Which is a very natural human impulse, but not so good for making life or death decisions.
For policy-makers or pilots alike.
Not seen over the skies of Britain since, thank goodness.
A complete cowboy job. Makes "Chernobyl look like picnic".