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With the Cummings Commons Committee starting at 0930 – the former advisor Tweets a pic of pre-lockdo
With the Cummings Commons Committee starting at 0930 – the former advisor Tweets a pic of pre-lockdown Number 10 strategy white board – politicalbetting.com
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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
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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".