Con 44 (+3) Lab 30 (-4) LD 10 (+2) Grn 5 (-1) SNP 4 (-1) Other 6 (-1)
18th - 20th June
What hoped has Starmer got if he loses B & S
Starmer has shown himself to be unlucky and short of leadrship skills in equal measure His Palestinian bashing coincided with one of Israels rampages where they used Gaza for target practice The timing was unlucky but if you tie yourself to an incontinent horse you get covered in s***. I fear this is going to lose him Batley and Spen. (Watch out for Gorgeous George surprisingly us)
The second problem is leadership. He should be taking a leaf out of Burnham's book. Pick a fight. If Johnson Zigs Starmer should Zag. There's nothing coherent about Burnham but he looks tough and at the moment that's what the 55% of Johnson haters want to see..
An important new NBER paper looks at impact of SIP (“shelter-in-place”) policies on excess mortality, i.e. including both deaths caused by Covid-19 AND deaths caused by lockdowns ...
Quoting the paper: “we would expect lower excess mortality in the weeks following SIP implementation in countries that implemented SIP policies relative to countries that did not implement policies”
Err. No.
You would not expect mortality to drop after lockdown starts (whether officially or not) for at least 2 weeks, because that’s how long it usually took for someone to get Covid & die from it on average. Oh, and that’s from being symptomatic -> death. Covid has a relatively long asymptomatic period (which is why it’s so infectious), so the probable mean time from infection -> death is probably closer to three weeks.
So we do not expect the death rate to drop after the introduction of lockdowns for /at least/ three weeks, if not longer, during which time the death rate will rise at first due to infections that occurred shortly before the lockdown started (that might otherwise have beenb avoided).
Unless I have got this very wrong & missed something crucial (entirely possible!), this entire paper is based on a complete misunderstanding of the timing of Covid deaths: They’ve found a spurious association between lockdowns and excess deaths, because we brought in lockdowns when covid infections were rising exponentially & those infections led to excess deaths that occurred during the lockdown period due to the lag time between infection & patient death.
If they were comparing excess deaths three-four weeks after lockdowns started then that might be a more appropriate comparison.
(I’d like to see a model that included the local R rate for each locality, estimated either from excess deaths or known covid infections & incorporated into an estimate of the number of expected deaths from Covid; that ought to show whether lockdowns “work” or not, given sufficient data.)
Yes as I said I found the paper so stupid I fear I must have missed something.
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