This is why the government can't win...Save the oldies, lock them away...bloody tin pot dictators.
Judy Downey, the chair of the Relatives and Residents Association, said she was very worried by care homes closing their doors to visitors.
“We have tin-pot dictators telling people that they can’t visit their parents and partners based on something they have half-heard,” she said, adding she also knew of a woman who had been told by a nurse that she couldn’t visit her mother, who lives in her own home.
Probably not generally defined as a mass gathering. Although the one man could infect his dog and vice versa.
The likes of Torquay United still get quite big crowds of ~3000 a game.
Dulwich get that in Vanarama League South.
Looking at the figures, Vanarama League is more popular than I realized. There are a load of clubs that get 1000+, for what's that the 6th tier of football.
I would imagine with all fully professional football off those numbers will be much higher.
I have taken time to come to terms with this. I have raised questions and expressed reservations based on the evidence of what other countries were doing. It seemed to me at times that the government’s policy was a counsel of despair resulting in the deaths of at least tens of thousands of our citizens. I do not accept that asking such questions and expressing such doubts is setting myself up as some form of “expert” or armchair general. We all have a stake in this. We are all going to lose family and friends.
With considerable reluctance and no little trepidation I have come to the view that the government’s policy is the best we can do on the known facts. Those facts may still change, especially if there is a breakthrough in treatment or vaccine but we cannot count on that. In the absence of such a breakthrough all we can do is get through this and take the pain.
Exactly my position David.
As I said yesterday there are no right answers just less wrong ones for the forseeable future.
Probably not generally defined as a mass gathering. Although the one man could infect his dog and vice versa.
The likes of Torquay United still get quite big crowds of ~3000 a game.
Dulwich get that in Vanarama League South.
Looking at the figures, Vanarama League is more popular than I realized. There are a load of clubs that get 1000+, for what's that the 6th tier of football.
Standing and drinking (within sight of the pitch shock horror!) can be quite popular. As is watching sport played by non millionaires. I like both ends of the spectrum.
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
As he says, our policy is “risky and rests on assumptions”, but when I noted this yesterday morning you went all “you think you know better than the PM of Singapore”?
I think this is my only actual problem with the British strategy (for all my over the top posts about it).
The overall long term strategy is utterly opaque. Although they may have a strategy there is no appearance of strategy.
There may be good reasons for this, they may think the public will act badly if they have all the info but at the moment without their plan and projected numbers I cannot see how they achieve a single summer peak and avoid a double hump.
Yes this is a problem. The people working on this are extremely clever. My problem has been that I couldn't see the overall strategy so I couldn't understand the tactics. I don't think that was through a lack of understanding on my part but rather a lack of communication of the strategy. They probably understand that too so it must have been deliberate.
Even so I wonder whether it would have been better to prep society for this for longer.
Probably not generally defined as a mass gathering. Although the one man could infect his dog and vice versa.
The likes of Torquay United still get quite big crowds of ~3000 a game.
Dulwich get that in Vanarama League South.
Looking at the figures, Vanarama League is more popular than I realized. There are a load of clubs that get 1000+, for what's that the 6th tier of football.
Standing and drinking (within sight of the pitch shock horror!) can be quite popular. As is watching sport played by non millionaires. I like both ends of the spectrum.
I also think its great for kids who are really keen players. Although the standard obviously isn't EPL, they can get to learn about the game and hopefully have a more family environment of interacting with players.
I also don't know of anyone who is happy to go along with being part of Boris Johnson's cull
It goes right against the most basic animal survival instinct
I'm hunkering down. Fuck Boris.
Could you also turn off your internet connection, please. All of your alter egos, if you don’t mind.
I am me. Not Eadric. Not Sean.
So no, ta.
This place, as a number have said recently, provides a really good social outlet in this crisis. We need to get along, no matter a variety of viewpoints and be welcoming to one another even when we don't agree with one another.
OK fine, but in that case stop the infantile shit about "culls" and so on.
It isn't infantile or wrong. It's exactly what the Gov't are proposing.
So I'll continue to post it and everyone out there is agreeing with me.
It's eugenics.
It rather looks it. Cull the old who aren't together enough to self-isolate and rely on their regular Waitrose deliveries. Save on pensions and future use of the NHS by those who still ignore the warnings.
Cull the young who are genetically unlucky ... before they have children. (OTOH this is too late to stop teenage pregnancies which Cummings's weirdos dislike.)
To get it in perspective, a flu outbreak in 2009 killed ~1% of over-65s. A friend tells me that the estimated fatality rate for this is 3-4%. Not nice given that I'm 66.
It would be good if the NHS hadn't been out of stock of pneumonia vaccine for 3-4 months.
And there is your problem. The CMO says he believes it is < 1%. The 3-4% figure is based upon Wuhan and incomplete data. The rest of China is nothing like that, nor is the likes of South Korea.
Witty maybe wrong, but that is the strategy they are working with.
Ta. 1% apparently depends on the NHS not being overwhelmed. At a doubling time of ~4 days, it's headed towards 256 x 10,000 = 2,560,000 cases by mid-April.
Lengthening the time to say 6 days would move peak mayhem to May and the NHS might cope better.
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
Its likely to get roughly twice as risky each week. So better to go to the pub every day this week than once in 3 weeks time. Id have hand gel with me though!
Two blunders in the first seven words. I wouldn't pay that much attention.
Not least because it's the wrong question. The correct question is "who would you rather have affirm what you want to believe is true?" To which the obvious answer is 'the experts' - but if they're not willing to play ball, because you're wrong, then 'the man in the pub' or 'the friend I know' will have to do.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I think you should be calling it more strongly than you are. Trump is unelectable.
And this is not said because I want it so much to be true. If anything, when superforecasting and betting, I tend to err on the side of things that I do NOT want to happen happening.
How do you do that superforecasting exactly - is there a method or just it just come to you like magic?
I also don't know of anyone who is happy to go along with being part of Boris Johnson's cull
It goes right against the most basic animal survival instinct
I'm hunkering down. Fuck Boris.
Could you also turn off your internet connection, please. All of your alter egos, if you don’t mind.
I am me. Not Eadric. Not Sean.
So no, ta.
This place, as a number have said recently, provides a really good social outlet in this crisis. We need to get along, no matter a variety of viewpoints and be welcoming to one another even when we don't agree with one another.
OK fine, but in that case stop the infantile shit about "culls" and so on.
It isn't infantile or wrong. It's exactly what the Gov't are proposing.
So I'll continue to post it and everyone out there is agreeing with me.
It's eugenics.
It rather looks it. Cull the old who aren't together enough to self-isolate and rely on their regular Waitrose deliveries. Save on pensions and future use of the NHS by those who still ignore the warnings.
Cull the young who are genetically unlucky ... before they have children. (OTOH this is too late to stop teenage pregnancies which Cummings's weirdos dislike.)
To get it in perspective, a flu outbreak in 2009 killed ~1% of over-65s. A friend tells me that the estimated fatality rate for this is 3-4%. Not nice given that I'm 66.
It would be good if the NHS hadn't been out of stock of pneumonia vaccine for 3-4 months.
And there is your problem. The CMO says he believes it is < 1%. The 3-4% figure is based upon Wuhan and incomplete data. The rest of China is nothing like that, nor is the likes of South Korea.
Witty maybe wrong, but that is the strategy they are working with.
Ta. 1% apparently depends on the NHS not being overwhelmed. At a doubling time of ~4 days, it's headed towards 256 x 10,000 = 2,560,000 cases by mid-April.
Lengthening the time to say 6 days would move peak mayhem to May and the NHS might cope better.
Yes, if the system crashes we will see more people dying. Unfortunately, I think it will crash at some point, obviously the hope is to minimise the time in which that occurs.
There is no easy answer to this, nobody knows what the optimal strategy is. We just have to hope that the egg-heads have taken the better path and make less mistakes. But there are going to be horrific weeks ahead.
On the family isolation issue, I think this is where the schools being open idea comes in. Students up to eighteen will have parents who are fifty or younger in the vast majority of cases. This then puts them all in the herd immunity attempt. They want the children to pass it on to parents.
Of course, there are some who are older and who would need to be isolated in the home (maybe community isolation with friends or older relatives would be a good thing, rather than individually?). Also, parents with underlying conditions would have to do the same.
That leaves any household with no parent who is low risk as being a problem. Maybe get other relatives or families to temporarily adopt?
Musing out loud, but these strategies need to be shared rather than letting people just do what they want piecemeal. There is still an important government role here as a national pandemic response.
I thought Hunt's suggestion was very sensible. To run schools with much more flexibility for the next few months.
Getting sixth formers to do some of the childcare and even teaching would make sense to me.
I think there are issues on whether they can legally be given that responsibility, given that teachers are in loco parentis.
Two blunders in the first seven words. I wouldn't pay that much attention.
Not least because it's the wrong question. The correct question is "who would you rather have affirm what you want to believe is true?" To which the obvious answer is 'the experts' - but if they're not willing to play ball, because you're wrong, then 'the man in the pub' or 'the friend I know' will have to do.
She forgot to mention the BBC's favourite world authority on the virus, Dr Farage.
I am glad the twitterati weren't about during WWII, they would be claiming that because Churchill was a posho he wanted us all to die and we aren't going to fight the Nazi's because its very risky.
By the same token there'd also be folk saying that Winny chap knows what he's about, don't worry about Singapore and isn't that Stalin a bloody good bloke. Which in fact there were, shitloads of 'em.
Two blunders in the first seven words. I wouldn't pay that much attention.
Not least because it's the wrong question. The correct question is "who would you rather have affirm what you want to believe is true?" To which the obvious answer is 'the experts' - but if they're not willing to play ball, because you're wrong, then 'the man in the pub' or 'the friend I know' will have to do.
Chair of the Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners from 2010 to 2013 so attention is merited despite the gramma!
On the family isolation issue, I think this is where the schools being open idea comes in. Students up to eighteen will have parents who are fifty or younger in the vast majority of cases. This then puts them all in the herd immunity attempt. They want the children to pass it on to parents.
Of course, there are some who are older and who would need to be isolated in the home (maybe community isolation with friends or older relatives would be a good thing, rather than individually?). Also, parents with underlying conditions would have to do the same.
That leaves any household with no parent who is low risk as being a problem. Maybe get other relatives or families to temporarily adopt?
Musing out loud, but these strategies need to be shared rather than letting people just do what they want piecemeal. There is still an important government role here as a national pandemic response.
The idea of larger class sizes and allowing well staff to move between schools now makes perfect sense if this is what is going to happen. It’s not to have students educated in any real sense, it’s to spread the virus and schools are incubators overseen by younger, fitter teachers.
Exams will need to be suspended now, schools put onto emergency timetables, I think.
Any flaws that I’ve missed?
Mrs Gadfly and I are both in our 60s with underlying chronic health issues and our 3 teacher children are entirely reliant upon us to look after our pre-school grandchildren whilst they're at work.
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
Its likely to get roughly twice as risky each week. So better to go to the pub every day this week than once in 3 weeks time. Id have hand gel with me though!
Ha yes.... Although I am largely in the camp of: I am going to get it sometime, I have no relevant underlying health conditions to speak of, I can isolate from friends and family who are at greater risk when I do get it... so why worry too much?
Generally consider Boris' strategy to be a sensible way forward.
I did observe that the many families will lose loved ones notion could be construed as optimal politicking, i.e. I told you it would be bad, what more could I do? Or it wasn't as bad as I said it would be, because I put in the correct measures.
On the subject of the Thursday press conference, with his darting eyes looking in multiple directions at the same time, and his dilated pupils, is Boris self-medicating or just tired? Being world king wasn't supposed to be like this!
On topic As for Trump and Pence yesterday, absolutely beyond parody.
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
Its likely to get roughly twice as risky each week. So better to go to the pub every day this week than once in 3 weeks time. Id have hand gel with me though!
My wife wants to go to a concert tomorrow. I'm against it. Such gatherings will be banned in a few days, so I'm annoyed Johnson didn't ban them from today - would have saved some debate.
On the family isolation issue, I think this is where the schools being open idea comes in. Students up to eighteen will have parents who are fifty or younger in the vast majority of cases. This then puts them all in the herd immunity attempt. They want the children to pass it on to parents.
Of course, there are some who are older and who would need to be isolated in the home (maybe community isolation with friends or older relatives would be a good thing, rather than individually?). Also, parents with underlying conditions would have to do the same.
That leaves any household with no parent who is low risk as being a problem. Maybe get other relatives or families to temporarily adopt?
Musing out loud, but these strategies need to be shared rather than letting people just do what they want piecemeal. There is still an important government role here as a national pandemic response.
I thought Hunt's suggestion was very sensible. To run schools with much more flexibility for the next few months.
Getting sixth formers to do some of the childcare and even teaching would make sense to me.
I think there are issues on whether they can legally be given that responsibility, given that teachers are in loco parentis.
Might need legislation but Brexit has shown that can be done in a day when needed. Now things will be needed. They can just be put in place for 3 months or so at a time so not part of our ongoing laws or standards, just giving schools more flexibility in a crisis.
I remain sceptical about the figures worldwide. Last time I looked Turkey, for instance, was declaring 2 cases but I have been told via someone in the capital that there are hundreds of cases in Ankara alone.
The Chinese situation now looks great but what would actually be stopping a totalitarian regime that badly wants to save face simply not testing people are attributing most deaths to other causes?
November is a long way away so I'm taking this with a pinch of salt. All sorts of things could happen before then, not least of which could be the worst of the infection passes over America and then Trump passes an emergency stimulus and lifts restrictions just in time.
Also, we had a Herdson article just a few weeks ago tipping buying Sanders when he was odds on - and we know what happened next.
Things that look inevitable one week can look very different the next.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I didn't say you said it was inevitable - just that it can look that way.
My point is that the dislike of Trump is so strong it can cloud our judgement.
I think what @SouthamObserver said earlier is fair. The culture wars in the US are so embedded that I can't see his base deserting even if casualties are in the low millions.
They'll blame someone else.
That doesn't mean he'll win but I could still see it being a close fight.
That's all true. But pre-Covid-19, I was tipping Trump to be re-elected so I don't think I was too clouded by a dislike of the man (which I do have).
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I think you should be calling it more strongly than you are. Trump is unelectable.
And this is not said because I want it so much to be true. If anything, when superforecasting and betting, I tend to err on the side of things that I do NOT want to happen happening.
How do you do that superforecasting exactly - is there a method or just it just come to you like magic?
Have we not progressed to megaforecasting yet? Keep up!
On the family isolation issue, I think this is where the schools being open idea comes in. Students up to eighteen will have parents who are fifty or younger in the vast majority of cases. This then puts them all in the herd immunity attempt. They want the children to pass it on to parents.
Of course, there are some who are older and who would need to be isolated in the home (maybe community isolation with friends or older relatives would be a good thing, rather than individually?). Also, parents with underlying conditions would have to do the same.
That leaves any household with no parent who is low risk as being a problem. Maybe get other relatives or families to temporarily adopt?
Musing out loud, but these strategies need to be shared rather than letting people just do what they want piecemeal. There is still an important government role here as a national pandemic response.
The idea of larger class sizes and allowing well staff to move between schools now makes perfect sense if this is what is going to happen. It’s not to have students educated in any real sense, it’s to spread the virus and schools are incubators overseen by younger, fitter teachers.
Exams will need to be suspended now, schools put onto emergency timetables, I think.
Any flaws that I’ve missed?
Mrs Gadfly and I are both in our 60s with underlying chronic health issues and our 3 teacher children are entirely reliant upon us to look after our pre-school grandchildren whilst they're at work.
We are in an incredibly difficult position.
Yes, that’s tricky. Apart from you keeping the grandchildren for the duration, I’m not sure. Not sure if you’d be happy with that or not!
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
Its likely to get roughly twice as risky each week. So better to go to the pub every day this week than once in 3 weeks time. Id have hand gel with me though!
Ha yes.... Although I am largely in the camp of: I am going to get it sometime, I have no relevant underlying health conditions to speak of, I can isolate from friends and family who are at greater risk when I do get it... so why worry too much?
To be fair anxiety would weaken your immune system, especially if combined with lack of sleep, so the hyper worriers might be at a similar risk as your approach, and you will be having more fun.
I remain sceptical about the figures worldwide. Last time I looked Turkey, for instance, was declaring 2 cases but I have been told via someone in the capital that there are hundreds of cases in Ankara alone.
The Chinese situation now looks great but what would actually be stopping a totalitarian regime that badly wants to save face simply not testing people are attributing most deaths to other causes?
[*] China has often been known to bamboozle foreign journalists, so what he's seeing may or may not be typical...
The reason the Chinese figures overall are suspect is they had an unknown virus circulated a density highly populated city of 11 million people and a region of 60 million for over 3 months without anybody knowing or taking any action.
Then the totally system crashed and they had to build 16 hospitals to even start to cope. And the Chinese government basically put the country on lockdown.
During which time we are to believe there were only 100k cases and 3000 deaths. And that it hardly spread at all to the rest of the country.
However, if you say to me have China got the case load right down (not 10 or whatever they claim now daily), yes I can believe that.
Probably not generally defined as a mass gathering. Although the one man could infect his dog and vice versa.
The likes of Torquay United still get quite big crowds of ~3000 a game.
Dulwich get that in Vanarama League South.
Looking at the figures, Vanarama League is more popular than I realized. There are a load of clubs that get 1000+, for what's that the 6th tier of football.
Standing and drinking (within sight of the pitch shock horror!) can be quite popular. As is watching sport played by non millionaires. I like both ends of the spectrum.
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
Its likely to get roughly twice as risky each week. So better to go to the pub every day this week than once in 3 weeks time. Id have hand gel with me though!
My wife wants to go to a concert tomorrow. I'm against it. Such gatherings will be banned in a few days, so I'm annoyed Johnson didn't ban them from today - would have saved some debate.
Tomorow morning's concert at Wigmore Hall is postponed. A string quartet cannot travel from their base to London.
I heard her interviewed this morning and to those like Mysticrose, rural voter and others who seem to have lost the plot she was fulsome in her praise for HMG, Boris and his advisers and said that there are an extraordinary number of experts in their field around the table constantly addressing the complexities and adapting to a fluid position
Clare Gerada was the chairperson of the Royal College of General Practitioners and was a constant thorn in the side of the previous conservative governments never holding back in attacking them
For her to be so in support of Boris and HMG is a demonstration how mature people can see a bigger picture and put on one side party politics for the better good a lesson some on here could well do to learn
November is a long way away so I'm taking this with a pinch of salt. All sorts of things could happen before then, not least of which could be the worst of the infection passes over America and then Trump passes an emergency stimulus and lifts restrictions just in time.
Also, we had a Herdson article just a few weeks ago tipping buying Sanders when he was odds on - and we know what happened next.
Things that look inevitable one week can look very different the next.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I didn't say you said it was inevitable - just that it can look that way.
My point is that the dislike of Trump is so strong it can cloud our judgement.
I think what @SouthamObserver said earlier is fair. The culture wars in the US are so embedded that I can't see his base deserting even if casualties are in the low millions.
They'll blame someone else.
That doesn't mean he'll win but I could still see it being a close fight.
That's all true. But pre-Covid-19, I was tipping Trump to be re-elected so I don't think I was too clouded by a dislike of the man (which I do have).
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
Like I say, you can't get them all right.
You get many more calls right than I do - so please don't worry about that.
I just think we in pb aren't as good on US politics (collectively) as we think we are so I have a very adaptable betting strategy from which I'm trying to remove all confirmation bias.
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
November is a long way away so I'm taking this with a pinch of salt. All sorts of things could happen before then, not least of which could be the worst of the infection passes over America and then Trump passes an emergency stimulus and lifts restrictions just in time.
Also, we had a Herdson article just a few weeks ago tipping buying Sanders when he was odds on - and we know what happened next.
Things that look inevitable one week can look very different the next.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I didn't say you said it was inevitable - just that it can look that way.
My point is that the dislike of Trump is so strong it can cloud our judgement.
I think what @SouthamObserver said earlier is fair. The culture wars in the US are so embedded that I can't see his base deserting even if casualties are in the low millions.
They'll blame someone else.
That doesn't mean he'll win but I could still see it being a close fight.
That's all true. But pre-Covid-19, I was tipping Trump to be re-elected so I don't think I was too clouded by a dislike of the man (which I do have).
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
Like I say, you can't get them all right.
You still haven't got it wrong yet. Although Trump is doing a sterling job of ensuring he isn't re-elected.
Harold Wilson's old adage about a week being a long time in politics has been superseded by an hour being a long time in politics.
On the family isolation issue, I think this is where the schools being open idea comes in. Students up to eighteen will have parents who are fifty or younger in the vast majority of cases. This then puts them all in the herd immunity attempt. They want the children to pass it on to parents.
Of course, there are some who are older and who would need to be isolated in the home (maybe community isolation with friends or older relatives would be a good thing, rather than individually?). Also, parents with underlying conditions would have to do the same.
That leaves any household with no parent who is low risk as being a problem. Maybe get other relatives or families to temporarily adopt?
Musing out loud, but these strategies need to be shared rather than letting people just do what they want piecemeal. There is still an important government role here as a national pandemic response.
The idea of larger class sizes and allowing well staff to move between schools now makes perfect sense if this is what is going to happen. It’s not to have students educated in any real sense, it’s to spread the virus and schools are incubators overseen by younger, fitter teachers.
Exams will need to be suspended now, schools put onto emergency timetables, I think.
Any flaws that I’ve missed?
Mrs Gadfly and I are both in our 60s with underlying chronic health issues and our 3 teacher children are entirely reliant upon us to look after our pre-school grandchildren whilst they're at work.
We are in an incredibly difficult position.
Yes, that’s tricky. Apart from you keeping the grandchildren for the duration, I’m not sure. Not sure if you’d be happy with that or not!
This had crossed my mind, but I can't imagine any of the mothers conceding to it.
That's all true. But pre-Covid-19, I was tipping Trump to be re-elected so I don't think I was too clouded by a dislike of the man (which I do have).
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
Like I say, you can't get them all right.
Maximum respect to David Herdson and the other people who put clear, verifiable predictions (or at least unambiguous statements about the odds) above the line.
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
As he says, our policy is “risky and rests on assumptions”, but when I noted this yesterday morning you went all “you think you know better than the PM of Singapore”?
I think this is my only actual problem with the British strategy (for all my over the top posts about it).
The overall long term strategy is utterly opaque. Although they may have a strategy there is no appearance of strategy.
There may be good reasons for this, they may think the public will act badly if they have all the info but at the moment without their plan and projected numbers I cannot see how they achieve a single summer peak and avoid a double hump.
Why do you think it’s opaque? It seems clear and obvious to me. They want the virus to spread but slowly enough that the NHS can cope. They want the bulk of cases to have happened before winter strains on the NHS come into play. They want, so far as possible, for herd immunity to be built up among the young and the fit whilst protecting or isolating the most vulnerable. They recognise that they will have limited success in this and some of the vulnerable will die as a result, as will a small number of the less vulnerable who are just unlucky.
It’s a tough policy with horrendous consequences but there really is nothing opaque about it.
The opacity is in many facets but the basic o e is the numbers. If they are looking for herd immunity to be in place before winter then they are looking at approx a million new coronavirus infections per week for the next 6 months.
If just 0.1% of those require hospitalisation that's a thousand people a week extra admissions into hospital.
As a result, based on the lack of information I have I do not believe they are aiming for a single peak and for herd immunity to be in place for this winter.
It’s actually worse that that because it is still a peak, even if it is a flattened one. At the peak there is going to be something like 20m infected. Very, very few will be able to get medical care, more than 1% will die. Do not be ill in that time. No one will be available to help.
Indeed the more I think about it the most important thing we can probably do right now, even more important than getting that bog roll in, is to get ourselves as fit and healthy as possible. Last night was an extremely poor start but I am off the drink until we are over this, l am going to try hard to lose those extra pounds and improve my lung capacity. We should work on the basis we are going to catch this, that it’s dangerous and we need to be in the best shape possible when we do.
As he says, our policy is “risky and rests on assumptions”, but when I noted this yesterday morning you went all “you think you know better than the PM of Singapore”?
I think this is my only actual problem with the British strategy (for all my over the top posts about it).
The overall long term strategy is utterly opaque. Although they may have a strategy there is no appearance of strategy.
There may be good reasons for this, they may think the public will act badly if they have all the info but at the moment without their plan and projected numbers I cannot see how they achieve a single summer peak and avoid a double hump.
Why do you think it’s opaque? It seems clear and obvious to me. They want the virus to spread but slowly enough that the NHS can cope. They want the bulk of cases to have happened before winter strains on the NHS come into play. They want, so far as possible, for herd immunity to be built up among the young and the fit whilst protecting or isolating the most vulnerable. They recognise that they will have limited success in this and some of the vulnerable will die as a result, as will a small number of the less vulnerable who are just unlucky.
It’s a tough policy with horrendous consequences but there really is nothing opaque about it.
The opacity is in many facets but the basic o e is the numbers. If they are looking for herd immunity to be in place before winter then they are looking at approx a million new coronavirus infections per week for the next 6 months.
If just 0.1% of those require hospitalisation that's a thousand people a week extra admissions into hospital.
As a result, based on the lack of information I have I do not believe they are aiming for a single peak and for herd immunity to be in place for this winter.
It’s actually worse that that because it is still a peak, even if it a flattened one. At the peak there is going to be something like 20m infected. Very, very few will be able to get medical care, more than 1% will die. Do not be ill in that time. No one will be available to help.
Indeed the more I think about it the most important thing we can probably do right now, even more important than getting that bog roll in, is to get ourselves as fit and healthy as possible. Last night was an extremely poor start but I am off the drink until we are over this, l am going to try hard to lose those extra pounds and improve my lung capacity. We should work on the basis we are going to catch this, that it’s dangerous and we need to be in the best shape possible when we do.
There is loads of good content on the YouTube for home work outs.
How many people die from pollution caused by tourism every year? I'm not anti-tourism by the way. Just wondering.
This is another missing component from the communication of the government's strategy. If the economy crashes hard then people will die from poverty related issues. Thus justifying the smoothest possible peak spread over the longest possible time, if x coronavirus deaths is less than y poverty deaths over time period z.
But communicating that quantification would be politically incredibly difficult for a government who's spent the last 9 years denying that austerity policies have caused any deaths.
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Damn - you are just reinforcing my prejudices here... Waitrose shoppers: intelligent, reasoned, polite, restrained, calm Morrisons shoppers: panicking, irrational, selfish idiots.
Sky sports and BT sports are going to have a customer revolt as football and other sports disappear from our screens. I have both and my contracts are due for renewal in june
I expect to cancel one of them and seek a contract that takes into account that football etc may well not return before august at the earliest
The one that offers me the best deal will get a new 24 month contract, as long as I survive covid 19
As he says, our policy is “risky and rests on assumptions”, but when I noted this yesterday morning you went all “you think you know better than the PM of Singapore”?
I think this is my only actual problem with the British strategy (for all my over the top posts about it).
The overall long term strategy is utterly opaque. Although they may have a strategy there is no appearance of strategy.
There may be good reasons for this, they may think the public will act badly if they have all the info but at the moment without their plan and projected numbers I cannot see how they achieve a single summer peak and avoid a double hump.
Why do you think it’s opaque? It seems clear and obvious to me. They want the virus to spread but slowly enough that the NHS can cope. They want the bulk of cases to have happened before winter strains on the NHS come into play. They want, so far as possible, for herd immunity to be built up among the young and the fit whilst protecting or isolating the most vulnerable. They recognise that they will have limited success in this and some of the vulnerable will die as a result, as will a small number of the less vulnerable who are just unlucky.
It’s a tough policy with horrendous consequences but there really is nothing opaque about it.
The opacity is in many facets but the basic o e is the numbers. If they are looking for herd immunity to be in place before winter then they are looking at approx a million new coronavirus infections per week for the next 6 months.
If just 0.1% of those require hospitalisation that's a thousand people a week extra admissions into hospital.
As a result, based on the lack of information I have I do not believe they are aiming for a single peak and for herd immunity to be in place for this winter.
It’s actually worse that that because it is still a peak, even if it a flattened one. At the peak there is going to be something like 20m infected. Very, very few will be able to get medical care, more than 1% will die. Do not be ill in that time. No one will be available to help.
Indeed the more I think about it the most important thing we can probably do right now, even more important than getting that bog roll in, is to get ourselves as fit and healthy as possible. Last night was an extremely poor start but I am off the drink until we are over this, l am going to try hard to lose those extra pounds and improve my lung capacity. We should work on the basis we are going to catch this, that it’s dangerous and we need to be in the best shape possible when we do.
I agree.
Just about to go and buy a keg from the microbrewery near me though.
November is a long way away so I'm taking this with a pinch of salt. All sorts of things could happen before then, not least of which could be the worst of the infection passes over America and then Trump passes an emergency stimulus and lifts restrictions just in time.
Also, we had a Herdson article just a few weeks ago tipping buying Sanders when he was odds on - and we know what happened next.
Things that look inevitable one week can look very different the next.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I didn't say you said it was inevitable - just that it can look that way.
My point is that the dislike of Trump is so strong it can cloud our judgement.
I think what @SouthamObserver said earlier is fair. The culture wars in the US are so embedded that I can't see his base deserting even if casualties are in the low millions.
They'll blame someone else.
That doesn't mean he'll win but I could still see it being a close fight.
That's all true. But pre-Covid-19, I was tipping Trump to be re-elected so I don't think I was too clouded by a dislike of the man (which I do have).
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
Like I say, you can't get them all right.
You still haven't got it wrong yet. Although Trump is doing a sterling job of ensuring he isn't re-elected.
Harold Wilson's old adage about a week being a long time in politics has been superseded by an hour being a long time in politics.
Well, I'm tipping Trump to lose now so I won't take any credit for the earlier prediction if it does turn out to be right.
A cull is the opposite to what the government is proposing. The government wants the brunt to be borne by young and healthy people who will not die but who will contribute to herd immunity. This will also allow the NHS to concentrate on aiding the sick. The plan may be blown off course by sports, schools and others taking their own decisions to close down for the duration but that is another story.
Cull is not the right term but "sacrifice" seems apt.
As compared to the Lockdown Trace & Test approach we are accepting a higher death toll during this epidemic in exchange for herd immunity and better prospects post the epidemic.
Is that not a fair way of putting it?
We are beyond Lockdown Trace and Test, with 10,000++ cases thought by the experts to be at large in the community.
Everyone wash their hands regularly and self-isolate to taste. Coughing and spluttering, feeling ill? The message is don't take risks with spreading it to the vulnerable. Stay home, watch box sets. That is what we can all do to minimise the "sacrifice".
There will always be those selfish twats who think their right to go down the pub is worth killing a few old folk for. But I am seeing no similar callous disregard in the actions of the Government. Talk of a "cull" is just so much sensationalist wank.
Sky sports and BT sports are going to have a customer revolt as football and other sports disappear from our screens. I have both and my contracts are due for renewal in june
I expect to cancel one of them and seek a contract that takes into account that football etc may well not return before august at the earliest
The one that offers me the best deal will get a new 24 month contract, as long as I survive covid 19
I think this might be the end of BT Sports. They were already struggling with numbers and being tied to some very expensive rights deals.
Sky will be ok, as although they will lose business they have movies / entertainment and now owned by the cable media giant Comcast.
How do you do that superforecasting exactly - is there a method or just it just come to you like magic?
Great question!
I make 2 types of offerings on betting matters. (i) The micro analysis-led sort. (ii) The macro blinding flash of big picture intuition and insight. (i) is your mundane ten a penny forecast. (ii) is that rarer - but when right very lucrative - beast, the SUPERforecast.
Trump to be crushed in WH2020 is a definite (ii).
If pushed to explain it, I reach for the Wizard of Oz. Trump beneath the bluster is a pathetic little man, completely out of his depth in big time geopolitics. And by November there will be sufficient Dorothys amongst those who voted for him in 2016 to ensure that he not only loses but loses big. It does not take that many if you do the math. He fluked it last time, remember, and back then there was not the compelling evidence of his inadequacy that 4 years in the job has so amply provided, most of all now with this crisis.
He will be trounced. You can take that to the bank.
I remain sceptical about the figures worldwide. Last time I looked Turkey, for instance, was declaring 2 cases but I have been told via someone in the capital that there are hundreds of cases in Ankara alone.
The Chinese situation now looks great but what would actually be stopping a totalitarian regime that badly wants to save face simply not testing people are attributing most deaths to other causes?
[*] China has often been known to bamboozle foreign journalists, so what he's seeing may or may not be typical...
That interviewee is one of the most convincing I've ever seen - really impressive technique. More importantly, explaining exactly how China appears to have cracked it is fascinating. I agree with the point that we now have to see what happens when they graduallylift the restrictions. But from where they started (and where we are about to arrive at) it's a good place to get to..
Covid 19 of course originated in China and unless the Chinese ban live meat markets and bat experiments further viruses may break out there again.
Trump has at least now declared a state of emergency, he has also banned flights and states are starting to shut schools in the US too so now they are taking harder measures than we are
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Damn - you are just reinforcing my prejudices here... Waitrose shoppers: intelligent, reasoned, polite, restrained, calm Morrisons shoppers: panicking, irrational, selfish idiots.
Sorry, but there it is.
Well, I should have gone on to Wotrose in Lichfield. But the truth is, they never have anything worth buying anyway.
November is a long way away so I'm taking this with a pinch of salt. All sorts of things could happen before then, not least of which could be the worst of the infection passes over America and then Trump passes an emergency stimulus and lifts restrictions just in time.
Also, we had a Herdson article just a few weeks ago tipping buying Sanders when he was odds on - and we know what happened next.
Things that look inevitable one week can look very different the next.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I didn't say you said it was inevitable - just that it can look that way.
My point is that the dislike of Trump is so strong it can cloud our judgement.
I think what @SouthamObserver said earlier is fair. The culture wars in the US are so embedded that I can't see his base deserting even if casualties are in the low millions.
They'll blame someone else.
That doesn't mean he'll win but I could still see it being a close fight.
That's all true. But pre-Covid-19, I was tipping Trump to be re-elected so I don't think I was too clouded by a dislike of the man (which I do have).
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
Like I say, you can't get them all right.
You still haven't got it wrong yet. Although Trump is doing a sterling job of ensuring he isn't re-elected.
Harold Wilson's old adage about a week being a long time in politics has been superseded by an hour being a long time in politics.
Well, I'm tipping Trump to lose now so I won't take any credit for the earlier prediction if it does turn out to be right.
November is a long way away so I'm taking this with a pinch of salt. All sorts of things could happen before then, not least of which could be the worst of the infection passes over America and then Trump passes an emergency stimulus and lifts restrictions just in time.
Also, we had a Herdson article just a few weeks ago tipping buying Sanders when he was odds on - and we know what happened next.
Things that look inevitable one week can look very different the next.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I didn't say you said it was inevitable - just that it can look that way.
My point is that the dislike of Trump is so strong it can cloud our judgement.
I think what @SouthamObserver said earlier is fair. The culture wars in the US are so embedded that I can't see his base deserting even if casualties are in the low millions.
They'll blame someone else.
That doesn't mean he'll win but I could still see it being a close fight.
That's all true. But pre-Covid-19, I was tipping Trump to be re-elected so I don't think I was too clouded by a dislike of the man (which I do have).
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
Like I say, you can't get them all right.
You still haven't got it wrong yet. Although Trump is doing a sterling job of ensuring he isn't re-elected.
Harold Wilson's old adage about a week being a long time in politics has been superseded by an hour being a long time in politics.
Well, I'm tipping Trump to lose now so I won't take any credit for the earlier prediction if it does turn out to be right.
I trust your judgement. If your new projection is accurate, the world will become a safer place.
I am aware that Presidential Elections don't stop for world wars, but is there any mechanism Trump could adopt with the approval of Congress that could postpone the election for a year or four?
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Haha. Thought Morrisons opens at 7.
I went in to ours to buy some of the things I like from there that most other local places do not stock - Grape Nuts, Imperial Leather soap and so on, and the soap was depleted but everything else was fine.
No issues in Aldi except hand sanitiser and one type of loo roll being popular. They are welcome to the hand sanitiser.
And the they had good deals on Ribeye Steaks this week, so I have a couple of those.
Mrs Gadfly and I are both in our 60s with underlying chronic health issues and our 3 teacher children are entirely reliant upon us to look after our pre-school grandchildren whilst they're at work.
We are in an incredibly difficult position.
Sympathies - that's really difficult. Without knowing the details it's hard to advise, but have you considered all the otherwise unthinkable options? Might the kids be OK on their own in the parents' homes, with your number to call if they get in difficulty? A lot of kids are much more capable than people think. Might the schools accept your children having emergency days off in rotation? Or, and I don't like saying this, could they pull sickies for a few days each?
The council have just come down the road with a large speaker with messages in Spanish and English ‘please stay at home everything is closed ....’ all quite spine chilling really!
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Are we saying there are regional variations of panic out there
I've been reading here for a long time, but today I feel that I needed to sign up and comment regarding the current government policy regarding the corona virus that seems extremely reckless to me.
Also I admit I do not completely understand it, so perhaps I am hopeful that I have missed something in my reasoning and the government plan actually makes some sense.
1) Not enough is known about the disease to plan to allow up to 80% of the population to catch it. It doesn't just effect the old and vulnerable, younger people also have needed critical care, they just have a higher survival rate as the intensive care units in Italy and elsewhere priorise younger people over old when there are limited beds available.
Studies from Hong Kong show many who recover from the disease can have reduced lung capacity by up to 30%, making even simple physical exercise like walking very difficult. Survivors from SARS still have ongoing health problems from the disease many years later. We don't know other long term implications of the disease, do you recover completely or does it stay in the body and reappear every so often? We don't even know that lifetime immunity is gained from the disease, it could be possible to catch it again later.
Also it is possible for the disease to mutate and a new variant to be caught from the population, corona viruses are very susceptible to mutation compared with other viruses. The more people that have caught the original disease the more likely it will mutate regularly and create a corona virus season to go alongside the flu season every year. If this happens then herd immunity to the first strain will be completely worthless and we will have to begin all over again.
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Haha. Thought Morrisons opens at 7.
It probably does, but after a week’s hard teaching I ain’t getting up to go on a big shop at 7am, Covid-19 or not.
2) I fundamentally disagree with the assumption that everyone is going to catch the disease eventually. China and Singapore have show that the R0 of the disease can be reduced to much lower than 1 with sufficient government policies during lock down. Yes after restrictions are lifted then the R0 will rise by up again, but this could be reduced with policies like social distancing, working from home more often and self isolating as soon as you develop any symptoms at all. Once multiple testing kits are freely available and sent to every household, people can be tested immediately if they have symptoms or have been in contact with someone who has the virus. All these measures reduce R0 in the population when it is not locked down.
When new outbreaks happen then further lock downs will be required, but they can be more localised and of shorter duration as the national number of cases is gradually reduced. The idea is to get the long term R0 to less than 1 with general policy and targeted lock downs, so eventually the disease can be eliminated completely. For foreign travel, only allow this openly to other countries with similar controls and as more countries get under control too then gradually open the borders to them as well. Optional travel with 14 day quarantine from higher risk areas can be allowed. Eventually a corona virus test before boarding can become standard in every country.
I remain sceptical about the figures worldwide. Last time I looked Turkey, for instance, was declaring 2 cases but I have been told via someone in the capital that there are hundreds of cases in Ankara alone.
The Chinese situation now looks great but what would actually be stopping a totalitarian regime that badly wants to save face simply not testing people are attributing most deaths to other causes?
[*] China has often been known to bamboozle foreign journalists, so what he's seeing may or may not be typical...
That interviewee is one of the most convincing I've ever seen - really impressive technique. More importantly, explaining exactly how China appears to have cracked it is fascinating. I agree with the point that we now have to see what happens when they graduallylift the restrictions. But from where they started (and where we are about to arrive at) it's a good place to get to..
What is interesting is the Chinese approach to this, is lot of "quick and inaccurate" methods including tech, but using it to funnel individuals towards more and more accurate / expensive / time consuming approaches.
South Korea has done something similar with a road side test then funnel into the gold standard screen programme.
The move fast and break stuff of Silicon Valley.
In the West, we have for always taken the approach of gold standard approach to test once when it comes to medicine.
On the family isolation issue, I think this is where the schools being open idea comes in. Students up to eighteen will have parents who are fifty or younger in the vast majority of cases. This then puts them all in the herd immunity attempt. They want the children to pass it on to parents.
Of course, there are some who are older and who would need to be isolated in the home (maybe community isolation with friends or older relatives would be a good thing, rather than individually?). Also, parents with underlying conditions would have to do the same.
That leaves any household with no parent who is low risk as being a problem. Maybe get other relatives or families to temporarily adopt?
Musing out loud, but these strategies need to be shared rather than letting people just do what they want piecemeal. There is still an important government role here as a national pandemic response.
I thought Hunt's suggestion was very sensible. To run schools with much more flexibility for the next few months.
Getting sixth formers to do some of the childcare and even teaching would make sense to me.
Sorry, what? Making 17 year olds responsible for the safety and teaching of infants? No.
The council have just come down the road with a large speaker with messages in Spanish and English ‘please stay at home everything is closed ....’ all quite spine chilling really!
In Hartlepool? Thank goodness freedom of movement stops at the end of the year!
I have taken time to come to terms with this. I have raised questions and expressed reservations based on the evidence of what other countries were doing. It seemed to me at times that the government’s policy was a counsel of despair resulting in the deaths of at least tens of thousands of our citizens. I do not accept that asking such questions and expressing such doubts is setting myself up as some form of “expert” or armchair general. We all have a stake in this. We are all going to lose family and friends.
With considerable reluctance and no little trepidation I have come to the view that the government’s policy is the best we can do on the known facts. Those facts may still change, especially if there is a breakthrough in treatment or vaccine but we cannot count on that. In the absence of such a breakthrough all we can do is get through this and take the pain.
Well, hopefully gives a bit more reassurance that trying to have 1 long flat peak across Summer is a better bet than stomping this down and getting it 5x as bad in December.
We are in the middle of a profound crisis and PB is debating Sky Sports subscriptions.
Never change PB.
Just another issue in a never ending line of them
Nothing is going to be the same post covid 19
WFH will become the norm for many, NHS and GP systems will see a huge change with the use of new ways to communicate, degree courses will be much more popular on line cutting costs of study, travel will change and I expect everyone will wash their hands much more permanently
Moreover the EU may find it difficult to re establish ever closer union as countries across Europe have done their own thing, including closing their borders.
I am sure there are many more examples of how life will change post covid 19 from the way it has been
A cull is the opposite to what the government is proposing. The government wants the brunt to be borne by young and healthy people who will not die but who will contribute to herd immunity. This will also allow the NHS to concentrate on aiding the sick. The plan may be blown off course by sports, schools and others taking their own decisions to close down for the duration but that is another story.
Cull is not the right term but "sacrifice" seems apt.
As compared to the Lockdown Trace & Test approach we are accepting a higher death toll during this epidemic in exchange for herd immunity and better prospects post the epidemic.
Is that not a fair way of putting it?
We are beyond Lockdown Trace and Test, with 10,000++ cases thought by the experts to be at large in the community.
Everyone wash their hands regularly and self-isolate to taste. Coughing and spluttering, feeling ill? The message is don't take risks with spreading it to the vulnerable. Stay home, watch box sets. That is what we can all do to minimise the "sacrifice".
There will always be those selfish twats who think their right to go down the pub is worth killing a few old folk for. But I am seeing no similar callous disregard in the actions of the Government. Talk of a "cull" is just so much sensationalist wank.
You do seemed to have missed the point that the strategy requires a few of your pub goers in order to work.
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
Its likely to get roughly twice as risky each week. So better to go to the pub every day this week than once in 3 weeks time. Id have hand gel with me though!
My wife wants to go to a concert tomorrow. I'm against it. Such gatherings will be banned in a few days, so I'm annoyed Johnson didn't ban them from today - would have saved some debate.
I had the same brief feeling of mild annoyance yesterday. As I mentioned a few days ago my wife and I were supposed to be with a friend of ours at the Bryan Ferry concert in London. We decided for the sake of elderly relatives to cancel our plans and take the hit on the tickets. In the back of my mind I was kind of hoping the Government would ban big gatherings so I would get my money back but of course the announcement has come too late.
In truth I am not actually that miffed about the money, more that, for the second time, I have missed seeing Ferry. I had tickets for the 2012 Roxy Music tour as well and missed out as I was working away. My wife told me the concert was brilliant and played all my favourite songs which of course made it all soooooo much better.
Anyway, I have 3 other gigs booked this year with the first in June so I am hoping things have resolved somewhat by then but I kind of doubt it.
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Haha. Thought Morrisons opens at 7.
It probably does, but after a week’s hard teaching I ain’t getting up to go on a big shop at 7am, Covid-19 or not.
Covid 19 of course originated in China and unless the Chinese ban live meat markets and bat experiments further viruses may break out there again.
Trump has at least now declared a state of emergency, he has also banned flights and states are starting to shut schools in the US too so now they are taking harder measures than we are
Even you seem half hearted in defending the idiotic Trump
It's been stated that schools should remain open as otherwise children just socialise more in close contact and would require being looked after by grand parents which is exactly what we don't want to happen.
What do they expect and/or advise people to do during the Easter Holidays when children will be off school and look after by grand parents in a normal situation?
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Damn - you are just reinforcing my prejudices here... Waitrose shoppers: intelligent, reasoned, polite, restrained, calm Morrisons shoppers: panicking, irrational, selfish idiots.
Sorry, but there it is.
If that's how Waitrose shoppers are, the stress of all that control has certainly pushed up their bog roll consumption round here.
I have taken time to come to terms with this. I have raised questions and expressed reservations based on the evidence of what other countries were doing. It seemed to me at times that the government’s policy was a counsel of despair resulting in the deaths of at least tens of thousands of our citizens. I do not accept that asking such questions and expressing such doubts is setting myself up as some form of “expert” or armchair general. We all have a stake in this. We are all going to lose family and friends.
With considerable reluctance and no little trepidation I have come to the view that the government’s policy is the best we can do on the known facts. Those facts may still change, especially if there is a breakthrough in treatment or vaccine but we cannot count on that. In the absence of such a breakthrough all we can do is get through this and take the pain.
Really? You are as pessimistic as that?
He's predicted a peak of 20million simultaneous cases. At that level the NHS will collapse. It is a logical consequence.
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
My parents were in London last night (I know, I know), and they said it was heaving.
2) I fundamentally disagree with the assumption that everyone is going to catch the disease eventually. China and Singapore have show that the R0 of the disease can be reduced to much lower than 1 with sufficient government policies during lock down. Yes after restrictions are lifted then the R0 will rise by up again, but this could be reduced with policies like social distancing, working from home more often and self isolating as soon as you develop any symptoms at all. Once multiple testing kits are freely available and sent to every household, people can be tested immediately if they have symptoms or have been in contact with someone who has the virus. All these measures reduce R0 in the population when it is not locked down.
When new outbreaks happen then further lock downs will be required, but they can be more localised and of shorter duration as the national number of cases is gradually reduced. The idea is to get the long term R0 to less than 1 with general policy and targeted lock downs, so eventually the disease can be eliminated completely. For foreign travel, only allow this openly to other countries with similar controls and as more countries get under control too then gradually open the borders to them as well. Optional travel with 14 day quarantine from higher risk areas can be allowed. Eventually a corona virus test before boarding can become standard in every country.
So you are going to basically shut off Africa permanently? I am afraid this is pie in the sky stuff.
November is a long way away so I'm taking this with a pinch of salt. All sorts of things could happen before then, not least of which could be the worst of the infection passes over America and then Trump passes an emergency stimulus and lifts restrictions just in time.
Also, we had a Herdson article just a few weeks ago tipping buying Sanders when he was odds on - and we know what happened next.
Things that look inevitable one week can look very different the next.
With respect, I didn't say it was inevitable and I did say that the White House bet was the better value, because "Trump’s typically self-centred and quite possibly grossly inadequate reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, should now be favourite in a head-to-head with Trump, the president’s skill at negative campaigning notwithstanding".
The Sanders call was the wrong one but it's the first wrong one I've made in a long time; I hope I can be forgiven that and the previous record taken into account?
I did, however, foresee where Covid-19 was going in the US, and what that would mean for Trump politically, and for the US economy.
I didn't say you said it was inevitable - just that it can look that way.
My point is that the dislike of Trump is so strong it can cloud our judgement.
I think what @SouthamObserver said earlier is fair. The culture wars in the US are so embedded that I can't see his base deserting even if casualties are in the low millions.
They'll blame someone else.
That doesn't mean he'll win but I could still see it being a close fight.
That's all true. But pre-Covid-19, I was tipping Trump to be re-elected so I don't think I was too clouded by a dislike of the man (which I do have).
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
Like I say, you can't get them all right.
You still haven't got it wrong yet. Although Trump is doing a sterling job of ensuring he isn't re-elected.
Harold Wilson's old adage about a week being a long time in politics has been superseded by an hour being a long time in politics.
Well, I'm tipping Trump to lose now so I won't take any credit for the earlier prediction if it does turn out to be right.
I trust your judgement. If your new projection is accurate, the world will become a safer place.
No, you should always do your own research and come to your own view.
Those can be informed by others, but you shouldn't automatically adopt their conclusions. Particularly since your second sentence shows the sympathies around which a risk of confirmation bias could be based.
A cull is the opposite to what the government is proposing. The government wants the brunt to be borne by young and healthy people who will not die but who will contribute to herd immunity. This will also allow the NHS to concentrate on aiding the sick. The plan may be blown off course by sports, schools and others taking their own decisions to close down for the duration but that is another story.
Cull is not the right term but "sacrifice" seems apt.
As compared to the Lockdown Trace & Test approach we are accepting a higher death toll during this epidemic in exchange for herd immunity and better prospects post the epidemic.
Is that not a fair way of putting it?
We are beyond Lockdown Trace and Test, with 10,000++ cases thought by the experts to be at large in the community.
Everyone wash their hands regularly and self-isolate to taste. Coughing and spluttering, feeling ill? The message is don't take risks with spreading it to the vulnerable. Stay home, watch box sets. That is what we can all do to minimise the "sacrifice".
There will always be those selfish twats who think their right to go down the pub is worth killing a few old folk for. But I am seeing no similar callous disregard in the actions of the Government. Talk of a "cull" is just so much sensationalist wank.
You do seemed to have missed the point that the strategy requires a few of your pub goers in order to work.
But not those who have elderly relatives at home/they care for/regularly visit. The strategy is to protect them (from becoming NHS patients, if you want to add a twist of hard-nosed practicality).
degree courses will be much more popular on line cutting costs of study
Oddly enough, that might bring politics back towards the centre; if young adults are near their older relatives for longer then the likelihood of both groups hothousing themselves into radically different positions is likely to be lower.
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Damn - you are just reinforcing my prejudices here... Waitrose shoppers: intelligent, reasoned, polite, restrained, calm Morrisons shoppers: panicking, irrational, selfish idiots.
Sorry, but there it is.
If that's how Waitrose shoppers are, the stress of all that control has certainly pushed up their bog roll consumption round here.
My main impact of this crisis so far is to worry that there's a use for loo roll I've yet to discover. The quantities people seem to think they need, vs the amount of food being bought, is quite insane.
This kind of explains the different approaches in Europe and Asia. Generals always want to fight the last war. In Asia the experts are fighting SARS. In Europe they're fighting the WW1 flu pandemic.
I have taken time to come to terms with this. I have raised questions and expressed reservations based on the evidence of what other countries were doing. It seemed to me at times that the government’s policy was a counsel of despair resulting in the deaths of at least tens of thousands of our citizens. I do not accept that asking such questions and expressing such doubts is setting myself up as some form of “expert” or armchair general. We all have a stake in this. We are all going to lose family and friends.
With considerable reluctance and no little trepidation I have come to the view that the government’s policy is the best we can do on the known facts. Those facts may still change, especially if there is a breakthrough in treatment or vaccine but we cannot count on that. In the absence of such a breakthrough all we can do is get through this and take the pain.
Really? You are as pessimistic as that?
He's predicted a peak of 20million simultaneous cases. At that level the NHS will collapse. It is a logical consequence.
At those levels more than half of NHS staff are probably patients, given their much-heightened exposure.
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Haha. Thought Morrisons opens at 7.
It probably does, but after a week’s hard teaching I ain’t getting up to go on a big shop at 7am, Covid-19 or not.
What a disappointment. With no Premier League football today I thought the next best thing was to be part of the panic buyers at my local Waitrose. Well there were only 3/4 other shoppers and almost all the shelves were full. What's happening to this country?
Morrison’s in Burntwood was the opposite. I went in at 8 to beat the panic buyers. Car park was full and the shelves were half empty. All Fray Bentos pies and most tinned fish had vanished. Two packets of yeast left. Hardly any soap. Bloody hoarders had barely left enough for me to fill two shopping trollies to meet my own simple needs.
Damn - you are just reinforcing my prejudices here... Waitrose shoppers: intelligent, reasoned, polite, restrained, calm Morrisons shoppers: panicking, irrational, selfish idiots.
Sorry, but there it is.
If that's how Waitrose shoppers are, the stress of all that control has certainly pushed up their bog roll consumption round here.
My main impact of this crisis so far is to worry that there's a use for loo roll I've yet to discover. The quantities people seem to think they need, vs the amount of food being bought, is quite insane.
If there's a run on gaffer tape too, it will be because it can be used to make impromptu face-masks....
I think Boris is pursuing the correct tactics. Bring in the experts and listen to them. They might be wrong but it is defensible. If he did anything else, it would give the armchair 'experts' an extra stick to beat him with.
There is still a political element to some of the criticisms, but there always will be. If he took notice of the assorted thickos jostling to shout loudest, they'd still criticise him for pandering to ignorance.
What’s disappointing is things like Ian Donald’s thread above. Thoughtful and useful thread. And then he added at the end “way to clever for Boris Johnson to have thought of”. Unnecessary and unhelpful. Johnson is listening to the specialists in this area and making a judgement on the right strategy.
It’s a gutsy call and I hope it goes right. For all our sakes.
So do I. FWIW I didn't criticise Johnson and his advisors after their press conference, and I don't think I'm especially politically motivated on this issue. But I'm coming to feel that we've made the wrong decision.
Not so much because I disbelieve the idea that a tough crackdown will just postpone the issue and the virus will reappear. But because I think that even if that's true, it will buy time to prepare - possibly effective treatment or a vaccine, certainly specialised infection-handling units set up across the country, and certainly careful planning of how restrictions are handled.
We are trying to follow a theory - that mass infection in a controlled way will help in the long term - while scrambling with measures on the hoof to respond to each day's pressures. that doesn't sound like a good way to tackle it, and the downside, as David says, is that the strategy inevitably means many more deaths in the short term.
I don't blame Boris for this - he's taking advice, as he should. But despite their convincing manner, I'm increasingly doubtful that the advisors are right.
(Dloes it matter what I think? Nah. But we're just discussing it for interest here0
Comments
Judy Downey, the chair of the Relatives and Residents Association, said she was very worried by care homes closing their doors to visitors.
“We have tin-pot dictators telling people that they can’t visit their parents and partners based on something they have half-heard,” she said, adding she also knew of a woman who had been told by a nurse that she couldn’t visit her mother, who lives in her own home.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/experts-question-bupa-care-home-ban-on-most-family-visits
I would imagine with all fully professional football off those numbers will be much higher.
Went for a meal with friends to a local Dorset village pub last night and it was rammed and loud. No one seemed to be at all bothered about coronavirus. It certainly looked like ideal cross-infection conditions. Given there has only been one recorded case in Dorset to date maybe most felt, like us, it was still relatively ok to socialise.
The last hurrah or simply helping the government's herd immmunity strategy?
Even so I wonder whether it would have been better to prep society for this for longer.
Lengthening the time to say 6 days would move peak mayhem to May and the NHS might cope better.
Not least because it's the wrong question. The correct question is "who would you rather have affirm what you want to believe is true?" To which the obvious answer is 'the experts' - but if they're not willing to play ball, because you're wrong, then 'the man in the pub' or 'the friend I know' will have to do.
There is no easy answer to this, nobody knows what the optimal strategy is. We just have to hope that the egg-heads have taken the better path and make less mistakes. But there are going to be horrific weeks ahead.
https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1238773449130196993
Sometimes it helps to laugh.
We are in an incredibly difficult position.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8111335/WHO-calls-UK-scaling-coronavirus-testing-issues-stark-warning-governments.html
I did observe that the many families will lose loved ones notion could be construed as optimal politicking, i.e. I told you it would be bad, what more could I do? Or it wasn't as bad as I said it would be, because I put in the correct measures.
On the subject of the Thursday press conference, with his darting eyes looking in multiple directions at the same time, and his dilated pupils, is Boris self-medicating or just tired? Being world king wasn't supposed to be like this!
On topic
As for Trump and Pence yesterday, absolutely beyond parody.
https://twitter.com/karaokecomputer/status/1238754471716388864
[*] China has often been known to bamboozle foreign journalists, so what he's seeing may or may not be typical...
What I was misled by was a particularly poor campaign event by Biden where he just seemed done in. That, combined with deteriorating polling and fundraising (and the early voting for Super Tuesday, much of which would be in pre-SC), made me think that he wouldn't recover his situation. I also thought that the candidates in for SC would see it through to ST, only a few days later, having invested what they had in it.
Like I say, you can't get them all right.
Trying to find somewhere in between the two.
Then the totally system crashed and they had to build 16 hospitals to even start to cope. And the Chinese government basically put the country on lockdown.
During which time we are to believe there were only 100k cases and 3000 deaths. And that it hardly spread at all to the rest of the country.
However, if you say to me have China got the case load right down (not 10 or whatever they claim now daily), yes I can believe that.
https://twitter.com/wigmore_hall/status/1238770186200788992
I heard her interviewed this morning and to those like Mysticrose, rural voter and others who seem to have lost the plot she was fulsome in her praise for HMG, Boris and his advisers and said that there are an extraordinary number of experts in their field around the table constantly addressing the complexities and adapting to a fluid position
Clare Gerada was the chairperson of the Royal College of General Practitioners and was a constant thorn in the side of the previous conservative governments never holding back in attacking them
For her to be so in support of Boris and HMG is a demonstration how mature people can see a bigger picture and put on one side party politics for the better good a lesson some on here could well do to learn
I just think we in pb aren't as good on US politics (collectively) as we think we are so I have a very adaptable betting strategy from which I'm trying to remove all confirmation bias.
Harold Wilson's old adage about a week being a long time in politics has been superseded by an hour being a long time in politics.
Indeed the more I think about it the most important thing we can probably do right now, even more important than getting that bog roll in, is to get ourselves as fit and healthy as possible. Last night was an extremely poor start but I am off the drink until we are over this, l am going to try hard to lose those extra pounds and improve my lung capacity. We should work on the basis we are going to catch this, that it’s dangerous and we need to be in the best shape possible when we do.
But communicating that quantification would be politically incredibly difficult for a government who's spent the last 9 years denying that austerity policies have caused any deaths.
Waitrose shoppers: intelligent, reasoned, polite, restrained, calm
Morrisons shoppers: panicking, irrational, selfish idiots.
Sorry, but there it is.
I expect to cancel one of them and seek a contract that takes into account that football etc may well not return before august at the earliest
The one that offers me the best deal will get a new 24 month contract, as long as I survive covid 19
Just about to go and buy a keg from the microbrewery near me though.
Beer and fitness. Best of both worlds.
https://twitter.com/ShippersUnbound/status/1238776232742924291?s=20
Everyone wash their hands regularly and self-isolate to taste. Coughing and spluttering, feeling ill? The message is don't take risks with spreading it to the vulnerable. Stay home, watch box sets. That is what we can all do to minimise the "sacrifice".
There will always be those selfish twats who think their right to go down the pub is worth killing a few old folk for. But I am seeing no similar callous disregard in the actions of the Government. Talk of a "cull" is just so much sensationalist wank.
Sky will be ok, as although they will lose business they have movies / entertainment and now owned by the cable media giant Comcast.
Never change PB.
Great question!
I make 2 types of offerings on betting matters. (i) The micro analysis-led sort. (ii) The macro blinding flash of big picture intuition and insight. (i) is your mundane ten a penny forecast. (ii) is that rarer - but when right very lucrative - beast, the SUPERforecast.
Trump to be crushed in WH2020 is a definite (ii).
If pushed to explain it, I reach for the Wizard of Oz. Trump beneath the bluster is a pathetic little man, completely out of his depth in big time geopolitics. And by November there will be sufficient Dorothys amongst those who voted for him in 2016 to ensure that he not only loses but loses big. It does not take that many if you do the math. He fluked it last time, remember, and back then there was not the compelling evidence of his inadequacy that 4 years in the job has so amply provided, most of all now with this crisis.
He will be trounced. You can take that to the bank.
Trump has at least now declared a state of emergency, he has also banned flights and states are starting to shut schools in the US too so now they are taking harder measures than we are
I am aware that Presidential Elections don't stop for world wars, but is there any mechanism Trump could adopt with the approval of Congress that could postpone the election for a year or four?
I went in to ours to buy some of the things I like from there that most other local places do not stock - Grape Nuts, Imperial Leather soap and so on, and the soap was depleted but everything else was fine.
No issues in Aldi except hand sanitiser and one type of loo roll being popular. They are welcome to the hand sanitiser.
And the they had good deals on Ribeye Steaks this week, so I have a couple of those.
Also I admit I do not completely understand it, so perhaps I am hopeful that I have missed something in my reasoning and the government plan actually makes some sense.
1) Not enough is known about the disease to plan to allow up to 80% of the population to catch it.
It doesn't just effect the old and vulnerable, younger people also have needed critical care, they just have a higher survival rate as the intensive care units in Italy and elsewhere priorise younger people over old when there are limited beds available.
Studies from Hong Kong show many who recover from the disease can have reduced lung capacity by up to 30%, making even simple physical exercise like walking very difficult. Survivors from SARS still have ongoing health problems from the disease many years later.
We don't know other long term implications of the disease, do you recover completely or does it stay in the body and reappear every so often?
We don't even know that lifetime immunity is gained from the disease, it could be possible to catch it again later.
Also it is possible for the disease to mutate and a new variant to be caught from the population, corona viruses are very susceptible to mutation compared with other viruses. The more people that have caught the original disease the more likely it will mutate regularly and create a corona virus season to go alongside the flu season every year. If this happens then herd immunity to the first strain will be completely worthless and we will have to begin all over again.
When new outbreaks happen then further lock downs will be required, but they can be more localised and of shorter duration as the national number of cases is gradually reduced. The idea is to get the long term R0 to less than 1 with general policy and targeted lock downs, so eventually the disease can be eliminated completely.
For foreign travel, only allow this openly to other countries with similar controls and as more countries get under control too then gradually open the borders to them as well. Optional travel with 14 day quarantine from higher risk areas can be allowed. Eventually a corona virus test before boarding can become standard in every country.
South Korea has done something similar with a road side test then funnel into the gold standard screen programme.
The move fast and break stuff of Silicon Valley.
In the West, we have for always taken the approach of gold standard approach to test once when it comes to medicine.
Nothing is going to be the same post covid 19
WFH will become the norm for many, NHS and GP systems will see a huge change with the use of new ways to communicate, degree courses will be much more popular on line cutting costs of study, travel will change and I expect everyone will wash their hands much more permanently
Moreover the EU may find it difficult to re establish ever closer union as countries across Europe have done their own thing, including closing their borders.
I am sure there are many more examples of how life will change post covid 19 from the way it has been
In truth I am not actually that miffed about the money, more that, for the second time, I have missed seeing Ferry. I had tickets for the 2012 Roxy Music tour as well and missed out as I was working away. My wife told me the concert was brilliant and played all my favourite songs which of course made it all soooooo much better.
Anyway, I have 3 other gigs booked this year with the first in June so I am hoping things have resolved somewhat by then but I kind of doubt it.
It's been stated that schools should remain open as otherwise children just socialise more in close contact and would require being looked after by grand parents which is exactly what we don't want to happen.
What do they expect and/or advise people to do during the Easter Holidays when children will be off school and look after by grand parents in a normal situation?
Those can be informed by others, but you shouldn't automatically adopt their conclusions. Particularly since your second sentence shows the sympathies around which a risk of confirmation bias could be based.
😴
Not so much because I disbelieve the idea that a tough crackdown will just postpone the issue and the virus will reappear. But because I think that even if that's true, it will buy time to prepare - possibly effective treatment or a vaccine, certainly specialised infection-handling units set up across the country, and certainly careful planning of how restrictions are handled.
We are trying to follow a theory - that mass infection in a controlled way will help in the long term - while scrambling with measures on the hoof to respond to each day's pressures. that doesn't sound like a good way to tackle it, and the downside, as David says, is that the strategy inevitably means many more deaths in the short term.
I don't blame Boris for this - he's taking advice, as he should. But despite their convincing manner, I'm increasingly doubtful that the advisors are right.
(Dloes it matter what I think? Nah. But we're just discussing it for interest here0