Surely you mean, 'a fuck the many not the few man?'
Although, in fairness, that could be said equally of Johnson and indeed Corbyn...
With Corbyn we will never know. He could be either the greatest or the worst PM we never had. My sense is something in between. Probably the most 'slightly above average but seemed better than that because of such low expectations' PM we never had.
The fact that Corbyn seems to be deliberately flouting Government advice for older people says all you need to know about him.
I'm just trying to stay in good shape for the virus' inevitable arrival. Sub 50 10k off the bucket list today anyway.
Well done. That's about where I was last summer but I've put a bit of weight on since then. Was planning to up my running again in June for the Loch Ness Marathon in October, but I'm not too optimistic that it will go ahead....
Loch Ness Marathon is lovely but a killer - all the way, but from mile 18 especially. Don't go hoping for a personal best.
If JD Sports and Sports Direct also follow suit. This is when the riots start.
We call all probably survive a few weeks without clothes shopping.
How about a 20% drop in GDP?
Millions unemployed, receiving government handouts. The rest paying 90% of their salary in a super tax. People unable to pay mortgages, homes repossessed, people living in their cars, children without a roof over their head. Food rationing. Violent crime up. Civil unrest.
Because that is where we will be in six months time if we don't get a handle on this.
That starts to scare me more than the headline mortality rate for this thing.
We are all going to be poorer after this I don't think that is in doubt and the economic crisis is very real. However how many deaths are we willing to pay as a price for no disruption.
I don't think it's a matter of there being no disruption (there's already been plenty of disruption, of course.) It's a matter of how much disruption society can bear. Government will have to weigh that up against the number of lives that would be saved - just like it does all the time.
This is the point where I remind people that huge numbers of lives would be saved if only the use of motor vehicles by private citizens were abandoned (so that they became the exclusive preserve of the State, e.g. for the provision of ambulances and buses) and we were made to walk or cycle everywhere that could not be accessed by the (massively overloaded) public transport system. It would save many thousands of lives every year, but the costs in terms of personal freedom and especially to the economy would be ruinous.
Therefore, we write off the lives of road traffic accident victims for the sake of personal convenience and economic efficiency.
The principle of lives having a quantifiable value, rather than an infinite one, having been established, it's merely a matter of society determining what that value is.
Yes I get what you are saying I even agree with it. However I am assuming that the government has enough data to suggest that the scale of death to keep the economy going as it was far exceeds what would be acceptable.
For example if QUALY put the value at less than the dole I think we would still give people the dole rather than have people starving in the streets for the same reason
I thought the model said 750,000 deaths via herd immunity
20,000 via social isolation.
So Cummings few turned out to be an extra 730,000 pensioners and vulnerables
It was 250,000. And everyone agrees that 20,000 is very optimistic. If we can keep it to that we will have done exceptionally well.
As I may have mentioned last night, I’ve been in touch with a friend who knows a very senior NHS bod and she - the NHS expert - is personally expecting 300,000 deaths.
Oh dear that's awful.
Let's hope they are wrong.
TBF that does depend heavily on the overlap with the 600,000 deaths we’d expect in a normal year anyway.
It's proof that a "whitehall official" is waging an internal war at a point they should be focused on keeping the country as safe as can be
Where is a Whitehall official mentioned?
My reading is that at a private engagement (i.e. not govt business) Cummings is alleged to have said this by several people present ["those present"].
I think it's highly plausible that in his quest to be a misunderstood science genius, he would have said something that sounded a lot like that.
There was a buzzfeed article from yesterday with a similar line of attack which quoted a "whitehall official" [I assume a SpAd]. I'm working on the basis that they are a coordinated attack.
Times would require 2 or more people before they printed that. Buzzfeed I'm not sure.
The article also quotes a senior Tory "“Dominic himself had a conversion,” a senior Tory said. “He’s gone from ‘herd immunity and let the old people die’, to ‘let’s shut down the country and the economy."
That Tory might be one of the original 2, or he might be another figure.
Balance of probabilities very much that this is true.
I'm not disputing that it's quite possibly true.
I'm criticising the wankers who are selectively leaking to the press to damage Cummings at a time of national emergency.
considering he is pulling all the strings the person is doing the country a service. We need to know what these venal unprincipled liars are really up to.
The clown in Downing Street is causing unnecessary infections
Frankly, the only people causing confusion seem to be the media who want a story. And individuals who want to flout the rules.
What is confusing about
Stay home. Save Lives. Protect our NHS.
Sadly, Boris is by nature the court jester, the classroom clown. There are times when that has worked well for him but, to put it bluntly, he lacks gravitas.
If JD Sports and Sports Direct also follow suit. This is when the riots start.
We call all probably survive a few weeks without clothes shopping.
How about a 20% drop in GDP?
Millions unemployed, receiving government handouts. The rest paying 90% of their salary in a super tax. People unable to pay mortgages, homes repossessed, people living in their cars, children without a roof over their head. Food rationing. Violent crime up. Civil unrest.
Because that is where we will be in six months time if we don't get a handle on this.
That starts to scare me more than the headline mortality rate for this thing.
We are all going to be poorer after this I don't think that is in doubt and the economic crisis is very real. However how many deaths are we willing to pay as a price for no disruption.
I don't think it's a matter of there being no disruption (there's already been plenty of disruption, of course.) It's a matter of how much disruption society can bear. Government will have to weigh that up against the number of lives that would be saved - just like it does all the time.
This is the point where I remind people that huge numbers of lives would be saved if only the use of motor vehicles by private citizens were abandoned (so that they became the exclusive preserve of the State, e.g. for the provision of ambulances and buses) and we were made to walk or cycle everywhere that could not be accessed by the (massively overloaded) public transport system. It would save many thousands of lives every year, but the costs in terms of personal freedom and especially to the economy would be ruinous.
Therefore, we write off the lives of road traffic accident victims for the sake of personal convenience and economic efficiency.
The principle of lives having a quantifiable value, rather than an infinite one, having been established, it's merely a matter of society determining what that value is.
Yes I get what you are saying I even agree with it. However I am assuming that the government has enough data to suggest that the scale of death to keep the economy going as it was far exceeds what would be acceptable.
For example if QUALY put the value at less than the dole I think we would still give people the dole rather than have people starving in the streets for the same reason
I thought the model said 750,000 deaths via herd immunity
20,000 via social isolation.
So Cummings few turned out to be an extra 730,000 pensioners and vulnerables
It was 250,000. And everyone agrees that 20,000 is very optimistic. If we can keep it to that we will have done exceptionally well.
As I may have mentioned last night, I’ve been in touch with a friend who knows a very senior NHS bod and she - the NHS expert - is personally expecting 300,000 deaths.
Oh dear that's awful.
Let's hope they are wrong.
TBF that does depend heavily on the overlap with the 600,000 deaths we’d expect in a normal year anyway.
It's an interesting question to ask how many of the people going into hospital with Coronavirus might in normal years have died peacefully in their beds and never touched the hospital system.
Surely you mean, 'a fuck the many not the few man?'
Although, in fairness, that could be said equally of Johnson and indeed Corbyn...
With Corbyn we will never know. He could be either the greatest or the worst PM we never had. My sense is something in between. Probably the most 'slightly above average but seemed better than that because of such low expectations' PM we never had.
It was intended as an ironic reference to his, ummm, lively sex life.
If JD Sports and Sports Direct also follow suit. This is when the riots start.
We call all probably survive a few weeks without clothes shopping.
How about a 20% drop in GDP?
Millions unemployed, receiving government handouts. The rest paying 90% of their salary in a super tax. People unable to pay mortgages, homes repossessed, people living in their cars, children without a roof over their head. Food rationing. Violent crime up. Civil unrest.
Because that is where we will be in six months time if we don't get a handle on this.
That starts to scare me more than the headline mortality rate for this thing.
If you let virus transmission get out of control, as the UK government seems to have done, and as several other western governments have done, but as several Asian governments have NOT done, you not only cause a huge number of unnecessary deaths, you trash your economy more than you need to as well. The trick, as those Asian countries have shown, is to effectively stop transmission and then gradually ease off restrictions in a risk controlled way.
Wrong. The Asian countries have not provably succeeded - not yet. All the science says that when you relax the restrictions, the virus comes roaring back
Singapore has been the golden boy of managing the virus - and they do have an excellent record. But even there it is returning:
If you accept herd immunity doesn't work as a policy, you have to focus - relentlessly - on keeping the number of transmissions down. The two effective ways of doing that are to keep people isolated from each other and to keep the uninfected population away from the infected population. Once you have reduced new transmissions and have a good (but it won't be perfect) handle on who is infected and who isn't you can allow the probably uninfected population to start interacting with each other and go about their business. You need constant monitoring. The degree of relaxation is a risk controlled trade-off.
To be clear, all available strategies have severe implications. Point is the implications of a strictly controlled transmission are less ghastly than a somewhat uncontrolled one.
It’s far too early to say if any method or policy has “worked”. We are in the very early stages of a pandemic that will likely last many months, or even years.
Countries that seem to do well now might get horrible second waves next winter, as happened with Spanish flu. Perhaps in the end every country will suffer pretty much equally
I agree there are no great choices. There are only sad and wretched choices.
Startling how much higher France's normal energy use is than the similarly sized UK's. Even after lock-down, it's still higher than the UK's.
I'm guessing they probably use more aircon and electric heating, as well as electric cookers, than we do, which would show up on electricity consumption. Remember how much UK household energy is natural gas.
I think there's more of an industrial element, but I'll have a look later.
Since if my information is right the UK's industrial base is currently around 30% larger than that of France that seems unlikely.
If JD Sports and Sports Direct also follow suit. This is when the riots start.
We call all probably survive a few weeks without clothes shopping.
How about a 20% drop in GDP?
Millions unemployed, receiving government handouts. The rest paying 90% of their salary in a super tax. People unable to pay mortgages, homes repossessed, people living in their cars, children without a roof over their head. Food rationing. Violent crime up. Civil unrest.
Because that is where we will be in six months time if we don't get a handle on this.
That starts to scare me more than the headline mortality rate for this thing.
We are all going to be poorer after this I don't think that is in doubt and the economic crisis is very real. However how many deaths are we willing to pay as a price for no disruption.
I don't think it's a matter of there being no disruption (there's already been plenty of disruption, of course.) It's a matter of how much disruption society can bear. Government will have to weigh that up against the number of lives that would be saved - just like it does all the time.
This is the point where I remind people that huge numbers of lives would be saved if only the use of motor vehicles by private citizens were abandoned (so that they became the exclusive preserve of the State, e.g. for the provision of ambulances and buses) and we were made to walk or cycle everywhere that could not be accessed by the (massively overloaded) public transport system. It would save many thousands of lives every year, but the costs in terms of personal freedom and especially to the economy would be ruinous.
Therefore, we write off the lives of road traffic accident victims for the sake of personal convenience and economic efficiency.
The principle of lives having a quantifiable value, rather than an infinite one, having been established, it's merely a matter of society determining what that value is.
Yes I get what you are saying I even agree with it. However I am assuming that the government has enough data to suggest that the scale of death to keep the economy going as it was far exceeds what would be acceptable.
For example if QUALY put the value at less than the dole I think we would still give people the dole rather than have people starving in the streets for the same reason
I thought the model said 750,000 deaths via herd immunity
20,000 via social isolation.
So Cummings few turned out to be an extra 730,000 pensioners and vulnerables
It was 250,000. And everyone agrees that 20,000 is very optimistic. If we can keep it to that we will have done exceptionally well.
As I may have mentioned last night, I’ve been in touch with a friend who knows a very senior NHS bod and she - the NHS expert - is personally expecting 300,000 deaths.
This article finally discusses the uncomfortable issue of whether many of the people dying of the virus probably would have died anyway from other conditions within a relatively short time.
"The coronavirus deaths will not be on top of this. Many would be within this "normal" number of expected deaths.
It was a point conceded by Sir Patrick at a press conference on Thursday when he said there would be "some overlap" between coronavirus deaths and expected deaths - he just did not know how much of an overlap."
If JD Sports and Sports Direct also follow suit. This is when the riots start.
We call all probably survive a few weeks without clothes shopping.
How about a 20% drop in GDP?
Millions unemployed, receiving government handouts. The rest paying 90% of their salary in a super tax. People unable to pay mortgages, homes repossessed, people living in their cars, children without a roof over their head. Food rationing. Violent crime up. Civil unrest.
Because that is where we will be in six months time if we don't get a handle on this.
That starts to scare me more than the headline mortality rate for this thing.
We are all going to be poorer after this I don't think that is in doubt and the economic crisis is very real. However how many deaths are we willing to pay as a price for no disruption.
I don't think it's a matter of there being no disruption (there's already been plenty of disruption, of course.) It's a matter of how much disruption society can bear. Government will have to weigh that up against the number of lives that would be saved - just like it does all the time.
This is the point where I remind people that huge numbers of lives would be saved if only the use of motor vehicles by private citizens were abandoned (so that they became the exclusive preserve of the State, e.g. for the provision of ambulances and buses) and we were made to walk or cycle everywhere that could not be accessed by the (massively overloaded) public transport system. It would save many thousands of lives every year, but the costs in terms of personal freedom and especially to the economy would be ruinous.
Therefore, we write off the lives of road traffic accident victims for the sake of personal convenience and economic efficiency.
The principle of lives having a quantifiable value, rather than an infinite one, having been established, it's merely a matter of society determining what that value is.
Yes I get what you are saying I even agree with it. However I am assuming that the government has enough data to suggest that the scale of death to keep the economy going as it was far exceeds what would be acceptable.
For example if QUALY put the value at less than the dole I think we would still give people the dole rather than have people starving in the streets for the same reason
I thought the model said 750,000 deaths via herd immunity
20,000 via social isolation.
So Cummings few turned out to be an extra 730,000 pensioners and vulnerables
It was 250,000. And everyone agrees that 20,000 is very optimistic. If we can keep it to that we will have done exceptionally well.
As I may have mentioned last night, I’ve been in touch with a friend who knows a very senior NHS bod and she - the NHS expert - is personally expecting 300,000 deaths.
Oh dear that's awful.
Let's hope they are wrong.
TBF that does depend heavily on the overlap with the 600,000 deaths we’d expect in a normal year anyway.
Worth pointing out that for seasonal flu figures we usually look at the "excess deaths" to see how good/bad the flu season has been, so people who die with/of flu but would have died at about the same time anyway don't show up in figures calculated on that basis. Whereas with the COVID-19 modelling figures, that distinction isn't generally being made.
Churchill didn't sink the French Navy at Mers El Kébir.
Only one battleship (Bretagne) and a tugboat were sunk. 2 battleships, 3 destroyers and a seaplane tender were damaged. 1 battleship and 2 destroyers escaped damage.
It was only the fact that Bretagne sank quickly that nearly 1,300 Frenchmen died.
Startling how much higher France's normal energy use is than the similarly sized UK's. Even after lock-down, it's still higher than the UK's.
I'm guessing they probably use more aircon and electric heating, as well as electric cookers, than we do, which would show up on electricity consumption. Remember how much UK household energy is natural gas.
I think there's more of an industrial element, but I'll have a look later.
Since if my information is right the UK's industrial base is currently around 30% larger than that of France that seems unlikely.
I think that electricity is the default in France as cheap nuclear, compared with fossil fuels.
Churchill didn't sink the French Navy at Mers El Kébir.
Only one battleship (Bretagne) and a tugboat were sunk. 2 battleships, 3 destroyers and a seaplane tender were damaged. 1 battleship and 2 destroyers escaped damage.
It was only the fact that Bretagne sank quickly that nearly 1,300 Frenchmen died.
Startling how much higher France's normal energy use is than the similarly sized UK's. Even after lock-down, it's still higher than the UK's.
I'm guessing they probably use more aircon and electric heating, as well as electric cookers, than we do, which would show up on electricity consumption. Remember how much UK household energy is natural gas.
I think there's more of an industrial element, but I'll have a look later.
Since if my information is right the UK's industrial base is currently around 30% larger than that of France that seems unlikely.
I think that electricity is the default in France as cheap nuclear, compared with fossil fuels.
Startling how much higher France's normal energy use is than the similarly sized UK's. Even after lock-down, it's still higher than the UK's.
I'm guessing they probably use more aircon and electric heating, as well as electric cookers, than we do, which would show up on electricity consumption. Remember how much UK household energy is natural gas.
I think there's more of an industrial element, but I'll have a look later.
Since if my information is right the UK's industrial base is currently around 30% larger than that of France that seems unlikely.
I think that electricity is the default in France as cheap nuclear, compared with fossil fuels.
True. And good luck next week Foxy - hopefully your prediction that in 4-6 weeks this will be calming down is proved correct!! (BTW, I sent you an email to the address associated with your account - not sure if you saw it or not - no need to reply if it's irrelevant!)
Lockdown has to come now...f##king stupid tw@ts can't just engage brain and use some common sense...but then the media are just as bad asking about having play dates for their kids and going on summer holidays.
Startling how much higher France's normal energy use is than the similarly sized UK's. Even after lock-down, it's still higher than the UK's.
I'm guessing they probably use more aircon and electric heating, as well as electric cookers, than we do, which would show up on electricity consumption. Remember how much UK household energy is natural gas.
I think there's more of an industrial element, but I'll have a look later.
Since if my information is right the UK's industrial base is currently around 30% larger than that of France that seems unlikely.
I think that electricity is the default in France as cheap nuclear, compared with fossil fuels.
True. And good luck next week Foxy - hopefully your prediction that in 4-6 weeks this will be calming down is proved correct!! (BTW, I sent you an email to the address associated with your account - not sure if you saw it or not - no need to reply if it's irrelevant!)
Did we have a prediction this will be calming down in 4-6 weeks. That would be fantastic, but based on what though?
The clown in Downing Street is causing unnecessary infections
You do know that Nicola is part of Cobra policy making along with the Welsh and Northern Ireland First Ministers. She is expressing the Cobra position headed by Boris
Your post falsely suggests that there is something unusual about your graph - an unhelpful illusion and I am sorry to say it is either lazy or dishonest of you to do this.
God you're tiresome.
I asked a question, hoping the answer might be differential diagnosis. Why is that so evil? I already acknowledged that the person who responded that flu is less prevalent in March is probably right, as you would have seen if you read on.
A thousand apologies for trying to think outside the box. Shame on me
This article finally discusses the uncomfortable issue of whether many of the people dying of the virus probably would have died anyway from other conditions within a relatively short time.
"The coronavirus deaths will not be on top of this. Many would be within this "normal" number of expected deaths.
It was a point conceded by Sir Patrick at a press conference on Thursday when he said there would be "some overlap" between coronavirus deaths and expected deaths - he just did not know how much of an overlap."
This is a very important point.
In 2018, the last year for which we have full data, 616,014 people died in the UK, an increase of 1.5% over 2017. If we assume that the "natural" progression is for 1.5% more people to die in 2019 and in 2020 (and there are good reasons to think that with an ageing population, the numbers should be slightly higher than that), then one would expect around 635,000 people to die in the UK in 2020.
Unless something else horrible appears, one would expect that the vast majority of the difference between the the actual death number for 2020 and 635,000 is the CV-19 excess morbidity.
My guess is that the actual death number will end up being in the 660,000 to 680,000 range - i.e. we'll see 5% more deaths indicating an excess morbidity of around 35,000 deaths. However, I think the public death number for CV-19 may very well be 50-100% higher than that.
On the red funnel back to the mainland, noticeably fewer private cars than coming over on Friday, mostly commercial vehicles. Safer than London at present, but with only a handful if ICU beds it wouldn't take much to overwhelm St Mary's Hospital.
Oldies doing alright and in good spirits, spoken to though closed windows. The only place with toilet rolls was the foodbank hamper in Tescos.
Although the messaging could be better, the public doing this stuff know they are doing wrong, but tell themselves I'll be ok or I don't count because....and then they will blame the government for everything.
You have to been in the German Big Brother house for the past 2 months not to know what is going on and what you shouldn't be doing.
It's curious that some countries (e.g., Scandinavia / Austria / Switzerland) have really slowed the number of new cases over the past few days (Worldometer). This can't be due to the recent restrictions imposed as the cases should all have been contracted before that (lockdown only started 5 days ago in Scandinavia at least) - quite curious...
You know back in the dim and distant past of a couple of weeks ago when I was furious that the Scotland France game was going ahead and that the idea of 10,000 plague carriers from the south of France turning up was a really dumb idea?
Turns out the first person to die of covid-19 in Scotland was a French Rugby fan who came over for the game.
Cummings doesn't want the job for long and is there to take the heat for anything that turns out controversial. See: Carrie briefing against him when the ex-chancellor went. Herd immunity was an outcome, not an aim, that became controversial because we don't follow the Chinese strategy with respect to irresponsible journalism.
Churchill didn't sink the French Navy at Mers El Kébir.
Only one battleship (Bretagne) and a tugboat were sunk. 2 battleships, 3 destroyers and a seaplane tender were damaged. 1 battleship and 2 destroyers escaped damage.
It was only the fact that Bretagne sank quickly that nearly 1,300 Frenchmen died.
So looking at the evidence the nudge policy has failed. Far from encouraging social distancing, for many it has encouraged the opposite.
My view is that people are making hay whilst the sun shines in fear of worse to come. If so, the approach of ramping up measures has a lot to answer for.
I am suddenly very anxious that every precaution should be taken for the safety and wellbeing of Boris Johnson.
Edit - to be fair, though, there isn't an obvious standout choice. Gove? Patel? Sunak? All deeply flawed in one way or another. Ben Wallace perhaps, but no doubt they think he's needed where he is.
Did we have a prediction this will be calming down in 4-6 weeks. That would be fantastic, but based on what though?
Here's my prediction:
UK numbers will continue to climb, prompting ever more significant lockdowns.
The results in a near total lockdown from 7 April onwards. Only those with essential work, or getting groceries, will be allowed out.
This results in the UK infection rate peaking on around 20 April, and then gradually tailing off. On 6 May, the first "new infections" below 200 is recorded, and on 10 May, it goes below 100.
The UK government now has the capability to test more than 25,000 people per day. Furthermore, the first large scale random antibody test is carried out in London to see how many people have had CV-19. To the government's surprise, it comes out as a little more than 15%.
As the crisis continues, treatments improve and improve. There are more ventilators in hospitals and special wards are created. Drug regimes continue to get better, and the use of a smartphone app for rapid testing, and prevenitive courses means that hospitalisation rates decline.
The government allows schools to reopen for the last month of the school year, although attendance is spotty. Most large scale restrictions are lifted in late June.
Although the pace of growth is slower, thanks to much better testing, the virus does come back. By the end of July, the new infection rate is back to 200-300/day, even with South Korean type measures. The UK government announces that there will be a further two week lockdown in the last two weeks of the school summer holidays. At the time of lockdown, new cases are running just north of 1,000/day again, but this is rapidly squashed down by the two week lockdown. The early notice helped too: simply it turns out that the economic impact of shutdowns is much less if - like Christmas - they are telegraphed well in advance.
Again, daily cases collapse during the lockdown. The govenrnment announces the next lockdown period will be over Christmas 2020. Adult children are faced with a difficult choice... two weeks with their parents all the time, or two weeks without their parents at all...
The pace of new cases grows again, but slower this time around. With a quarter of Londoners having already had CV-19, there are fewer infection vectors. People are better about using the app. And the UK Testing Force sets up mobile testing checkpoints to do random tests.
Britain ends 2020 having seen around 25,000 deaths, a nasty recession, but society is intact, and there is room for optimism about 2021.
You know back in the dim and distant past of a couple of weeks ago when I was furious that the Scotland France game was going ahead and that the idea of 10,000 plague carriers from the south of France turning up was a really dumb idea?
Turns out the first person to die of covid-19 in Scotland was a French Rugby fan who came over for the game.
Apparently he had an aggressive form a cancer - what I can’t find out is whether they were being treated for that, or if they were unaware of their condition.
More evidence that the virus is much more contagious and much less dangerous than assumed.
% infected x fatality rate = deaths Deaths are known so if %infected is higher, then fatality rate is lower.
This is delusional wishful thinking, I'm afraid. Death is a lagging indicator, so if the virus is spreading very fast, it just means there are a lot of people walking around who are contagious, and some of them are themselves doomed.
It is very, very complicated. For a start the classic examples are usual highly virulent diseases, and what is usually not mentioned so frequently is that the least virulent strains of them can also get out-competed. The pressures on viruses that aren't highly virulent like this one are far less severe.
In most textbooks, the story stops there [Less virulent strains becoming dominant]. But the virus continued to evolve. From the late 1970s, reports began to accumulate that MYXV was becoming more lethal again. The picture was not simple, partly because the sampling was not as extensive as it had been during Fenner’s studies, and partly because there was substantial regional variation. Fascinated by the possibility that the textbook evolutionary trajectory of virulence had reversed, we, together with Eddie Holmes of the University of Sydney and Penn State University’s Isabella Cattadori, have been using Fenner’s common garden protocols to find out what happened.
To our great surprise, the most virulent of the isolates harvested from the field and frozen in the 1990s caused our susceptible laboratory rabbits to develop a highly lethal immune collapse syndrome akin to septic shock. This disease syndrome had never been seen before. Rabbits die at about the same rate as those infected with the ancestral virus, but they do so without developing classical myxomatosis. Instead, death is associated with a form of toxic or septic shock characterized by an almost complete absence of cellular inflammatory responses, allowing normally well-controlled bacteria to run rampant in the test rabbits.
Does this sound familiar to anyone?
In other words this virus may be SARS fighting back.
I think his final bit re public health is worth quoting. I have noticed that in the public arena, politicians and wonks and medics are talking about vaccination like it's going to be brilliant. They're looking desperately for an exit route from the current chaos. There are difficult issues with mass vaccination, including some delicate ethical problems - eg it is almost certain there will be some vaccine-related adverse events, but the benefits to children of being vaccinated are, on an individual level, likely to be low in the case of COVID-19. Effectively we asking that age group to accept harm in order to confer a benefit on a different group of older or more vulnerable adults. Although not publicised in the media so much (have they learned lessons from Wakefield/MMR?) these perspectives are still fairly well-known and understood. There is though a much more troubling point that I have seen discussed in public health circles, don't think I've ever seen it in the media, suspect isn't common knowledge in political circles, and is subject to grave uncertainty:
Could the widespread use of human vaccines lead to the evolution of pathogens that would be more harmful to the unvaccinated? Most of the human vaccines that have been in use for decades generate sterilizing immunity and so would not be expected to promote pathogen evolution. But next-generation vaccines might be less effective. Clearly, we all hope for malaria or HIV vaccines that completely prevent transmission, but in the absence of fundamental breakthroughs, it seems likely that our current list of vaccine-preventable diseases will soon be joined by a list of vaccine-ameliorable diseases, in which symptoms are alleviated but infection and onward transmission continue. In those cases, it will be critical to understand the possible evolutionary trajectories those target pathogens might take once they evolve in populations that can, just like resistant Australian rabbits, control pathogen titers and sickness, but not prevent infection.
Mathematical models and experimental studies point to the possibility that for some diseases and some vaccines, immunized people might create conditions for the evolution of pathogens that cause more-severe disease in the nonimmunized.1,2 There are controversial suggestions that this might already be so for the nonsterilizing* vaccines against pertussis (also known as whooping cough),3,4,5 and for our money, there is a strong case for examining the evolutionary consequences of vaccines against cervical cancer and typhoid fever. This is not an argument against next-generation vaccines; rather, it is an admonition that, in the future, we may need additional tools to protect those whom vaccines cannot reach.
*nonsterilizing = some vaccines turn out to be pretty good at protecting you from the disease, but you can still carry the infection and transmit it to others
The clown in Downing Street is causing unnecessary infections
You do know that Nicola is part of Cobra policy making along with the Welsh and Northern Ireland First Ministers. She is expressing the Cobra position headed by Boris
Your hatred of Boris shows no bounds
One doesn't have to hate him to think that he should have pursued a career as a chat-show host, stand-up comedian and journalist, not politician. If the Tory party wanted a serious PM who could also do show-biz, why didn't it try Gyles Brandreth?
You know back in the dim and distant past of a couple of weeks ago when I was furious that the Scotland France game was going ahead and that the idea of 10,000 plague carriers from the south of France turning up was a really dumb idea?
Turns out the first person to die of covid-19 in Scotland was a French Rugby fan who came over for the game.
He had cancer and other such ailments, probably wanted to see his last game
So looking at the evidence the nudge policy has failed. Far from encouraging social distancing, for many it has encouraged the opposite.
My view is that people are making hay whilst the sun shines in fear of worse to come. If so, the approach of ramping up measures has a lot to answer for.
Is this a London thing ? It was bloody quiet when I ventured out this afternoon for a brief walk, and I had no problem keeping well over 3m from the occasional passerby.
It's curious that some countries (e.g., Scandinavia / Austria / Switzerland) have really slowed the number of new cases over the past few days (Worldometer). This can't be due to the recent restrictions imposed as the cases should all have been contracted before that (lockdown only started 5 days ago in Scandinavia at least) - quite curious...
Maybe in those countries people are better at taking the hint and staying home...
Did we have a prediction this will be calming down in 4-6 weeks. That would be fantastic, but based on what though?
Here's my prediction:
UK numbers will continue to climb, prompting ever more significant lockdowns.
The results in a near total lockdown from 7 April onwards. Only those with essential work, or getting groceries, will be allowed out.
This results in the UK infection rate peaking on around 20 April, and then gradually tailing off. On 6 May, the first "new infections" below 200 is recorded, and on 10 May, it goes below 100.
The UK government now has the capability to test more than 25,000 people per day. Furthermore, the first large scale random antibody test is carried out in London to see how many people have had CV-19. To the government's surprise, it comes out as a little more than 15%.
As the crisis continues, treatments improve and improve. There are more ventilators in hospitals and special wards are created. Drug regimes continue to get better, and the use of a smartphone app for rapid testing, and prevenitive courses means that hospitalisation rates decline.
The government allows schools to reopen for the last month of the school year, although attendance is spotty. Most large scale restrictions are lifted in late June.
Although the pace of growth is slower, thanks to much better testing, the virus does come back. By the end of July, the new infection rate is back to 200-300/day, even with South Korean type measures. The UK government announces that there will be a further two week lockdown in the last two weeks of the school summer holidays. At the time of lockdown, new cases are running just north of 1,000/day again, but this is rapidly squashed down by the two week lockdown. The early notice helped too: simply it turns out that the economic impact of shutdowns is much less if - like Christmas - they are telegraphed well in advance.
Again, daily cases collapse during the lockdown. The govenrnment announces the next lockdown period will be over Christmas 2020. Adult children are faced with a difficult choice... two weeks with their parents all the time, or two weeks without their parents at all...
The pace of new cases grows again, but slower this time around. With a quarter of Londoners having already had CV-19, there are fewer infection vectors. People are better about using the app. And the UK Testing Force sets up mobile testing checkpoints to do random tests.
Britain ends 2020 having seen around 25,000 deaths, a nasty recession, but society is intact, and there is room for optimism about 2021.
I think we will go into the extreme lockdown a little earlier. And the number of fatalities could be a touch higher. But otherwise I agree - with shorter, sharper (but total) lockdowns future iterations of the virus can be managed without the chaos we (and, to be fair, most of Europe) are currently experiencing. For example, Italy is only today going to the total lockdown mode (Spain went there on Monday, so, perversely, I expect cases there may decline before Italy).
The clown in Downing Street is causing unnecessary infections
You do know that Nicola is part of Cobra policy making along with the Welsh and Northern Ireland First Ministers. She is expressing the Cobra position headed by Boris
Your hatred of Boris shows no bounds
One doesn't have to hate him to think that he should have pursued a career as a chat-show host, stand-up comedian and journalist, not politician. If the Tory party wanted a serious PM who could also do show-biz, why didn't it try Gyles Brandreth?
So looking at the evidence the nudge policy has failed. Far from encouraging social distancing, for many it has encouraged the opposite.
My view is that people are making hay whilst the sun shines in fear of worse to come. If so, the approach of ramping up measures has a lot to answer for.
Is this a London thing ? It was bloody quiet when I ventured out this afternoon for a brief walk, and I had no problem keeping well over 3m from the occasional passerby.
I think it might well be tbh. Here as well it's very quiet and when going for a walk people are really keeping their distance very carefully.
The government may also roll out a tax-free coronavirus “attendance bonus” for people who need to be at their workplace to carry out their jobs, officials have said.
Can I suggest it would be a nice thing to give to front line NHS staff
Did we have a prediction this will be calming down in 4-6 weeks. That would be fantastic, but based on what though?
Here's my prediction:
UK numbers will continue to climb, prompting ever more significant lockdowns.
The results in a near total lockdown from 7 April onwards. Only those with essential work, or getting groceries, will be allowed out.
This results in the UK infection rate peaking on around 20 April, and then gradually tailing off. On 6 May, the first "new infections" below 200 is recorded, and on 10 May, it goes below 100.
The UK government now has the capability to test more than 25,000 people per day. Furthermore, the first large scale random antibody test is carried out in London to see how many people have had CV-19. To the government's surprise, it comes out as a little more than 15%.
As the crisis continues, treatments improve and improve. There are more ventilators in hospitals and special wards are created. Drug regimes continue to get better, and the use of a smartphone app for rapid testing, and prevenitive courses means that hospitalisation rates decline.
The government allows schools to reopen for the last month of the school year, although attendance is spotty. Most large scale restrictions are lifted in late June.
Although the pace of growth is slower, thanks to much better testing, the virus does come back. By the end of July, the new infection rate is back to 200-300/day, even with South Korean type measures. The UK government announces that there will be a further two week lockdown in the last two weeks of the school summer holidays. At the time of lockdown, new cases are running just north of 1,000/day again, but this is rapidly squashed down by the two week lockdown. The early notice helped too: simply it turns out that the economic impact of shutdowns is much less if - like Christmas - they are telegraphed well in advance.
Again, daily cases collapse during the lockdown. The govenrnment announces the next lockdown period will be over Christmas 2020. Adult children are faced with a difficult choice... two weeks with their parents all the time, or two weeks without their parents at all...
The pace of new cases grows again, but slower this time around. With a quarter of Londoners having already had CV-19, there are fewer infection vectors. People are better about using the app. And the UK Testing Force sets up mobile testing checkpoints to do random tests.
Britain ends 2020 having seen around 25,000 deaths, a nasty recession, but society is intact, and there is room for optimism about 2021.
There is no exit strategy, other than vaccine (12-18 months) or Summer.
The end of June will be summer
We have no idea whether summer will do the trick. It is just a wish and a prayer.
By then we should be passed the peak until the winter, beyond that social distancing will just have to be applied and relaxed as we reach and leave each peak until a vaccine is found
The clown in Downing Street is causing unnecessary infections
You do know that Nicola is part of Cobra policy making along with the Welsh and Northern Ireland First Ministers. She is expressing the Cobra position headed by Boris
Your hatred of Boris shows no bounds
The point is you can understand what the message is when Nicola gives it, your don't with Boris.
Boris gives the message and then totally muddies it with his ad-libbing because he can't help himself.
So looking at the evidence the nudge policy has failed. Far from encouraging social distancing, for many it has encouraged the opposite.
My view is that people are making hay whilst the sun shines in fear of worse to come. If so, the approach of ramping up measures has a lot to answer for.
Is this a London thing ? It was bloody quiet when I ventured out this afternoon for a brief walk, and I had no problem keeping well over 3m from the occasional passerby.
I think it might well be tbh. Here as well it's very quiet and when going for a walk people are really keeping their distance very carefully.
Went out yesterday as had to shop, high st quieter than normal but those out didnt seem to be behaving differently
The clown in Downing Street is causing unnecessary infections
You do know that Nicola is part of Cobra policy making along with the Welsh and Northern Ireland First Ministers. She is expressing the Cobra position headed by Boris
Your hatred of Boris shows no bounds
One doesn't have to hate him to think that he should have pursued a career as a chat-show host, stand-up comedian and journalist, not politician. If the Tory party wanted a serious PM who could also do show-biz, why didn't it try Gyles Brandreth?
Comments
Not necessarily his fault but there it is.
That's the problem.
https://twitter.com/itvnews/status/1241738992170778626
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654
"The coronavirus deaths will not be on top of this. Many would be within this "normal" number of expected deaths.
It was a point conceded by Sir Patrick at a press conference on Thursday when he said there would be "some overlap" between coronavirus deaths and expected deaths - he just did not know how much of an overlap."
Today's hour in the garden.
Forsythia Pruning has started, and the following arrangements will help leaven the 3 month "house arrest".
Surprised that the holly still has berries, but it is not big enough yet to lose big chunks of foliage unfortunately.
New question tomorrow hopefully. Probably about pruning old Fruit Trees.
https://twitter.com/mattwardman/status/1241747280266498051
We are days away from a complete lockdown with virtual police state now. That is going to be the only way to stop the twats of Britain.
Only one battleship (Bretagne) and a tugboat were sunk.
2 battleships, 3 destroyers and a seaplane tender were damaged.
1 battleship and 2 destroyers escaped damage.
It was only the fact that Bretagne sank quickly that nearly 1,300 Frenchmen died.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Mers-el-Kébir
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCa0JXEwDEk&t=3s
https://twitter.com/dinosofos/status/1241697657690734593
Your hatred of Boris shows no bounds
I asked a question, hoping the answer might be differential diagnosis. Why is that so evil? I already acknowledged that the person who responded that flu is less prevalent in March is probably right, as you would have seen if you read on.
A thousand apologies for trying to think outside the box. Shame on me
In 2018, the last year for which we have full data, 616,014 people died in the UK, an increase of 1.5% over 2017. If we assume that the "natural" progression is for 1.5% more people to die in 2019 and in 2020 (and there are good reasons to think that with an ageing population, the numbers should be slightly higher than that), then one would expect around 635,000 people to die in the UK in 2020.
Unless something else horrible appears, one would expect that the vast majority of the difference between the the actual death number for 2020 and 635,000 is the CV-19 excess morbidity.
My guess is that the actual death number will end up being in the 660,000 to 680,000 range - i.e. we'll see 5% more deaths indicating an excess morbidity of around 35,000 deaths. However, I think the public death number for CV-19 may very well be 50-100% higher than that.
Oldies doing alright and in good spirits, spoken to though closed windows. The only place with toilet rolls was the foodbank hamper in Tescos.
I guess it might only be London, but I suspect Johnson won't want to single out the capital in case that causes a mass exodus they can't control.
You have to been in the German Big Brother house for the past 2 months not to know what is going on and what you shouldn't be doing.
% infected x fatality rate = deaths
Deaths are known so if %infected is higher, then fatality rate is lower.
And quite a lot of flowers as well.
There is no exit strategy, other than vaccine (12-18 months) or Summer.
Turns out the first person to die of covid-19 in Scotland was a French Rugby fan who came over for the game.
Clearly Gove would be better choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling_of_the_French_fleet_at_Toulon
My view is that people are making hay whilst the sun shines in fear of worse to come. If so, the approach of ramping up measures has a lot to answer for.
Edit - to be fair, though, there isn't an obvious standout choice. Gove? Patel? Sunak? All deeply flawed in one way or another. Ben Wallace perhaps, but no doubt they think he's needed where he is.
UK numbers will continue to climb, prompting ever more significant lockdowns.
The results in a near total lockdown from 7 April onwards. Only those with essential work, or getting groceries, will be allowed out.
This results in the UK infection rate peaking on around 20 April, and then gradually tailing off. On 6 May, the first "new infections" below 200 is recorded, and on 10 May, it goes below 100.
The UK government now has the capability to test more than 25,000 people per day. Furthermore, the first large scale random antibody test is carried out in London to see how many people have had CV-19. To the government's surprise, it comes out as a little more than 15%.
As the crisis continues, treatments improve and improve. There are more ventilators in hospitals and special wards are created. Drug regimes continue to get better, and the use of a smartphone app for rapid testing, and prevenitive courses means that hospitalisation rates decline.
The government allows schools to reopen for the last month of the school year, although attendance is spotty. Most large scale restrictions are lifted in late June.
Although the pace of growth is slower, thanks to much better testing, the virus does come back. By the end of July, the new infection rate is back to 200-300/day, even with South Korean type measures. The UK government announces that there will be a further two week lockdown in the last two weeks of the school summer holidays. At the time of lockdown, new cases are running just north of 1,000/day again, but this is rapidly squashed down by the two week lockdown. The early notice helped too: simply it turns out that the economic impact of shutdowns is much less if - like Christmas - they are telegraphed well in advance.
Again, daily cases collapse during the lockdown. The govenrnment announces the next lockdown period will be over Christmas 2020. Adult children are faced with a difficult choice... two weeks with their parents all the time, or two weeks without their parents at all...
The pace of new cases grows again, but slower this time around. With a quarter of Londoners having already had CV-19, there are fewer infection vectors. People are better about using the app. And the UK Testing Force sets up mobile testing checkpoints to do random tests.
Britain ends 2020 having seen around 25,000 deaths, a nasty recession, but society is intact, and there is room for optimism about 2021.
I think his final bit re public health is worth quoting. I have noticed that in the public arena, politicians and wonks and medics are talking about vaccination like it's going to be brilliant. They're looking desperately for an exit route from the current chaos. There are difficult issues with mass vaccination, including some delicate ethical problems - eg it is almost certain there will be some vaccine-related adverse events, but the benefits to children of being vaccinated are, on an individual level, likely to be low in the case of COVID-19. Effectively we asking that age group to accept harm in order to confer a benefit on a different group of older or more vulnerable adults. Although not publicised in the media so much (have they learned lessons from Wakefield/MMR?) these perspectives are still fairly well-known and understood. There is though a much more troubling point that I have seen discussed in public health circles, don't think I've ever seen it in the media, suspect isn't common knowledge in political circles, and is subject to grave uncertainty:
Could the widespread use of human vaccines lead to the evolution of pathogens that would be more harmful to the unvaccinated? Most of the human vaccines that have been in use for decades generate sterilizing immunity and so would not be expected to promote pathogen evolution. But next-generation vaccines might be less effective. Clearly, we all hope for malaria or HIV vaccines that completely prevent transmission, but in the absence of fundamental breakthroughs, it seems likely that our current list of vaccine-preventable diseases will soon be joined by a list of vaccine-ameliorable diseases, in which symptoms are alleviated but infection and onward transmission continue. In those cases, it will be critical to understand the possible evolutionary trajectories those target pathogens might take once they evolve in populations that can, just like resistant Australian rabbits, control pathogen titers and sickness, but not prevent infection.
Mathematical models and experimental studies point to the possibility that for some diseases and some vaccines, immunized people might create conditions for the evolution of pathogens that cause more-severe disease in the nonimmunized.1,2 There are controversial suggestions that this might already be so for the nonsterilizing* vaccines against pertussis (also known as whooping cough),3,4,5 and for our money, there is a strong case for examining the evolutionary consequences of vaccines against cervical cancer and typhoid fever. This is not an argument against next-generation vaccines; rather, it is an admonition that, in the future, we may need additional tools to protect those whom vaccines cannot reach.
*nonsterilizing = some vaccines turn out to be pretty good at protecting you from the disease, but you can still carry the infection and transmit it to others
It was bloody quiet when I ventured out this afternoon for a brief walk, and I had no problem keeping well over 3m from the occasional passerby.
The government may also roll out a tax-free coronavirus “attendance bonus” for people who need to be at their workplace to carry out their jobs, officials have said.
Can I suggest it would be a nice thing to give to front line NHS staff
'Live' Boris press conference at 5.00pm
A pattern seems to be emerging with co-ordinated press conference between Nicola Sturgeon and Boris
Expect the messaging to be similar
Boris gives the message and then totally muddies it with his ad-libbing because he can't help himself.