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A Butcher’s Bill for EU – politicalbetting.com
A Butcher’s Bill for EU – politicalbetting.com
On Thursday morning the number of “EU Citizens” who have been killed by COVID, based on current official counts, stood at 500,809. It has broken the big half-million.
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Life savers: the amazing story of the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/14/life-savers-story-oxford-astrazeneca-coronavirus-vaccine-scientists
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1360952758694723588?s=19
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1360953006922072064?s=19
Andy_JS said:
The paradoxical thing is that TV replays have had the (in most peoples opinions positive) effect of stopping batsman playing with their pads when the ball is on the stumps. But this seemingly doesnt extend to using your pads when the ball is outside the off stump to any greater extent than was already the case before TV replays were introduced, since its still the onfield umpire making that decision as it was before — because it looks like the TV replay cant overturn the original decision on whether a shot was played or not.
A change in the law is required there Andy. The whole decision should be allocated to the off-field umpire.
The standard of the umpiring has been extremely good so far. Perversely, two of the three palpable errors in this match have been down to the third umpire - the stumping and the pad onto bat incident. Both may have been partly down to deficient technology.
Rohit definitely wasn't playing a shot but it's hard to judge in real time and different umpires have different ideas of what is constitutes a shot and what is just play acting. You would be more likely to get a consistent standard if the assessment were handed over the off-field man.
The worst elements of the UK/EU negotiations were a result of the 2017 elections leading to the paralysis of the 2017/19 Parliament. The UK had just about the worst possible Prime Minister and worst possible Chancellor for the negotiations as neither of them actually believed in what was being done.
Scottish independence won't be tackled from a "let's get this bloody stupid thing done, how can we minimise it's damage" perspective that May and especially Hammond and the 2017-19 Parliament had.
Scottish independence negotiations would be the pinnacle of the life's work for the SNP politicians who would be masters of all they survey politically.
No need for the Vaxometer today!
Absolutely excellent work by the NHS in all four nations.
Still, who cares? Great job.
A PhD from Hull and a Professor at Oxford.
"I asked if he'd been to one of the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Hull .... You failed to spot that only two of those are great universities ... "
There's so much of this virus that has nuanced elements.
On the one hand, seasonality of SARS-CoV-2 seems pretty limited at best, with the outbreaks north and south of the equator and during spring, summer, autumn, and winter being largely based on mobility data (official and de facto restrictions/lockdowns) rather than the season - but on the other hand, one would expect some benefit to weather that encourages people being outside and/or with windows open. It could be wishful thinking, of course, but I'd be a bit surprised if there was none.
Even if it's not very visible when R0 is high, we would expect the benefits to be considerably stronger when vaccines push transmission down such that the R without restrictions would be a lot lower.
On the cross-reactive coronaviruses - after some excitement in autumn when activity was seen (albeit the scientists involved strongly warned that inhibition of transmission and effective boosts to herd immunity were so unlikely as to be implausible), further study has shown no real discernable benefit. T-cells get a bit excited, but then don't actually do anything useful - they have low avidity for the virus (there's some weak evidence that it can make things worse - almost as if they assume they've recognised it, decided it's not a big deal, and buggered off again). Still, it would just have been a bonus if it had come off, and now we have something (vaccines) that DOES give real immunity.
Herd immunity-wise - they've found that antibody levels decline slower than expected, which is good for avoidance of re-infection or even transmission of the virus by the infected-and-recovered; bad for assumptions of higher levels of infection-and-recovery.
But while the levels of herd immunity will be lower than we'd have hoped from infection, restrictions act to multiply the effect of whatever herd immunity there is. If there's 25% immunity, that means R is pushed down to three quarters of what it would be without it. So restrictions that would otherwise push R down to 1.2 (September growth levels) would actually put it down to 0.9 (comfortably declining). I wouldn't be surprised if this was what had made the difference with controlling the B.1.1.7 variant (about four-thirds more infections, coupled with about 25% immunity leads to a wash - restrictions that would have controlled the original variant can now control the new one)
Some wags will no doubt wish to rearrange the order of the words.
I think I agree with the central idea of it too, across the western world there isn't going to be a lot of difference in the final infection and death rates or the economic picture either.
Every leader in the west needs to pay for the failure to put up border restrictions in February of last year whether it's Boris or Macron or Merkel, all of them have failed the people and thousands of people died unnecessarily to protect this nebulous idea of being "open for business" or not to be seen as racist by closing the border to China and other infected countries.
A vindication too for the "it's a sprint, not a marathon" strategy. Every person jabbed is sprinting against death itself.
https://twitter.com/martha_gill/status/1360569949492813824?s=21
What is the counterfactual though? We did well in contracting to get vaccines early. Had the EU done the same would we have had less? Would we not have made our 15m target? Or would there simply be more vaccine being manufactured right now on our part of the planet? My guess is a bit of both.
This was at least the seventh major potential pandemic this century alone, but the first serious one it turned out in a century. It was the boy who cried wolf, eventually the wolf arrived but if we shut the country down every time one of these potential pandemics came around we'd be shutting down virtually every other year.
Is that how you want to live the rest of your life? Not for me thanks. We should learn lessons but I'd rather not be shutting down every time someone sneezes funny in years to come.
I agree with the main thrust of your argument. You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the bare figures, especially as we don't know where it all ends yet. I do however think it is reasonable to pause over the current results and reflect that the UK's vaccination roll-out probably would almost certainly have gone less well had the country still been part of the EU.
This gives unreconstructed Europhiles like myself food for thought. My habit has been to mock Leavers over the absence of palpable benefits of leaving the EU. Now we appear to have a very tangible one.
Of course nobody could have foreseen this, but it would be dishonest of Remainers to deny these very real consequences. If it can be reasonably argued that they derive from the very nature of the EU, and therefore further benefits of leaving the EU are likely to accrue in due course, there will be a lot of humble pie to be eaten, not least on this site.
I might even have some myself.
The article goes on to explain that he has received a bad hand, ie next to no legacy projects from Boris and a non-sympathetic government - but also that his working style is totally ineffective with allies and opponents alike.
The numbers reported today are actually up to yesterday, midday.
A probable working assumption is that nearly all of that is end of day returns from the day before - Friday.
Tbh, it doesn't matter if the R hits 4 or 5 in the summer as long as it doesn't result in hospitalisations/death so I don't think having a high infection rate should be an impediment to reopening the economy fully.
However, this is the ultimate pedanticbetting.com discussion.
Target beaten with room to spare.
A little remarked upon fact is that the UK spent more on developing vaccines, priming manufacturing etc than the entire EU combined. The UK spent more per capita than the USA and about 7x more per capita than the EU and the output now scales almost perfectly to the per capita spending of all the countries concerned.
Can we have a panic for 10 past 2 tomorrow, about the "collapse" in figures? I'll put out the folding chairs and the tea. Could someone else bring the biscuits, please?
I was thinking of backing Mourinho as next one to go to be honest, so this has just stopped me doing that. Changing the formation to include more attacking players but still losing, and letting in 8 goals in 2 games, upsetting Alli and Bale, the ingredients are there. I can't imagine Tottenham fans are happy with the football they play under him, they have a reputation as a flair club, and if they aren't really progressing success wise either what's the point?
That leaves the Lib Dems.
I’ve seen one very short clip of their candidate where she appears to be about 13 years old.
The rule for London so far is don’t bother competing unless you are a v big beast.
BUT....it again looks like ~500k per day is the ceiling. We need to see that really cranked up otherwise we will be waiting until very late in the year before the population is vaccinated.
I completely agree with Matt Hancock who said recently the ultimate aim should be to turn COVID into a flu like disease where people are simply vaccinated once a year in September and October. We can't have another lockdown like this ever again, all of the zero COVID strategies still need lockdowns even with vaccines and that's unacceptable.
What is clear is that if the EU had invested on anything like the scale that we did in vaccine production they would be vaccinating a lot faster now and fewer EU citizens would be about to die of this terrible illness. No one sane takes any satisfaction from that, only regret.
Cartoony, but only in the very best sense.
I would agree that if you have to tell Londoners who you are you have already lost.
However, Londoners will not vote for you if you are an economy-wrecking xenophobe, so that rules out today’s Tory Party.
700k left London, lets say remote working continues (even 3 days a week), little tourism for the next year or two, that it going to huge pressures on a city based on so many people spending. And of course things like violent crime has already been rising before COVID.
I cannot see that we’d happily have acquiesced to the current EU scheme - and it’s quite conceivable we’d still have gone our own way.
We might even have persuaded the EU to have been more proactive.
I suspect you are right about the vaccination programme struggling to get off the ground were we still in the EU, but one swallow does not a summer make. Although, it's a pretty big swallow!
I suspect a Labour Government would also have been considerably slower in mobilising vaccine procurement and delivery (although it may have done better in other areas of Covid- not that Wales necessarily confirms that notion). For my own part I think vaccine policy has probably been something of a happy accident, but that takes nothing away from its success and the Government's role in that success.
Ultimately even if people are getting Covid, if the hospital's aren't filling up let alone the morgues then nobody will care besides cranks.
As we add 1% per day to it - by the time we reach 50%, R is pushed down to half the previous value. At 75%, it's pushed down to a quarter.
In addition, dispersion, k, is a factor.
That is - most people spread to considerably less than R, made up by the few superspreaders. If R is pushed down significantly, the underspreaders get pushed to pretty much zero, and the superspreaders get pegged a long way back. If we get prevalence down a long way, this can make outbreaks really difficult to occur: in early stages, superspreaders seem to need to hit on other superspreaders to get it to "spark" (which is why it can seemingly bubble along at very low levels before surging out - when a spark like that occurs).
With R pushed down like that by vaccines, the possibility of such sparking becomes a lot less - sort of like making tinder damp.
Our whole approach would have been simply impossible within the confines of the EU and our scheme would have been pre-empted with the commission ruling that these deals are subject to state aid rules and not possible as they are reliant on huge subsidies for UK industry and it has given the UK a long term leg up on the rest of the EU for vaccine development and manufacturing for the next decade.
Long flu, for the regular flu, is a apparently a thing.....
Allegra and NutNuts are doing a significantly better Comms job than Cummings managed.
What was also predictable is that some form of Black Swan would eventually appear, and that agile nations would be able to respond better to the completely new than slower entities. Brexit did not guarantee that the UK would be more agile than the EU, but it did give it the opportunity to be.
I can't be bothered to find my old posts, but that was always my justification for supporting Brexit: the world is changing at an ever more rapid pace, which given the complexity of human society's interactions with technology, the planet and itself, means that governments must be able to react swiftly to unexpected new challenges characterized by high degrees of uncertainty and large areas of ignorance. Agility will be ever more important. The EU is not good at agile.
https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1360958966273110019
Which gives a week or so to start on the under 50s before second doses start being necessary (down to over 45s?) and even then, the rate of second doses starts off low as the first doses in early January were slow. We could probably do all over 40s by mid-to-late April.
What’s certain is that the EU would be significantly different, had we remained a member. Just how different is unknowable.