Political leaflets go in the bin almost always. Admittedly I think I have somewhere a leaflet from the Natural Law Party - it was filled with nonsense but very hard maths - I sort of have it on my list to work out that it was nonsense.
I will say though that the LDs are pushing in London, and the simple identification of that as the leaflet goes in to the bin might just give them something.
The Tories have put out a 4*A4 leaflet in Waverley I think paid through Royal Mail and therefore legal. They presumably reckon the average voter won't be aware of the controversy and will just think "Heard from the Tories, nothing from the others". They may be right. I live in a safe Tory division, so who knows what they're up to in marginals?
My outrage has been blunted by Trump, contract favouritism, voter suppression by ID requirements and all the rest of it. I now basically expect conservatives in the US and UK to cheat, in a way that their counterparts in, say, Germany, would not dream of. Sorry if that sounds offensive - I have Tory and Republican friends, but their parties are now disreputable, so we talk of other things.
I'm a Tory and I'd never cheat anyone.
What was the 'controversy'?
Cheer up eh. You're easily one of my favourite people on PB. We'll never agree, but I'll certainly always listen.
The controversy is the lead piece - the Government is quite shamelessly making it illegal to deliver leaflets unless you pay for delivery, in which case you vcan deliver as many as you like.
I dont understand vaccine scepticism amongst EMs. If they see nearly 100% of white people taking it, why are they suspicious of it? Unless they think its been deliberately engineered to be bad for them specifically, which is surely taking conspiracy theories a bit far.
Political leaflets go in the bin almost always. Admittedly I think I have somewhere a leaflet from the Natural Law Party - it was filled with nonsense but very hard maths - I sort of have it on my list to work out that it was nonsense.
I will say though that the LDs are pushing in London, and the simple identification of that as the leaflet goes in to the bin might just give them something.
The Tories have put out a 4*A4 leaflet in Waverley I think paid through Royal Mail and therefore legal. They presumably reckon the average voter won't be aware of the controversy and will just think "Heard from the Tories, nothing from the others". They may be right. I live in a safe Tory division, so who knows what they're up to in marginals?
My outrage has been blunted by Trump, contract favouritism, voter suppression by ID requirements and all the rest of it. I now basically expect conservatives in the US and UK to cheat, in a way that their counterparts in, say, Germany, would not dream of. Sorry if that sounds offensive - I have Tory and Republican friends, but their parties are now disreputable, so we talk of other things.
I am hopelessly behind the curve on this one. Since when have political leaflets been illegal? I seem to remember that the Lib Dems normally have one quarterly, somewhat loosely disguised as a free newspaper. Surely most controversy over leaflets is whether or not the sponsor's details are honest & correct.
Good evening, everyone.
The issue is that, purportedly as a matter of public safety, delivery of leafloets by volunteers is banned. Meanwehile, delivery by paid services is not.
The correlation of enthusiasm to wealthier parties is probably not coincidental.
"About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection."
Let's examine this conclusion. Now, others with a better knowledge of the figures than I have will be able to confirm this, but I suspect that if the ONS surveillance program had revealed that so many Britons had been infected asymptomatically that we were similarly close to herd immunity (and there's every reason to suppose that UK and US infection rates oughtn't to be a million miles apart, given how badly we've both been hit,) then wouldn't this be obvious from the figures, and the conclusion have been widely disseminated, by now?
Alternatively, might it therefore be possible that the percentage of the population that is invulnerable to the illness for reasons other than past infection (for example, if they have protection conferred by encounters with other coronaviruses, or if there's something else about their biology that simply makes it hard for Covid-19 to attack them) is really rather high? This is a new disease and the boffins' knowledge of it is still far from complete.
EDIT: of course, another obvious explanation is that the IFR that your Twitterer has quoted is simply too low...
Now, who remembers the Handelstwatt controversy and the apparent misquoting of the 8% figure?
In this case, the 0.23% IFR looks suspiciously identical to this learned estimate from October...
The COVID infection fatality ratio is around 1% in high-income countries, but substantially lower in low-income countries with younger populations.
These are the findings of a new report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team.
The report reveals that:
In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).
In low-income countries, the estimated overall IFR is 0.23% (95% prediction interval 0.14-0.42).
Run the same simple maths as the Twitterer did using the high income estimate instead, and the proportion of Americans who might be thought to have had the virus drops to 13%, which is some considerable distance from "herd immunity"...
That, I'm afraid, is what seems to have happened here. Crap maths. Easily done. I've been guilty of it myself more than once during this saga.
Something genuinely interesting going on in India.
You've got to wonder what the real figures are like, though. We know that they've been underreporting in India to a big degree - has that changed in degree at all? Or has something else changed? Would be very interesting to know for sure.
I don't think the numbers can be out by orders of magnitude though. There would be bodies in the street, like in Peru, RSA or Brazil.
"About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection."
Let's examine this conclusion. Now, others with a better knowledge of the figures than I have will be able to confirm this, but I suspect that if the ONS surveillance program had revealed that so many Britons had been infected asymptomatically that we were similarly close to herd immunity (and there's every reason to suppose that UK and US infection rates oughtn't to be a million miles apart, given how badly we've both been hit,) then wouldn't this be obvious from the figures, and the conclusion have been widely disseminated, by now?
Alternatively, might it therefore be possible that the percentage of the population that is invulnerable to the illness for reasons other than past infection (for example, if they have protection conferred by encounters with other coronaviruses, or if there's something else about their biology that simply makes it hard for Covid-19 to attack them) is really rather high? This is a new disease and the boffins' knowledge of it is still far from complete.
EDIT: of course, another obvious explanation is that the IFR that your Twitterer has quoted is simply too low...
Now, who remembers the Handelstwatt controversy and the apparent misquoting of the 8% figure?
In this case, the 0.23% IFR looks suspiciously identical to this learned estimate from October...
The COVID infection fatality ratio is around 1% in high-income countries, but substantially lower in low-income countries with younger populations.
These are the findings of a new report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team.
The report reveals that:
In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).
In low-income countries, the estimated overall IFR is 0.23% (95% prediction interval 0.14-0.42).
Run the same simple maths as the Twitterer did using the high income estimate instead, and the proportion of Americans who might be thought to have had the virus drops to 13%, which is some considerable distance from "herd immunity"...
That, I'm afraid, is what seems to have happened here. Crap maths. Easily done. I've been guilty of it myself more than once during this saga.
Something genuinely interesting going on in India.
You've got to wonder what the real figures are like, though. We know that they've been underreporting in India to a big degree - has that changed in degree at all? Or has something else changed? Would be very interesting to know for sure.
It's possible that both testing for, and the attribution of deaths to, Covid-19 is way out and the true figures are much higher. Still doesn't explain why the US has these repeated waves whereas the Indian figures assume something resembling a single, normal distribution though.
I don't think it can be something as simple as the disease having gone through all the elderly and vulnerable in one go: even though India's demographics are heavily skewed towards the young, they nonetheless already had forty million citizens aged over 70 ten years ago (if the census figures quoted on the mighty Wiki are correct.) The carnage would've been enormous.
I dont understand vaccine scepticism amongst EMs. If they see nearly 100% of white people taking it, why are they suspicious of it? Unless they think its been deliberately engineered to be bad for them specifically, which is surely taking conspiracy theories a bit far.
I think the flaw is expecting rationality. Delusions and conspiracy theories don't need logic.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
"About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection."
Let's examine this conclusion. Now, others with a better knowledge of the figures than I have will be able to confirm this, but I suspect that if the ONS surveillance program had revealed that so many Britons had been infected asymptomatically that we were similarly close to herd immunity (and there's every reason to suppose that UK and US infection rates oughtn't to be a million miles apart, given how badly we've both been hit,) then wouldn't this be obvious from the figures, and the conclusion have been widely disseminated, by now?
Alternatively, might it therefore be possible that the percentage of the population that is invulnerable to the illness for reasons other than past infection (for example, if they have protection conferred by encounters with other coronaviruses, or if there's something else about their biology that simply makes it hard for Covid-19 to attack them) is really rather high? This is a new disease and the boffins' knowledge of it is still far from complete.
EDIT: of course, another obvious explanation is that the IFR that your Twitterer has quoted is simply too low...
Now, who remembers the Handelstwatt controversy and the apparent misquoting of the 8% figure?
In this case, the 0.23% IFR looks suspiciously identical to this learned estimate from October...
The COVID infection fatality ratio is around 1% in high-income countries, but substantially lower in low-income countries with younger populations.
These are the findings of a new report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team.
The report reveals that:
In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).
In low-income countries, the estimated overall IFR is 0.23% (95% prediction interval 0.14-0.42).
Run the same simple maths as the Twitterer did using the high income estimate instead, and the proportion of Americans who might be thought to have had the virus drops to 13%, which is some considerable distance from "herd immunity"...
That, I'm afraid, is what seems to have happened here. Crap maths. Easily done. I've been guilty of it myself more than once during this saga.
Something genuinely interesting going on in India.
Leaving aside the four-nation rivalry, we really should stop and wonder at the extraordinary fact that from a standing start on 8th December, we've now vaccinated about a third of all adults in the UK, including the majority of the most at-risk. That's pretty stunning both in delivery, and in vaccine development and production for a virus which was identified only just over a year ago.
It is a triumph and one that we may only fully appreciate in a few years time when we look back on all this. Given the pandemic is ongoing it is hard to recognise just what an extraordinary achievement it all is. But the UK is genuinely and unequivocally leading the world here in an entirely positive way. It is something that we should all feel pretty chuffed about. Intriguingly, it feeds into a diverse set of political belief systems as well. As a social democrat I feel that my faith in the state as a force for good is being totally vindicated; but I can also recognise the raw business skill and Tory government foresight that allowed it all to happen. Only the terminally partisan would disagree ;-)
Well said.
As a rightwinger I confess the handling of the vaccinatons has - somewhat - warmed me to the idea of the NHS. I really is good at this stuff (tho Israel is better - if we want to reform it, Israel could be a model)
At the same time it has reaffirmed my belief in entrepreneurial vigour. A boss with a brain & a backbone can do things pathetic lefty committees will never achieve.
Havent most jabs been via gp surgeries? Are they not private companies providing health care under contract and not really part of the public sector nhs?
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
"The IFR is 0.23%" Which means that 78% of the UK had had the virus by late January, which would be a bit of a relief.
They're repeating the now-comprehensively-disproven assertion that cross-reactivity with seasonal cold coronaviruses provides natural immunity - it doesn't. If anything, it may make infections slightly worse if your T-cells remember too many such infections.
It's written by a surgeon, not an immunologist, epidemiologist, or virologist, which is often a red flag for op-ed pieces on covid.
There's plenty of positive news around, but this is, unfortunately, bollocks. Fortunately, we don't need to rely on Yeadon-esque made-up hidden immunity or arithmetically impossible IFRs. We're actually on the way out, anyway, with 30% of adults vaccinated and the rest of us coming up soon.
The fall in cases can be explained by a combination of the lockdown and herd immunity in the proportion of the population who are active and exposed to the risk of infection. It does not mean that the whole population has reached herd immunity.
"About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection."
Let's examine this conclusion. Now, others with a better knowledge of the figures than I have will be able to confirm this, but I suspect that if the ONS surveillance program had revealed that so many Britons had been infected asymptomatically that we were similarly close to herd immunity (and there's every reason to suppose that UK and US infection rates oughtn't to be a million miles apart, given how badly we've both been hit,) then wouldn't this be obvious from the figures, and the conclusion have been widely disseminated, by now?
Alternatively, might it therefore be possible that the percentage of the population that is invulnerable to the illness for reasons other than past infection (for example, if they have protection conferred by encounters with other coronaviruses, or if there's something else about their biology that simply makes it hard for Covid-19 to attack them) is really rather high? This is a new disease and the boffins' knowledge of it is still far from complete.
EDIT: of course, another obvious explanation is that the IFR that your Twitterer has quoted is simply too low...
Now, who remembers the Handelstwatt controversy and the apparent misquoting of the 8% figure?
In this case, the 0.23% IFR looks suspiciously identical to this learned estimate from October...
The COVID infection fatality ratio is around 1% in high-income countries, but substantially lower in low-income countries with younger populations.
These are the findings of a new report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team.
The report reveals that:
In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).
In low-income countries, the estimated overall IFR is 0.23% (95% prediction interval 0.14-0.42).
Run the same simple maths as the Twitterer did using the high income estimate instead, and the proportion of Americans who might be thought to have had the virus drops to 13%, which is some considerable distance from "herd immunity"...
That, I'm afraid, is what seems to have happened here. Crap maths. Easily done. I've been guilty of it myself more than once during this saga.
Something genuinely interesting going on in India.
You've got to wonder what the real figures are like, though. We know that they've been underreporting in India to a big degree - has that changed in degree at all? Or has something else changed? Would be very interesting to know for sure.
I don't think the numbers can be out by orders of magnitude though. There would be bodies in the street, like in Peru, RSA or Brazil.
I'm possibly a little over-cynical with regards to Indian covid figures as one of my brothers-in-law (MrsC comes from a large family) was living in India up until mid-last-year and came down with a mysterious respiratory infection in April which ended up rushing him to ICU with all the symptoms of covid.
They refused to test him for covid because "there is no coronavirus in India." He did survive (he's 40 and fit as a horse, albeit he was having some breathing issues for six months or so) and managed to get back here during late summer.
Genuinely don't know why the drop - it could be rcs1000s cycles, or younger populations, or having burned through the clumps of people and places that couldn't socially distance.
We'll probably only know a year or two after the fact in some places.
Leaving aside the four-nation rivalry, we really should stop and wonder at the extraordinary fact that from a standing start on 8th December, we've now vaccinated about a third of all adults in the UK, including the majority of the most at-risk. That's pretty stunning both in delivery, and in vaccine development and production for a virus which was identified only just over a year ago.
It is a triumph and one that we may only fully appreciate in a few years time when we look back on all this. Given the pandemic is ongoing it is hard to recognise just what an extraordinary achievement it all is. But the UK is genuinely and unequivocally leading the world here in an entirely positive way. It is something that we should all feel pretty chuffed about. Intriguingly, it feeds into a diverse set of political belief systems as well. As a social democrat I feel that my faith in the state as a force for good is being totally vindicated; but I can also recognise the raw business skill and Tory government foresight that allowed it all to happen. Only the terminally partisan would disagree ;-)
Well said.
As a rightwinger I confess the handling of the vaccinatons has - somewhat - warmed me to the idea of the NHS. I really is good at this stuff (tho Israel is better - if we want to reform it, Israel could be a model)
At the same time it has reaffirmed my belief in entrepreneurial vigour. A boss with a brain & a backbone can do things pathetic lefty committees will never achieve.
I think there are some interesting lessons to be learned.
The private sector / market / cheapest price alone isn't good for some crucial sectors e.g PPE.
Private / Public partnerships done right can work really well e.g testing and vaccines...but can also work terribly e.g. track and trace.
The NHS when really pushed has managed to expand and process huge numbers efficiently...what can be learned to increase general productivity and capacity going forward across the whole system.
But also the likes of PHE have found to be lacking and inability to really think big when it came to testing / data processing. The classic stereotypical public sector can't be done, too hard, using outdated approaches.
In terms of research / science, some really impressive stuff with vaccine and REACT trials, but also some very clear weaknesses e.g. mRNA UK is behind
I dont understand vaccine scepticism amongst EMs. If they see nearly 100% of white people taking it, why are they suspicious of it? Unless they think its been deliberately engineered to be bad for them specifically, which is surely taking conspiracy theories a bit far.
Well, first, a lot of immigrants are from Europe thanks to pre-Brexit FOM. Second, some of them (or their parents) will have come from totalitarian dictatorships in Eastern Europe or the Middle East whose concern for the hoi polloi was less than total. Third, even if they do not think the vaccine is designed to harm them, there might be concerns it was not tested on people like them (and remember that has been a concern for many governments, including our own). Fourth, there have been (false) rumours the vaccine contains ingredients forbidden to various belief systems, especially but not only Islam.
But really we do not know enough about why different groups reject the vaccine. I am slightly sceptical about the current advert for BAME groups as it lumps them all together, but welcome any such messaging.
I wonder to what degree this indicates public generosity, and to what degree it indicates some sort of basic grasp of the nature of the vaccines, after all the media coverage they've had?
Once everybody has had their two shots then there's little value in keeping hold of the spares. If we do end up needing annual boosters then they're going to need to be updated and manufactured afresh, to account for the dreaded mutations.
I'm fairly sure that the NHS doesn't ask for several years' worth of flu vaccines to be bulk manufactured to cut down the cost, and then deep freeze them so that the same jab is then used in each annual campaign until the supplies run out.
I see that No 10 is nodding, winking and smiling at the tabloids tonight, another evening of hints, suppositions and suggestions about Monday's irreversible lockdown exit.
"About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection."
Let's examine this conclusion. Now, others with a better knowledge of the figures than I have will be able to confirm this, but I suspect that if the ONS surveillance program had revealed that so many Britons had been infected asymptomatically that we were similarly close to herd immunity (and there's every reason to suppose that UK and US infection rates oughtn't to be a million miles apart, given how badly we've both been hit,) then wouldn't this be obvious from the figures, and the conclusion have been widely disseminated, by now?
Alternatively, might it therefore be possible that the percentage of the population that is invulnerable to the illness for reasons other than past infection (for example, if they have protection conferred by encounters with other coronaviruses, or if there's something else about their biology that simply makes it hard for Covid-19 to attack them) is really rather high? This is a new disease and the boffins' knowledge of it is still far from complete.
EDIT: of course, another obvious explanation is that the IFR that your Twitterer has quoted is simply too low...
Now, who remembers the Handelstwatt controversy and the apparent misquoting of the 8% figure?
In this case, the 0.23% IFR looks suspiciously identical to this learned estimate from October...
The COVID infection fatality ratio is around 1% in high-income countries, but substantially lower in low-income countries with younger populations.
These are the findings of a new report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team.
The report reveals that:
In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).
In low-income countries, the estimated overall IFR is 0.23% (95% prediction interval 0.14-0.42).
Run the same simple maths as the Twitterer did using the high income estimate instead, and the proportion of Americans who might be thought to have had the virus drops to 13%, which is some considerable distance from "herd immunity"...
That, I'm afraid, is what seems to have happened here. Crap maths. Easily done. I've been guilty of it myself more than once during this saga.
Something genuinely interesting going on in India.
You've got to wonder what the real figures are like, though. We know that they've been underreporting in India to a big degree - has that changed in degree at all? Or has something else changed? Would be very interesting to know for sure.
I don't think the numbers can be out by orders of magnitude though. There would be bodies in the street, like in Peru, RSA or Brazil.
I'm possibly a little over-cynical with regards to Indian covid figures as one of my brothers-in-law (MrsC comes from a large family) was living in India up until mid-last-year and came down with a mysterious respiratory infection in April which ended up rushing him to ICU with all the symptoms of covid.
They refused to test him for covid because "there is no coronavirus in India." He did survive (he's 40 and fit as a horse, albeit he was having some breathing issues for six months or so) and managed to get back here during late summer.
Genuinely don't know why the drop - it could be rcs1000s cycles, or younger populations, or having burned through the clumps of people and places that couldn't socially distance.
We'll probably only know a year or two after the fact in some places.
I do think that, with all previous predictions of herd immunity having turned out spectacularly wrong, we can all be quite skeptical of claims of it appearing now. I get a strong sense that some are (perhaps understandably) wishcasting.
That's not to say that herd immunity is impossible in some places, but I'd need strong evidence. And it wouldn't be too difficult to get such evidence e.g. by antibody surveys.
I credit the Prime Minister for cleaning up after himself, especially under current pandemic conditions.
Don't usually say this, but this time - more power to him.
And do NOT care that there is a strong PR element, particularly when the positive public health message is also so strong.
Contrast from earlier in the thread, President Biden at Pfizer in normal suit and tie, and Boris in his standard medical photo-op get-up: jacket off, tie tucked in; sleeves rolled up.
Political leaflets go in the bin almost always. Admittedly I think I have somewhere a leaflet from the Natural Law Party - it was filled with nonsense but very hard maths - I sort of have it on my list to work out that it was nonsense.
I will say though that the LDs are pushing in London, and the simple identification of that as the leaflet goes in to the bin might just give them something.
The Tories have put out a 4*A4 leaflet in Waverley I think paid through Royal Mail and therefore legal. They presumably reckon the average voter won't be aware of the controversy and will just think "Heard from the Tories, nothing from the others". They may be right. I live in a safe Tory division, so who knows what they're up to in marginals?
My outrage has been blunted by Trump, contract favouritism, voter suppression by ID requirements and all the rest of it. I now basically expect conservatives in the US and UK to cheat, in a way that their counterparts in, say, Germany, would not dream of. Sorry if that sounds offensive - I have Tory and Republican friends, but their parties are now disreputable, so we talk of other things.
I'm a Tory and I'd never cheat anyone.
What was the 'controversy'?
Cheer up eh. You're easily one of my favourite people on PB. We'll never agree, but I'll certainly always listen.
The controversy is the lead piece - the Government is quite shamelessly making it illegal to deliver leaflets unless you pay for delivery, in which case you vcan deliver as many as you like.
But you're very kind - OK, I'll cheer up
Personally, think people are being bent all out of shape over nothing. I just reckon the Govt. wants to show that politicians are taking the pandemic as seriously as they want everyone else to treat it.
There would be a massive media hysteria about double standards if Boris was seen out pushing a few leaflets through letter boxes. The bitching LibDems know this full well. They would be the ones ramping up the outrage.
"About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection."
Let's examine this conclusion. Now, others with a better knowledge of the figures than I have will be able to confirm this, but I suspect that if the ONS surveillance program had revealed that so many Britons had been infected asymptomatically that we were similarly close to herd immunity (and there's every reason to suppose that UK and US infection rates oughtn't to be a million miles apart, given how badly we've both been hit,) then wouldn't this be obvious from the figures, and the conclusion have been widely disseminated, by now?
Alternatively, might it therefore be possible that the percentage of the population that is invulnerable to the illness for reasons other than past infection (for example, if they have protection conferred by encounters with other coronaviruses, or if there's something else about their biology that simply makes it hard for Covid-19 to attack them) is really rather high? This is a new disease and the boffins' knowledge of it is still far from complete.
EDIT: of course, another obvious explanation is that the IFR that your Twitterer has quoted is simply too low...
Now, who remembers the Handelstwatt controversy and the apparent misquoting of the 8% figure?
In this case, the 0.23% IFR looks suspiciously identical to this learned estimate from October...
The COVID infection fatality ratio is around 1% in high-income countries, but substantially lower in low-income countries with younger populations.
These are the findings of a new report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team.
The report reveals that:
In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).
In low-income countries, the estimated overall IFR is 0.23% (95% prediction interval 0.14-0.42).
Run the same simple maths as the Twitterer did using the high income estimate instead, and the proportion of Americans who might be thought to have had the virus drops to 13%, which is some considerable distance from "herd immunity"...
That, I'm afraid, is what seems to have happened here. Crap maths. Easily done. I've been guilty of it myself more than once during this saga.
Something genuinely interesting going on in India.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
"About 1 in 600 Americans has died of Covid-19, which translates to a population fatality rate of about 0.15%. The Covid-19 infection fatality rate is about 0.23%. These numbers indicate that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population has had the infection."
Let's examine this conclusion. Now, others with a better knowledge of the figures than I have will be able to confirm this, but I suspect that if the ONS surveillance program had revealed that so many Britons had been infected asymptomatically that we were similarly close to herd immunity (and there's every reason to suppose that UK and US infection rates oughtn't to be a million miles apart, given how badly we've both been hit,) then wouldn't this be obvious from the figures, and the conclusion have been widely disseminated, by now?
Alternatively, might it therefore be possible that the percentage of the population that is invulnerable to the illness for reasons other than past infection (for example, if they have protection conferred by encounters with other coronaviruses, or if there's something else about their biology that simply makes it hard for Covid-19 to attack them) is really rather high? This is a new disease and the boffins' knowledge of it is still far from complete.
EDIT: of course, another obvious explanation is that the IFR that your Twitterer has quoted is simply too low...
Now, who remembers the Handelstwatt controversy and the apparent misquoting of the 8% figure?
In this case, the 0.23% IFR looks suspiciously identical to this learned estimate from October...
The COVID infection fatality ratio is around 1% in high-income countries, but substantially lower in low-income countries with younger populations.
These are the findings of a new report from the Imperial College London COVID-19 Response Team.
The report reveals that:
In high income countries, the estimated overall infection fatality ratio (IFR) is 1.15% (95% prediction interval 0.78-1.79).
In low-income countries, the estimated overall IFR is 0.23% (95% prediction interval 0.14-0.42).
Run the same simple maths as the Twitterer did using the high income estimate instead, and the proportion of Americans who might be thought to have had the virus drops to 13%, which is some considerable distance from "herd immunity"...
That, I'm afraid, is what seems to have happened here. Crap maths. Easily done. I've been guilty of it myself more than once during this saga.
Something genuinely interesting going on in India.
I see that No 10 is nodding, winking and smiling at the tabloids tonight, another evening of hints, suppositions and suggestions about Monday's irreversible lockdown exit.
What coquettish hints are they giving off tonight?
........ I will say though that the LDs are pushing in London, and the simple identification of that as the leaflet goes in to the bin might just give them something.
The Tories have put out a 4*A4 leaflet in Waverley I think paid through Royal Mail and therefore legal. They presumably reckon the average voter won't be aware of the controversy and will just think "Heard from the Tories, nothing from the others". They may be right. I live in a safe Tory division, so who knows what they're up to in marginals?
My outrage has been blunted by Trump, contract favouritism, voter suppression by ID requirements and all the rest of it. I now basically expect conservatives in the US and UK to cheat, in a way that their counterparts in, say, Germany, would not dream of. Sorry if that sounds offensive - I have Tory and Republican friends, but their parties are now disreputable, so we talk of other things.
Sorry, Mr Palmer. Actions are not legal or illegal just because it suits the Conservative Party machine to declare that they are so. This is just another example of Conservative skulduggery, which we never would have expected in previous times.
Most Conservative voters are decent people (though mistaken in their politics, obviously) and have been very badly let down by these unscrupulous leaders. They just chant "We have an 80 seat majority in Parliament and we can make the laws".
They forget that here we have government by consent, and their cheating is undermining their own legitimacy, and with that the stability of the whole social system.
(1) Antibody tests show that around one-in-ten Americans (or maybe a little less) have had CV19. So, unless you think there is massive selection bias in those taking those tests, you have to explain why they're not picking up 50+% of Americans having had it.
(2) If the US as a whole was reaching herd immunity, you would expect places which had been particularly hard hit in round one (like New York) would have been essentially immune in round two. That has not happened. (And you might use Northern Italy as a corollary.)
(3) There is a simple natural cycle here - which is true of *all* infectious diseases - where people limit social interactions they are afraid of getting infected. Look at the UK right now, despite vaccinations cutting into the number of infectible people the pace of decline in cases is falling. Why? Because levels of social interaction is key.
This CDC estimate gives a total of 83.1 million total estimated infections, which is more like 35% of Americans, having been infected by December -
Presumably since then you can add another 5 or 10% maybe? Those people will have immunity from both T-Cell immunity and antibodies and will be concentrated upon homeless people, frontline and essential workers, and people living in crowded homes - the low hanging fruit. The virus can’t get at the middle classes hunkering down at home relying on Amazon deliveries. They will get their vaccines when the US is, as you put it yourself, swimming in them.
So I don’t think the author is necessary as off base as you say. Sure, April is wholly optimistic, but cases globally have halved in a month. In aggregate my view is that the above is what may be happening on a global level.
The usual caveats that I am not in any way medically or scientifically qualified apply. But the data invites one to try and interpret it, however amateur one is!
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
The fact that the SNP tried to make an issue about this, 'and at a WOMAN!' (is it OK to tell a guy to fuck off then?), because this man is at present doing a particularly good job of holding the First Minister to account, against all the odds, is (amongst stiff competition) not really their finest hour.
I wonder to what degree this indicates public generosity, and to what degree it indicates some sort of basic grasp of the nature of the vaccines, after all the media coverage they've had?
Once everybody has had their two shots then there's little value in keeping hold of the spares. If we do end up needing annual boosters then they're going to need to be updated and manufactured afresh, to account for the dreaded mutations.
I'm fairly sure that the NHS doesn't ask for several years' worth of flu vaccines to be bulk manufactured to cut down the cost, and then deep freeze them so that the same jab is then used in each annual campaign until the supplies run out.
We had no idea which vaccines would work. Maybe none, perhaps a couple.
We have a cornucopia of riches, as it has turned out. Thank God. So let us share that good fortune with the world. We will have vast numbers replacing them soon. Their utility as a rare commodity will soon be gone.
I still say we should make 1m J&J single-jab vaccines available from 1st July for athletes and officials to enable the Olympics to happen.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
The fact that the SNP tried to make an issue about this, 'and at a WOMAN!' (is it OK to tell a guy to fuck off then?), because this man is at present doing a particularly good job of holding the First Minister to account, against all the odds, is (amongst stiff competition) not really their finest hour.
A single SNP MSP replying to a journalist's article on the matter is hardly making a meal of it.
Political leaflets go in the bin almost always. Admittedly I think I have somewhere a leaflet from the Natural Law Party - it was filled with nonsense but very hard maths - I sort of have it on my list to work out that it was nonsense.
I will say though that the LDs are pushing in London, and the simple identification of that as the leaflet goes in to the bin might just give them something.
The Tories have put out a 4*A4 leaflet in Waverley I think paid through Royal Mail and therefore legal. They presumably reckon the average voter won't be aware of the controversy and will just think "Heard from the Tories, nothing from the others". They may be right. I live in a safe Tory division, so who knows what they're up to in marginals?
My outrage has been blunted by Trump, contract favouritism, voter suppression by ID requirements and all the rest of it. I now basically expect conservatives in the US and UK to cheat, in a way that their counterparts in, say, Germany, would not dream of. Sorry if that sounds offensive - I have Tory and Republican friends, but their parties are now disreputable, so we talk of other things.
I'm a Tory and I'd never cheat anyone.
What was the 'controversy'?
Cheer up eh. You're easily one of my favourite people on PB. We'll never agree, but I'll certainly always listen.
The controversy is the lead piece - the Government is quite shamelessly making it illegal to deliver leaflets unless you pay for delivery, in which case you vcan deliver as many as you like.
But you're very kind - OK, I'll cheer up
Personally, think people are being bent all out of shape over nothing. I just reckon the Govt. wants to show that politicians are taking the pandemic as seriously as they want everyone else to treat it.
There would be a massive media hysteria about double standards if Boris was seen out pushing a few leaflets through letter boxes. The bitching LibDems know this full well. They would be the ones ramping up the outrage.
Yes you would.
Unusually, I agree with NPXMP here. I have a good friend who is an independent county councillor in the south west of England. He got an enormous majority last time, beating the Tories, LDs by a huge margin
But he is now freaking out (when he is normally quite confident) thinking he could lose this election, precisely because the new rules benefit the big rich parties. He's not wealthy but is forced to pay for delivery companies to distribute his leaflets, and these companies are themselves very wary of doing it, because the law is vague.
They should postpone the election or make it more equitable
Political leaflets go in the bin almost always. Admittedly I think I have somewhere a leaflet from the Natural Law Party - it was filled with nonsense but very hard maths - I sort of have it on my list to work out that it was nonsense.
I will say though that the LDs are pushing in London, and the simple identification of that as the leaflet goes in to the bin might just give them something.
The Tories have put out a 4*A4 leaflet in Waverley I think paid through Royal Mail and therefore legal. They presumably reckon the average voter won't be aware of the controversy and will just think "Heard from the Tories, nothing from the others". They may be right. I live in a safe Tory division, so who knows what they're up to in marginals?
My outrage has been blunted by Trump, contract favouritism, voter suppression by ID requirements and all the rest of it. I now basically expect conservatives in the US and UK to cheat, in a way that their counterparts in, say, Germany, would not dream of. Sorry if that sounds offensive - I have Tory and Republican friends, but their parties are now disreputable, so we talk of other things.
I'm a Tory and I'd never cheat anyone.
What was the 'controversy'?
Cheer up eh. You're easily one of my favourite people on PB. We'll never agree, but I'll certainly always listen.
The controversy is the lead piece - the Government is quite shamelessly making it illegal to deliver leaflets unless you pay for delivery, in which case you vcan deliver as many as you like.
But you're very kind - OK, I'll cheer up
As I have already pointed out, this issue is devolved.
Mark Drakeford has set out the rules for Wales, and they involve a ban on door-to-door leafletting.
In fact, Drakeford's main opponent in Cardiff West (an independent, Neil NcEvoy) has already had a visit from the police because of leaflets in Cardiff West.
Are the Labour party similarly "cheating" (your word) in Wales?
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
The fact that the SNP tried to make an issue about this, 'and at a WOMAN!' (is it OK to tell a guy to fuck off then?), because this man is at present doing a particularly good job of holding the First Minister to account, against all the odds, is (amongst stiff competition) not really their finest hour.
Another rich source of amusement is their current trashing of the Wings blog, which is apparently also now a festering hotbed of misogynistic filth, having once been a beacon of alternative journalism - a transformation that appears to correlate directly with the fact that it is currently bashing the First Minister rather than bashing her opponents.
I see that No 10 is nodding, winking and smiling at the tabloids tonight, another evening of hints, suppositions and suggestions about Monday's irreversible lockdown exit.
Yes, here we go again - with the thrilling prospect (according to The Sun) of being able at some point next March to visit the three remaining clothes retailers, so as to buy a lovely new outfit to sit in at home. Followed by meeting with one other household outside at Easter. I'm practically wetting myself with excitement.
Meanwhile, apparently overnight stays are off until June (if we're lucky - the Government will probably stall and string the suffering out beyond that.) That'll be nearly a year since I'll last have been to visit the olds by the time it's no longer illegal to do so. Joy.
Oh, and the argument about the schools continues. Attempts to open the whole lot at once have gone down like a cup of cold sick with the unions - but also with Whitty, if the speculation in The Grauniad is correct, and it does sound plausible. If you really are interested in being cautious (and, indeed, inflicting the consequences of that caution on every other part of society and of life) then why in God's name would you let all the schoolkids in England who have been at home during lockdown (at a guess, about 7 or 8 million youngsters) go back to the petri dishes in one massive wave? God alone knows.
I see that No 10 is nodding, winking and smiling at the tabloids tonight, another evening of hints, suppositions and suggestions about Monday's irreversible lockdown exit.
What coquettish hints are they giving off tonight?
Something to do with Two households, both alike in dignity, being able to meet from Monday.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
The fact that the SNP tried to make an issue about this, 'and at a WOMAN!' (is it OK to tell a guy to fuck off then?), because this man is at present doing a particularly good job of holding the First Minister to account, against all the odds, is (amongst stiff competition) not really their finest hour.
A single SNP MSP replying to a journalist's article on the matter is hardly making a meal of it.
It's clearly enough of a meal for TUD to reheat it for us this evening.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
The fact that the SNP tried to make an issue about this, 'and at a WOMAN!' (is it OK to tell a guy to fuck off then?), because this man is at present doing a particularly good job of holding the First Minister to account, against all the odds, is (amongst stiff competition) not really their finest hour.
Another rich source of amusement is their current trashing of the Wings blog, which is apparently also now a festering hotbed of misogynistic filth, having once been a beacon of alternative journalism - a transformation that appears to correlate directly with the fact that it is currently bashing the First Minister rather than bashing her opponents.
You've not been keeping up with Scottish politics for an awfully long time if you say that. It's always been very marmite indeed even within the independence movement - cf. the Ms Dugdale court case (whose result was not what either side expected, BTW).
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
The fact that the SNP tried to make an issue about this, 'and at a WOMAN!' (is it OK to tell a guy to fuck off then?), because this man is at present doing a particularly good job of holding the First Minister to account, against all the odds, is (amongst stiff competition) not really their finest hour.
A single SNP MSP replying to a journalist's article on the matter is hardly making a meal of it.
It's clearly enough of a meal for TUD to reheat it for us this evening.
< Personally, think people are being bent all out of shape over nothing. I just reckon the Govt. wants to show that politicians are taking the pandemic as seriously as they want everyone else to treat it.
There would be a massive media hysteria about double standards if Boris was seen out pushing a few leaflets through letter boxes. The bitching Lib Dems know this full well. They would be the ones ramping up the outrage.
Yes you would.
Another day, another whinge at the Lib Dems.
You've never really gotten over losing the seat in '97, have you? Just 12 votes, must have really hurt.
Ancient history - move on.
You won the election - majority of 80 - why isn't that enough?
One day you're going to lose - probably quite badly - but that's the cycle of politics.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
The fact that the SNP tried to make an issue about this, 'and at a WOMAN!' (is it OK to tell a guy to fuck off then?), because this man is at present doing a particularly good job of holding the First Minister to account, against all the odds, is (amongst stiff competition) not really their finest hour.
Another rich source of amusement is their current trashing of the Wings blog, which is apparently also now a festering hotbed of misogynistic filth, having once been a beacon of alternative journalism - a transformation that appears to correlate directly with the fact that it is currently bashing the First Minister rather than bashing her opponents.
cf. the Ms Dugdale court case (whose result was not what either side expected, BTW).
Wasn't it?
The volte face over WINGS has been a spectacle to behold over the last few years....from "the one true voice" to "Anti-Christ Satan incarnate (and he lives in Bath)" has been impressive.
Ah "Sturgeon celebrates election of 27 year old cancer survivor in the wrong way" discourse.
In the Venn diagram of LDs who had a prolapse over Sturgeon’s celebrations and those who have maintained a ‘dignified’ silence over an MSP telling a female MSP to fuck off, I wonder how many would be in the intersection of those two groups?
There's an even tinier intersection of people who know what you are talking about and ALSO give an atom of a damn, indeed, it is probably a data-set of one: You
Hmm you obviously give a damn too. So n(a, b) = 2.
No, it's one. Because I DO give a damn but I have no idea what this senescent old twat is wittering on about
Okay, in the spirit of free information, here it is.
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
The fact that the SNP tried to make an issue about this, 'and at a WOMAN!' (is it OK to tell a guy to fuck off then?), because this man is at present doing a particularly good job of holding the First Minister to account, against all the odds, is (amongst stiff competition) not really their finest hour.
Another rich source of amusement is their current trashing of the Wings blog, which is apparently also now a festering hotbed of misogynistic filth, having once been a beacon of alternative journalism - a transformation that appears to correlate directly with the fact that it is currently bashing the First Minister rather than bashing her opponents.
cf. the Ms Dugdale court case (whose result was not what either side expected, BTW).
Wasn't it?
The volte face over WINGS has been a spectacle to behold over the last few years....from "the one true voice" to "Anti-Christ Satan incarnate (and he lives in Bath)" has been impressive.
Have a look at the juidgement, and not the reportage.
< Personally, think people are being bent all out of shape over nothing. I just reckon the Govt. wants to show that politicians are taking the pandemic as seriously as they want everyone else to treat it.
There would be a massive media hysteria about double standards if Boris was seen out pushing a few leaflets through letter boxes. The bitching Lib Dems know this full well. They would be the ones ramping up the outrage.
Yes you would.
Another day, another whinge at the Lib Dems.
You've never really gotten over losing the seat in '97, have you? Just 12 votes, must have really hurt.
Ancient history - move on.
You won the election - majority of 80 - why isn't that enough?
One day you're going to lose - probably quite badly - but that's the cycle of politics.
My extensive experience of the LibDems is that they are THE low-life of British politics.
< Personally, think people are being bent all out of shape over nothing. I just reckon the Govt. wants to show that politicians are taking the pandemic as seriously as they want everyone else to treat it.
There would be a massive media hysteria about double standards if Boris was seen out pushing a few leaflets through letter boxes. The bitching Lib Dems know this full well. They would be the ones ramping up the outrage.
Yes you would.
Another day, another whinge at the Lib Dems.
You've never really gotten over losing the seat in '97, have you? Just 12 votes, must have really hurt.
Ancient history - move on.
You won the election - majority of 80 - why isn't that enough?
One day you're going to lose - probably quite badly - but that's the cycle of politics.
< Personally, think people are being bent all out of shape over nothing. I just reckon the Govt. wants to show that politicians are taking the pandemic as seriously as they want everyone else to treat it.
There would be a massive media hysteria about double standards if Boris was seen out pushing a few leaflets through letter boxes. The bitching Lib Dems know this full well. They would be the ones ramping up the outrage.
Yes you would.
Another day, another whinge at the Lib Dems.
You've never really gotten over losing the seat in '97, have you? Just 12 votes, must have really hurt.
Ancient history - move on.
You won the election - majority of 80 - why isn't that enough?
One day you're going to lose - probably quite badly - but that's the cycle of politics.
Oh, and I had nothing to do with Torbay until we won it back in 2015.
Political leaflets go in the bin almost always. Admittedly I think I have somewhere a leaflet from the Natural Law Party - it was filled with nonsense but very hard maths - I sort of have it on my list to work out that it was nonsense.
I will say though that the LDs are pushing in London, and the simple identification of that as the leaflet goes in to the bin might just give them something.
The Tories have put out a 4*A4 leaflet in Waverley I think paid through Royal Mail and therefore legal. They presumably reckon the average voter won't be aware of the controversy and will just think "Heard from the Tories, nothing from the others". They may be right. I live in a safe Tory division, so who knows what they're up to in marginals?
My outrage has been blunted by Trump, contract favouritism, voter suppression by ID requirements and all the rest of it. I now basically expect conservatives in the US and UK to cheat, in a way that their counterparts in, say, Germany, would not dream of. Sorry if that sounds offensive - I have Tory and Republican friends, but their parties are now disreputable, so we talk of other things.
I'm a Tory and I'd never cheat anyone.
What was the 'controversy'?
Cheer up eh. You're easily one of my favourite people on PB. We'll never agree, but I'll certainly always listen.
The controversy is the lead piece - the Government is quite shamelessly making it illegal to deliver leaflets unless you pay for delivery, in which case you vcan deliver as many as you like.
But you're very kind - OK, I'll cheer up
Personally, think people are being bent all out of shape over nothing. I just reckon the Govt. wants to show that politicians are taking the pandemic as seriously as they want everyone else to treat it.
There would be a massive media hysteria about double standards if Boris was seen out pushing a few leaflets through letter boxes. The bitching LibDems know this full well. They would be the ones ramping up the outrage.
Yes you would.
Unusually, I agree with NPXMP here. I have a good friend who is an independent county councillor in the south west of England. He got an enormous majority last time, beating the Tories, LDs by a huge margin
But he is now freaking out (when he is normally quite confident) thinking he could lose this election, precisely because the new rules benefit the big rich parties. He's not wealthy but is forced to pay for delivery companies to distribute his leaflets, and these companies are themselves very wary of doing it, because the law is vague.
They should postpone the election or make it more equitable
Mmm. I wonder if Independents rather than Labour are the actual targets here? Most of them hold wards which would otherwise be solid Tory (indeed I live in one myself). Several dozen gains off hard working Indies who usually do the hard yards of door knocking and leafletting but can't afford a mass mail shot to offset some other losses? My Indy is shielding so I'm not sure it will be to their disadvantage (And the majority is huge).
No matter how ridiculous and pompously self absorbed Harry and Meghan are, they are not a patch on how ridiculous and pompous self absorbed their British critics are.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
Once the over 50s have been vaccinated (early April?) there will be mass disobedience as people visit each other in their homes and gardens imho. People have had enough. Way more than enough.
If the government want to only listen to certain voices on SAGE and continue to keep the pubs and restaurants closed until late summer then they will look completely and utterly out of touch.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
No matter how ridiculous and pompously self absorbed Harry and Meghan are, they are not a patch on how ridiculous and pompous self absorbed their British critics are.
You'd have to be a real news junkie to name all those journo faces.
I'll probably have to vote for Starmer solely on the basis of this shitty leaking to the press style of Gov't. Doubtless he'll ape it so whoever is the Tory candidate in 2027 or whenever will get my vote again.
No matter how ridiculous and pompously self absorbed Harry and Meghan are, they are not a patch on how ridiculous and pompous self absorbed their British critics are.
That's true, but given they claim not to want to play the royal game anymore they sure don't act like it, so I can understand why people are sick of hearing about it, whether its them moaning or the Mail moaning about them.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
I don't want to be negative, but I do feel that the generally positive air of 'we are getting on top of COVID' which was around a week or so has disappeared somewhat.
It's clear that the fall in cases is slowing somewhat although at the moment the fall in hospitalisations and deaths is still encouraging.
There are many areas where, once you get to a certain point, cases just do not seem to fall any further.
It does appear that the cases in under 30s are possibly rising as people get fed up. Also many of those who have been vaccinated would have been taking greater precautions in any case so would this would not affect cases so much.
There is evidence that vaccinations are having an impact however and the government may/will be relying on this increasing to have any chance of delivering a meaningful unlocking.
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
There is pretty good evidence that aerosol transmission is an issue though.
Being sacked by your grandmother shows new heights of dysfunctionality. No wonder they scarpered.
Regardless, they've had a hand of cards that many would envy, and they've played them really, really badly.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
Australia wouldn’t have suited them. Due to facebook, nobody outside Australia would read anything about them.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
I don't want to be negative, but I do feel that the generally positive air of 'we are getting on top of COVID' which was around a week or so has disappeared somewhat.
It's clear that the fall in cases is slowing somewhat although at the moment the fall in hospitalisations and deaths is still encouraging.
There are many areas where, once you get to a certain point, cases just do not seem to fall any further.
It does appear that the cases in under 30s are possibly rising as people get fed up. Also many of those who have been vaccinated would have been taking greater precautions in any case so would this would not affect cases so much.
There is evidence that vaccinations are having an impact however and the government may/will be relying on this increasing to have any chance of delivering a meaningful unlocking.
1. Everyone's thoroughly fed up of lockdown (disregard for it is increasing, and will start to move up the newly-vaccinated age groups as well if the misery drags on for very much longer) 2. Nobody trusts the Government. Why would you? 3. A great many of us are worried that they're intent on regularly moving the goalposts, with the purpose of stalling and keeping us under lock and key for as long as possible. That might not turn out to be the case in the end but we can hardly be blamed for suspecting it
The vaccine rollout is very conducive to positivity but the other circumstances aren't. The mood won't lift until there's substantial evidence from the Government's actions - its words have no value - that we're actually going to be let out of prison (and with a meaningful expectation that it won't resort to yet more lockdowns further down the line.)
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
I don't think it needs to be an intentional evil plan.
But I can all too easily see a very slow opening up due to "an abundance of caution", maybe being able to do a few limited things mostly outside in July and August, and then before you know it them tightening things up again in September out of either a new abundance of caution about winter and/or panic about whatever the latest variants are.
Probably I'll be wrong, but we're in a situation now where they seem to be of the opinion that because we've been generally so obedient about being cooped up all this time that actually you can get away with extending it a good bit yet just to make sure.
All sense of "not one second longer than necessary" has melted away to "well probably just keep doing something like that for a while becuase it'll help".
There's plenty of electoral practices in america that I might not think are good ideas, but which are widely accepted and practiced there so it's fine, so when restrictive measures are brought in it is hard sometimes to think of the non sinister explanation that is presumably used as an excuse.
North Carolina Republicans tried the same thing and the courts said "it is very hard to be able definitely say voting restriction have been specifically targeted at a racial group as the law demands before we can strike down a restriction but this is fucking clear cut, get fucked."
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
Let's have a rule that says in the two weeks prior to the elections, each candidate can hand deliver no more than one leaflet. Rules on similar size of leaflets to apply.
No candidates are to door knock.
Who could possibly bitch about democracy falling over then?
But you can have 20x pizza place leaflets over the same period?
I don't think we should fuck about with the current democratic process given that we have all been through what has been an unprecedented period of restricted freedoms.
Let's keep this one (political leafleting) inviolate.
If a local candidate wants talk to me, he or she can knock on my door (socially distanced of course) or ring me up. A load of printed rubbish that goes straight in the recycling just fills up my bin.
Knocking on doors canvassing is strictly outlawed in our neighbourhood watch scheme
Get to fuck with that what right do they have to do that? None.
It is part of the neighbourhood watch scheme and we have a notice on our front door
So what. It is not outlawed. It is just that you and your neighbours don't want to be canvassed.
Canvassers can decide for themselves whether to adhere to your wishes.
I cannot recall when we were last canvassed or someone cold called at our front door
My house was, once. I had just nipped to the shop and was really disappointed to have missed it! (UKIP, it turns out)
Depends on the seat, I guess.
We went to 35,000 houses in Totnes in 2019 (out of some 43,000 I think it is). And that is quite an effort in quite a rural seat.
Interestingly, our canvas return calculated on the night before the vote was within 0.1% of the actual result. Damn, we pavement-pounders are good at identifying our vote!
So even known unsympathetics you canvassed? Not done that before.
When faced with my sweet-talking, there's no such thing as a lost cause.... 😉
I have no doubt. But given that canvassing is aimed at getting your own vote out, more than changing the mind of "their vote" I find it surprising.
But it evidently worked.
Was there a swing in the seat?
About an 8% swing against, but it was complicated by having the previousy elected Tory MP (Dr. Sarah Wollaston) standing against the new Tory candidate.
The LibDems threw an enormous amount of cash at trying to save her. It was one of the reasons we had to go door to door, to identify those who were giving her a personal vote from amongst our former safe voters. There was also an element of appearing cock-sure we were trying to contact all voters. "We understand that you might not vote for us this time, but we have an excellent candidate who we believe will be an excellent representative for all of Totnes' voters, regardless of that vote." The message: he is going to win, so he will be happy to represent you on any issues you might have.
Anthony Mangnall really is a delightful chap. I do not begrudge one moment spent helping him get elected. That he is solidly in favour of tidal lagoon power is merely coincidental....
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
Did they really think that “working with James Matthews” would encourage people to apply? It sounds as attractive as a job advert for a Slug Eradication Officer. Although it sounds like that job’s already been taken, Isn’t that right Mr Lewis and Mr Gove?
So this raises aerosol transmission higher up the likelihood list?
Not necessarily - droplets rather than aerosols are still the principal source of transmission in all the literature I have read. That is not to say that there is no aerosol, or fomites, or faecal-oral transmission, just that the bulk of transmission seems to be from droplets.
The distinction between the two is rather artificial, though.
Not really - aerosols can hang in the air for long periods of time and travel much further. Droplets tend to fall to the ground under gravity in the 3-12' range in a very short period of time. From an infection control and biosafety perspective, that is a huge difference. For example, it means that turnaround time in rooms for droplet only transmission can be the time it takes to disinfect surfaces, whereas for aerosols it is that plus the time it takes for the requisite number of air changes through filtration, or 30+ minutes where there is no mechanical air exchange.
It’s a continuum, though, and the behaviour if particles depends on th e ait conditions (humidity, turbulence etc). There’s no clear dividing line.
Two households meeting up outside at Easter presumably means restaurants in, oh, October.
I understand the cynicism completely. Hospitality probably will come back at some point before the Autumn, but you have to wonder when. And there's always that dark suspicion lingering in the back of your mind that it's all part of a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year. Basically shifting the goalposts incrementally - from jabbing the old, to jabbing everyone, to a ridiculously low target number of cases, to giving the old their boosters, to it being Winter and a massive panic over seasonal flu and Covid hitting the hospitals again. Before you know it, we're right back round to February - of 2022 - and nothing much has changed.
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
Two challenges to your rather over-wrought post:
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
This is the worst time to be a Briton since the Second World War, no question. In some ways it is crueller than THAT - eg the lack of human touch, the absence of camaraderie, and so on. For a year I have seen my parents either at a distance, or behind glass.
It is relentlessly awful.
Snowflake
"there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up."
No. But there may be groupthink by science advisors that leads to that situation.
When the over 50s have been vaccinated it is time to accept that the economic and social and mental health benefits of properly unlocking in all probability outweigh the risks.
Comments
But you're very kind - OK, I'll cheer up
The correlation of enthusiasm to wealthier parties is probably not coincidental.
Don't usually say this, but this time - more power to him.
And do NOT care that there is a strong PR element, particularly when the positive public health message is also so strong.
Not that I necessarily want Labour to win, but improving the government's game helps us all....
I don't think it can be something as simple as the disease having gone through all the elderly and vulnerable in one go: even though India's demographics are heavily skewed towards the young, they nonetheless already had forty million citizens aged over 70 ten years ago (if the census figures quoted on the mighty Wiki are correct.) The carnage would've been enormous.
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1362867995341635589?s=20
They refused to test him for covid because "there is no coronavirus in India." He did survive (he's 40 and fit as a horse, albeit he was having some breathing issues for six months or so) and managed to get back here during late summer.
Genuinely don't know why the drop - it could be rcs1000s cycles, or younger populations, or having burned through the clumps of people and places that couldn't socially distance.
We'll probably only know a year or two after the fact in some places.
The private sector / market / cheapest price alone isn't good for some crucial sectors e.g PPE.
Private / Public partnerships done right can work really well e.g testing and vaccines...but can also work terribly e.g. track and trace.
The NHS when really pushed has managed to expand and process huge numbers efficiently...what can be learned to increase general productivity and capacity going forward across the whole system.
But also the likes of PHE have found to be lacking and inability to really think big when it came to testing / data processing. The classic stereotypical public sector can't be done, too hard, using outdated approaches.
In terms of research / science, some really impressive stuff with vaccine and REACT trials, but also some very clear weaknesses e.g. mRNA UK is behind
But really we do not know enough about why different groups reject the vaccine. I am slightly sceptical about the current advert for BAME groups as it lumps them all together, but welcome any such messaging.
Once everybody has had their two shots then there's little value in keeping hold of the spares. If we do end up needing annual boosters then they're going to need to be updated and manufactured afresh, to account for the dreaded mutations.
I'm fairly sure that the NHS doesn't ask for several years' worth of flu vaccines to be bulk manufactured to cut down the cost, and then deep freeze them so that the same jab is then used in each annual campaign until the supplies run out.
That's not to say that herd immunity is impossible in some places, but I'd need strong evidence. And it wouldn't be too difficult to get such evidence e.g. by antibody surveys.
--AS
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1362722508407988225?s=19
There would be a massive media hysteria about double standards if Boris was seen out pushing a few leaflets through letter boxes. The bitching LibDems know this full well. They would be the ones ramping up the outrage.
Yes you would.
"Mixing outside is super healthy - exposure to low [viral] loads builds immunity"
Could be something in that, with low exposure maybe acting a bit like a vaccine.
https://twitter.com/joepike/status/1362871649410969602?s=20
https://www.thenational.scot/news/19088728.holyrood-libdem-msp-alex-cole-hamilton-appears-swear-committee-meeting/
PS Re Guz discussion last night - did you ever get to Cotehele Quay? Sounds interesting.
https://twitter.com/ReutersUK/status/1362870889931538436?s=20
But it fairly accurately lampoons Cruz’ attitude towards global warming.
Most Conservative voters are decent people (though mistaken in their politics, obviously) and have been very badly let down by these unscrupulous leaders. They just chant "We have an 80 seat majority in Parliament and we can make the laws".
They forget that here we have government by consent, and their cheating is undermining their own legitimacy, and with that the stability of the whole social system.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html
Presumably since then you can add another 5 or 10% maybe? Those people will have immunity from both T-Cell immunity and antibodies and will be concentrated upon homeless people, frontline and essential workers, and people living in crowded homes - the low hanging fruit. The virus can’t get at the middle classes hunkering down at home relying on Amazon deliveries. They will get their vaccines when the US is, as you put it yourself, swimming in them.
So I don’t think the author is necessary as off base as you say. Sure, April is wholly optimistic, but cases globally have halved in a month. In aggregate my view is that the above is what may be happening on a global level.
The usual caveats that I am not in any way medically or scientifically qualified apply. But the data invites one to try and interpret it, however amateur one is!
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/snp-mhairi-black-video-conservative-minister-caroline-nokes-tory-hen-commons-scottish-footage-a7618706.html
We have a cornucopia of riches, as it has turned out. Thank God. So let us share that good fortune with the world. We will have vast numbers replacing them soon. Their utility as a rare commodity will soon be gone.
I still say we should make 1m J&J single-jab vaccines available from 1st July for athletes and officials to enable the Olympics to happen.
But he is now freaking out (when he is normally quite confident) thinking he could lose this election, precisely because the new rules benefit the big rich parties. He's not wealthy but is forced to pay for delivery companies to distribute his leaflets, and these companies are themselves very wary of doing it, because the law is vague.
They should postpone the election or make it more equitable
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-55895712
Mark Drakeford has set out the rules for Wales, and they involve a ban on door-to-door leafletting.
In fact, Drakeford's main opponent in Cardiff West (an independent, Neil NcEvoy) has already had a visit from the police because of leaflets in Cardiff West.
Are the Labour party similarly "cheating" (your word) in Wales?
Meanwhile, apparently overnight stays are off until June (if we're lucky - the Government will probably stall and string the suffering out beyond that.) That'll be nearly a year since I'll last have been to visit the olds by the time it's no longer illegal to do so. Joy.
Oh, and the argument about the schools continues. Attempts to open the whole lot at once have gone down like a cup of cold sick with the unions - but also with Whitty, if the speculation in The Grauniad is correct, and it does sound plausible. If you really are interested in being cautious (and, indeed, inflicting the consequences of that caution on every other part of society and of life) then why in God's name would you let all the schoolkids in England who have been at home during lockdown (at a guess, about 7 or 8 million youngsters) go back to the petri dishes in one massive wave? God alone knows.
https://twitter.com/Coldwar_Steve/status/1362873456665260036?s=20
I understand the blindspot....
You've never really gotten over losing the seat in '97, have you? Just 12 votes, must have really hurt.
Ancient history - move on.
You won the election - majority of 80 - why isn't that enough?
One day you're going to lose - probably quite badly - but that's the cycle of politics.
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1362875947695951873?s=19
The volte face over WINGS has been a spectacle to behold over the last few years....from "the one true voice" to "Anti-Christ Satan incarnate (and he lives in Bath)" has been impressive.
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1362875947695951873?s=20
I am not a hater of the DM (as so many are), but I really think that front page could be peak DM.
'Tidy your worries away!'
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1362838532943982592?s=20
Most of them hold wards which would otherwise be solid Tory (indeed I live in one myself).
Several dozen gains off hard working Indies who usually do the hard yards of door knocking and leafletting but can't afford a mass mail shot to offset some other losses?
My Indy is shielding so I'm not sure it will be to their disadvantage (And the majority is huge).
If the government want to only listen to certain voices on SAGE and continue to keep the pubs and restaurants closed until late summer then they will look completely and utterly out of touch.
https://twitter.com/goal/status/1362879108858990594?s=19
That's implausible, but so many things have gone wrong and we've been locked up so often that the fear that it will just keep on happening over and over again always plays in the back of one's mind. And I certainly wouldn't trust anything any of the politicians ever say about any subject whatever. If there's the least indication that we might, one day, be let out of our cages then the vague intentions can just as easily be withdrawn or reversed at any moment in the future.
This is an evil time to be alive.
https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/media/the-confused-persons-guide-to-the-war-on-woke-20210219205543
It isn't families it's 2 households.
My household can meet with my mother's household or my in-laws.
Sigh.
What is the point of moving to LA? Who is Megan Markle there? She was a popular but not A-list actress, and now she's a less popular one with a vaguely interesting (for 5 seconds at parties) husband, who is getting less glamorous by the minute now he's been stripped of his geegaws. They are insignificant minnows in a shark tank.
The Royals would have gladly stitched up a compromise and let the Sussexes represent the Queen in Australia (if Canada wasn't warm enough for their liking), where they would have lived a life of huge ease and fairly constant adulation, as fairly big and very flashy fishes in a fairly small (media-wise) pond. I find it hard to reach any conclusion other than that Harry would have been OK with a compromise and Megan had an exocet-like attraction to 'this', whatever 'this' is.
It's clear that the fall in cases is slowing somewhat although at the moment the fall in hospitalisations and deaths is still encouraging.
There are many areas where, once you get to a certain point, cases just do not seem to fall any further.
It does appear that the cases in under 30s are possibly rising as people get fed up. Also many of those who have been vaccinated would have been taking greater precautions in any case so would this would not affect cases so much.
There is evidence that vaccinations are having an impact however and the government may/will be relying on this increasing to have any chance of delivering a meaningful unlocking.
https://twitter.com/hendopolis/status/1362882564965425159?s=19
https://associationofanaesthetists-publications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/anae.15093
1. This is not an 'evil time to be alive' - that would be 1950s USSR, or 1930s Nazi, or 1914-18 in the trenches, or many other examples from history. This is a challenging time to be alive but not especially challenging compared to the challenges many (most) of our ancestors faced.
2. "...a nasty little plan of stalling so that they can keep us locked up for another entire year". Why, in the name of God, would HMG, the civil service or whoever you think controls real power in this country want to keep us locked up for any longer than was necessary? what possible motive could there be for that? (Hint: none whatsoever - there is no hidden plot to keep the populous locked up.)
2. Nobody trusts the Government. Why would you?
3. A great many of us are worried that they're intent on regularly moving the goalposts, with the purpose of stalling and keeping us under lock and key for as long as possible. That might not turn out to be the case in the end but we can hardly be blamed for suspecting it
The vaccine rollout is very conducive to positivity but the other circumstances aren't. The mood won't lift until there's substantial evidence from the Government's actions - its words have no value - that we're actually going to be let out of prison (and with a meaningful expectation that it won't resort to yet more lockdowns further down the line.)
But I can all too easily see a very slow opening up due to "an abundance of caution", maybe being able to do a few limited things mostly outside in July and August, and then before you know it them tightening things up again in September out of either a new abundance of caution about winter and/or panic about whatever the latest variants are.
Probably I'll be wrong, but we're in a situation now where they seem to be of the opinion that because we've been generally so obedient about being cooped up all this time that actually you can get away with extending it a good bit yet just to make sure.
All sense of "not one second longer than necessary" has melted away to "well probably just keep doing something like that for a while becuase it'll help".
There is no earthly reason why political leaflets can't be delivered as well.
It is relentlessly awful.
Bloody hell.
https://twitter.com/ulrichspeck/status/1362853523667484680
There’s no clear dividing line.
No. But there may be groupthink by science advisors that leads to that situation.
When the over 50s have been vaccinated it is time to accept that the economic and social and mental health benefits of properly unlocking in all probability outweigh the risks.