"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
The panic, hysteria and delusion is predominantly coming from the "mad scientists gonna lock us down forever cos they luv it" brigade.
I don't believe the boffins are "mad", but it has to be asked why SAGE & Co are so relentlessly and wrongly pessimistic, time and again, and so eager for lockdown. It is a legitimate and important question
At least one - Michie - is a professed communist, who admits her desire for a reordered society with greater state control. so she's doggy. Kick her out immediately
Of the rest, who knows. I do believe that some of iSage are getting off on the fame. Someone like Pagel is building an entire media career out of alarmism. She now has 175,000 followers and is an important influencer, writes for the papers. Etc. Before Covid she probably had 9 followers. An obscure scientist doing obscure science. Now she is famous and probably making money. None of that would have happened if her tweets had been measured and her predictions on the modest side, rather than scary and clickbaity
As for the others, there might be further explanations. Groupthink, for a start. Also a tendency to value healthcare above all else in the medics. Plus a desire to protect the NHS. Along with an inability to understand wider social costs?
Some of them strike me as actually quite dim. Remember Van Tam and his mask advice. Likewise Harries. Simply over-promoted time-servers? I have never met them so who knows.
Not sure if you've seen this; you might find it of interest.
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
When a close relative was diagnosed with inopperable cancer, the specialist (top of his field, wrote definitive papers on the particular type of cancer) said, when asked, he had no idea how long they would live. People were always confounding him, apparently.
He did describe in simple, clear detail, the stages that would occur. Because that he had information for. In great detail, backed by peer review publications (I asked).
Whatever works for him and his patients.
But some patients might want to really know.. so they can plan things etc.
Well, if he doesn't know, then probably no one on the planet does. So should he tell lies to patients, so he can check a box?
A big piece of science is saying "We don't know. The gaps in our knowledge are X, Y and Z".
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
Yes.
Finally!
Any sane person would think that's a million times better than the pack of lies they're feeding us now,
Great. I hope you get the 'dunno' answer the next time you ask someone a tricky question where you want their expertise.
Pack of lies? You sound a bit like a conspiracy theorist. You do realise that don't you?
I would sincerely hope that an expert would tell me that they don't know the answer to a tricky question if indeed they did not. (And in many cases in relation to COVID, they simply cannot).
I am not sure what you are trying to prove with these posts except that you are both ignorant and snarky. Not a good combination.
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
Religion has little to do with it, of course.
We are not exposed to death on a regular basis the way previous generations were. When life was "nasty, brutish and short", death was a part of life. Siblings, friends, parents - all died while most people were still young.
Those generations who experienced the privations of war saw death up close on the home front from German bombs and later rockets and of course more people in the Armed Forces meant more people knew someone who was serving somewhere.
Nowadays, it's the old who see death among their contemporaries as their circles of friends and acquaintances diminish. The other side is most people haven't a clue what to do when someone dies - we are not educated in death, arguably it's one of the last taboos. I remember this from when my father passed away - I literally did not know what to do.
We should recognise there is a whole industry of death which works under the radar and often under very difficult circumstances.
Yokes - for all I know he's a fraud (!) but his background is in nursing and he has written a couple of textbooks that he likes to promote. It may be that he seems like the antithesis of the sensational media commentator and there's an audience for that.
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
The panic, hysteria and delusion is predominantly coming from the "mad scientists gonna lock us down forever cos they luv it" brigade.
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
When a close relative was diagnosed with inopperable cancer, the specialist (top of his field, wrote definitive papers on the particular type of cancer) said, when asked, he had no idea how long they would live. People were always confounding him, apparently.
He did describe in simple, clear detail, the stages that would occur. Because that he had information for. In great detail, backed by peer review publications (I asked).
Whatever works for him and his patients.
But some patients might want to really know.. so they can plan things etc.
Is the suggestion, therefore, that the doctor in question should invent a fictitious prognosis, because certainty would be less unsettling to the patient than uncertainty, and they have no way of knowing that the information they've been given is false?
Some posters have been commenting on the motives of those who appear to want to re-introduce more restrictions or possibly another ‘lockdown’ whatever that specifically means. I don’t doubt that there is an appetite for more measures coming from the likes of Whitty and his colleagues. Is this because they are control freaks, power hungry or worst of all secretly fascist? I find that distinctly unlikely and worth us remembering that it’s a great human failing to attribute the worst motives to people we disagree with doubly so at a time of stress or misery.
Sean Fear has suggested that the relationship between the government and Whitty et all was like that between the government and the military in times of war. That’s true and ultimately it is up for the government to decide because advisers only advise. Commanders often have much sympathy with their frontline troops and I suspect Whitty is no different. Clearly the last two years have been a huge burden on health service staff and here we are again asking them to make another big commitment. Not that January is ever an easy month for them of course. I can understand why Whitty would want to minimise the burden on his staff but ultimately it is not for the government to prioritise the staff of the health service above everything else. It is this I suspect that might explain the ‘enthusiasm’ for stringent control measures right now.
One other thing. Dr John Campbell made the point yesterday that hospital staff can be a rather superstitious bunch. Don’t say things are going quite well or better than expected for fear of tempting fate. Sports fans will be familiar with the curse of the commentator, say some is batting really well he’s never getting out, or such and such never serves a double fault and you know what is likely to happen next. Well maybe not but people avoid doing it anyway. I imagine that the pandemic has taken it’s toll on all the government’s advisers. I can understand why if you think you have continually been surprised on the downside with regards to covid it would be difficult to accept any good news that comes along. Omicron looks less severe? Let’s not get our hopes up or tempt fate. There’s a lot of shame (shaming?) in false optimism that gets corrected by events so it’s easier to focus on the negatives. I’ll risk it and be cautiously optimistic.
Out of curiosity how has John Campbell got such a profile? Ive seen a few bits of his stuff and he appears somewhat normal which is maybe why hes got the profile...
Well, he's written two books on ?physiology?, which he gives away for free as PDF's, and had loads of educational YouTube content pre-Covid - so he probably had a sizable following beforehand. I think I ended up on his site on a couple of occasions.
Also: although I don't agree with everything he says, he presents information in a much better way than 99% of the mainstream media journalists.
It's like someone who started a small channel on repairs of concrete and steel structures, who did not have that many followers until Champlain Towers collapsed earlier this year. Since then he's provided invaluable input into the collapse and his subscribers have jumped - although not as much as he deserves.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
Not quite.
For the first time, technology has enabled Governments to adopt a different response to a pandemic. It is possible for hundreds of thousands of admin based staff to work in their own homes rather than like battery hens at banks of desks in some remote town or city.
Incredible medical advances have enabled life-saving vaccines to be produced not in years but months.
When we had the Hong Kong Flu in the late 60s, none of that existed. We just had to "keep buggering on" as the saying has it. Unquestionably, lives have been saved by the progress we have made and we are now able to put the priority of public health above the priority of economic wealth.
Yes, there have been deaths, both due to the virus and to the psychological and emotional impacts of the measures taken to prevent it. Had we done nothing in March 2020, would more lives have been lost? Unquestionably. However, this cannot and must not ignore the hidden "costs" of the virus which aren't so much the lost businesses, bad though it is but the suicides and the deaths by abuse (whether physical or psychological) or the deaths of those who couldn't get the treatment they needed for other conditions.
Even now, we witter on about data models - the biggest risk group for Omicron isn't as much the unvaccinated but those with other health problems such as those in hospital.
Yes - but essentially, when the stay home order came in; we sacrificed our freedom in an unprecedented way. It wasn't just a case of WFHing, social distancing, masks, better ventillation, using home delivery etc.
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
The panic, hysteria and delusion is predominantly coming from the "mad scientists gonna lock us down forever cos they luv it" brigade.
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
When a close relative was diagnosed with inopperable cancer, the specialist (top of his field, wrote definitive papers on the particular type of cancer) said, when asked, he had no idea how long they would live. People were always confounding him, apparently.
He did describe in simple, clear detail, the stages that would occur. Because that he had information for. In great detail, backed by peer review publications (I asked).
Whatever works for him and his patients.
But some patients might want to really know.. so they can plan things etc.
His crystal ball might not have been working.
Do you not actually realise how stupid that comment sounds? I mean - really! 'They might want to know?' Well the only way to know would be to commit fecking suicide on an appointed day!
Ha. Does it really? The only way to know how long someone is going to live for is if they commit suicide?
I thought this was a betting site where people understood things like probability, life tables etc.
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
When a close relative was diagnosed with inopperable cancer, the specialist (top of his field, wrote definitive papers on the particular type of cancer) said, when asked, he had no idea how long they would live. People were always confounding him, apparently.
He did describe in simple, clear detail, the stages that would occur. Because that he had information for. In great detail, backed by peer review publications (I asked).
Whatever works for him and his patients.
But some patients might want to really know.. so they can plan things etc.
They gave my late mother 6 months, within 4 weeks she was gone.
Sorry to be morbid but predictions when it comes to medicine and science with so many variables is difficult.
Going back to our scientists and Covid, they saved many lives in my eyes even if their modelling may have looked at the worst case scenarios. We have fared better than a lot of countries out there, each death is a tragedy for families who have lost loved ones due to this horrible bug but the toll could have been so much worse.
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
Yes.
Finally!
Any sane person would think that's a million times better than the pack of lies they're feeding us now,
Great. I hope you get the 'dunno' answer the next time you ask someone a tricky question where you want their expertise.
Pack of lies? You sound a bit like a conspiracy theorist. You do realise that don't you?
I would sincerely hope that an expert would tell me that they don't know the answer to a tricky question if indeed they did not. (And in many cases in relation to COVID, they simply cannot).
I am not sure what you are trying to prove with these posts except that you are both ignorant and snarky. Not a good combination.
Conspiracy theorists never show any doubt - their.... er.... "knowledge" is exact and to 6 decimal places.
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
When a close relative was diagnosed with inopperable cancer, the specialist (top of his field, wrote definitive papers on the particular type of cancer) said, when asked, he had no idea how long they would live. People were always confounding him, apparently.
He did describe in simple, clear detail, the stages that would occur. Because that he had information for. In great detail, backed by peer review publications (I asked).
Whatever works for him and his patients.
But some patients might want to really know.. so they can plan things etc.
His crystal ball might not have been working.
Do you not actually realise how stupid that comment sounds? I mean - really! 'They might want to know?' Well the only way to know would be to commit fecking suicide on an appointed day!
Ha. Does it really? The only way to know how long someone is going to live for is if they commit suicide?
I thought this was a betting site where people understood things like probability, life tables etc.
What's offensive about 'Franny' by the way?
If they wanted to call themselves that, they would have used that name as their handle.
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
The panic, hysteria and delusion is predominantly coming from the "mad scientists gonna lock us down forever cos they luv it" brigade.
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
At some point, particularly for the poor, money is life.
Yokes - for all I know he's a fraud (!) but his background is in nursing and he has written a couple of textbooks that he likes to promote. It may be that he seems like the antithesis of the sensational media commentator and there's an audience for that.
A point of order: he gives away the textbooks he likes to promote for free.
Some posters have been commenting on the motives of those who appear to want to re-introduce more restrictions or possibly another ‘lockdown’ whatever that specifically means. I don’t doubt that there is an appetite for more measures coming from the likes of Whitty and his colleagues. Is this because they are control freaks, power hungry or worst of all secretly fascist? I find that distinctly unlikely and worth us remembering that it’s a great human failing to attribute the worst motives to people we disagree with doubly so at a time of stress or misery.
Sean Fear has suggested that the relationship between the government and Whitty et all was like that between the government and the military in times of war. That’s true and ultimately it is up for the government to decide because advisers only advise. Commanders often have much sympathy with their frontline troops and I suspect Whitty is no different. Clearly the last two years have been a huge burden on health service staff and here we are again asking them to make another big commitment. Not that January is ever an easy month for them of course. I can understand why Whitty would want to minimise the burden on his staff but ultimately it is not for the government to prioritise the staff of the health service above everything else. It is this I suspect that might explain the ‘enthusiasm’ for stringent control measures right now.
One other thing. Dr John Campbell made the point yesterday that hospital staff can be a rather superstitious bunch. Don’t say things are going quite well or better than expected for fear of tempting fate. Sports fans will be familiar with the curse of the commentator, say some is batting really well he’s never getting out, or such and such never serves a double fault and you know what is likely to happen next. Well maybe not but people avoid doing it anyway. I imagine that the pandemic has taken it’s toll on all the government’s advisers. I can understand why if you think you have continually been surprised on the downside with regards to covid it would be difficult to accept any good news that comes along. Omicron looks less severe? Let’s not get our hopes up or tempt fate. There’s a lot of shame (shaming?) in false optimism that gets corrected by events so it’s easier to focus on the negatives. I’ll risk it and be cautiously optimistic.
Out of curiosity how has John Campbell got such a profile? Ive seen a few bits of his stuff and he appears somewhat normal which is maybe why hes got the profile...
Well, he's written two books on ?physiology?, which he gives away for free as PDF's, and had loads of educational YouTube content pre-Covid - so he probably had a sizable following beforehand. I think I ended up on his site on a couple of occasions.
Also: although I don't agree with everything he says, he presents information in a much better way than 99% of the mainstream media journalists.
It's like someone who started a small channel on repairs of concrete and steel structures, who did not have that many followers until Champlain Towers collapsed earlier this year. Since then he's provided invaluable input into the collapse and his subscribers have jumped - although not as much as he deserves.
He presents things really well. My concern recently is he has gone down some rather iffy paths e.g. Vitamin D, Zinc, Ivermectin, flawed jabbing technique are hobby horses.
The first two doesn't really matter if they are true or not, there is zero risk. Ivermectin is definitely dodgy ground and the flawed vaccination technique could be spun by antivaxxers.
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
On the whole I prefer to live than to die. Humans are conditioned that way.
I would also say, despite giving Johnson a hard time, we have as the human race handled this pandemic better than any previous one of similar severity. Would you really swap Covid for the Black Death?
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
Yes.
Finally!
Any sane person would think that's a million times better than the pack of lies they're feeding us now,
Great. I hope you get the 'dunno' answer the next time you ask someone a tricky question where you want their expertise.
Pack of lies? You sound a bit like a conspiracy theorist. You do realise that don't you?
Oh really, this is ridiculous. They have repeatedly and deliberately put forward false information with intent to deceive. That's called 'a pack of lies.'
And yes, I prefer honest admissions of ignorance. Far better than the terrible damage these consistently failed models are doing.
You probably don't know philosophy but Aristotle once said there was only form of knowledge worth having and that was the knowledge of your own ignorance. These people don't have it, and clearly, nor do you.
As for your abuse, you're showing your true colours. You are just a nasty troll. You have so far said nothing worthwhile or helpful. You have abused multiple posters, including a highly offensive rewrite of one poster's name. You have deliberately made false statements and done so for no other reason than to cause trouble.
@PBModerator you might want to take a look at this one too. Much cleverer than the last troll but not much pleasanter.
Could he be one of your students who didn’t receive the marks he thinks he’s entitled to?
904,598 booster vaccinations in 🇬🇧 exc Wales yesterday (530,086 the previous Saturday)
🏴 830,403 🏴 64,081 NI 10,114
When Welsh data is added in (tomorrow) it's almost certain yesterday will turn out to be the first day that more than a million vaccines were given out - figure excluding Wales is c. 987k I think.
Think we'll hit the million mark this week and then it will be after new year's day before we get back to that level.
Great prediction lol. Must have really been a challenge to make that extrapolation. Now now master modeller with all the really clever friends. Where are hospitalisations going to be this week and next?
Nobody knows. Including the modellers working for the government. Their modelling every single time have however been out, often by huge margins. So nobody should be using it.
If of course you have clairvoyant powers and can deliver the information, perhaps you should be advising the government?
I don't know myself but then I haven't posted thousands of posts pretending I do, always after the event of course. ;-)
Max at least has been saying for months on end that this modelling doesn't make sense and the use of them is flawed.
Which is all anyone can do.
What is disturbing is the way they are, despite being patently flawed, they are being used to strongly push a policy agenda.
Which is what is the real issue at stake here. Not the models - they work as they are intended to - but how they are deployed and what they are used for.
'This modelling doesn't make sense'. Wow is that the level of insight that Max has been giving? Very impressive stuff. Forensic.
He's given specific examples of where the assumptions used in the models are wrong. And we don't have to take his word for it, just look at how accurate they have been in the past.
How accurate they have been? All of them all the time?
Max has just enough knowledge to pretend he knows something. But ask him to produce his own prediction, he goes strangely quiet. It's the same for his mate Mr Francis. They know all the answers but always after the event. Funny that.
Er - you're asking him to predict something when the whole point of what he"s saying is that the methods used are useless and it's totally unpredictable?
OK. Tell Vlad from me this is an improvement on that bullshit about pilots, or his massive cockup in Salisbury, or backing that drunken failure Lukashenko, but it's still not working.
And have a good one.
Really? I thought Max's (at least one of his many) argument was that the wide boys in the City could do a better job. Or that the academics were fascist or something. There's been so many it's hard to keep up.
You didn't answer my question though. If we don't use a model what should we do? Finger in the air?
As an historian, if I don't have a reliable source on an event in Nazi Germany, I don't use the bulletins of the Deutsches Nachrichten Buro as a substitute. I say, I don't know.
It would be better for them to admit they don't know than to waste time and on incorrect and highly damaging guesswork.
Or do you actually think it's better to use lies that cause harm than to admit ignorance or use past experience (which these models do not) as a guide? Because if so you're clearly not rational and not worth arguing with.
That's great so you'd prefer it that the scientific community just says 'dunno'.
Doctor, what are the chances of me surviving this cancer? Dunno.
Weatherman, is it going to rain at the weekend? Dunno.
Epidemiologists, are we going to have 1 million people dying in the next few months? Dunno.
Yes.
Finally!
Any sane person would think that's a million times better than the pack of lies they're feeding us now,
Great. I hope you get the 'dunno' answer the next time you ask someone a tricky question where you want their expertise.
Pack of lies? You sound a bit like a conspiracy theorist. You do realise that don't you?
Oh really, this is ridiculous. They have repeatedly and deliberately put forward false information with intent to deceive. That's called 'a pack of lies.'
And yes, I prefer honest admissions of ignorance. Far better than the terrible damage these consistently failed models are doing.
You probably don't know philosophy but Aristotle once said there was only form of knowledge worth having and that was the knowledge of your own ignorance. These people don't have it, and clearly, nor do you.
As for your abuse, you're showing your true colours. You are just a nasty troll. You have so far said nothing worthwhile or helpful. You have abused multiple posters, including a highly offensive rewrite of one poster's name. You have deliberately made false statements and done so for no other reason than to cause trouble.
@PBModerator you might want to take a look at this one too. Much cleverer than the last troll but not much pleasanter.
Could he be one of your students who didn’t receive the marks he thinks he’s entitled to?
In fairness I was the one who took this one on, not the other way around.
I thought it possible they were just needing a bit of a nudge to say something useful.
But I was wrong. They're just nuts. And not in a pleasant way either.
"The median delay (lag) between symptom onset and hospital admission varies between 1 and 6.7 days depending on age and whether the patient lives in a nursing home."
Let us make a reasonable assumption, which is that the 1 day lag applies to the frail elderly and most Covid hospital admissions will be much closer to 7 days after symptomatic infection.
We also know that recorded cases, many of which must logically be the result of people taking tests after the onset of symptomatic infection, really started to take off on December 13th.
If hospitalisations are going to start following the same steep trajectory as cases in the Omicron wave, it seems reasonable to assume that we are, therefore, likely to see the first evidence for this in the next couple of days.
Should the admissions data from Monday and Tuesday look alarming, we may be treated to another No.10 press conference on Wednesday...
Some posters have been commenting on the motives of those who appear to want to re-introduce more restrictions or possibly another ‘lockdown’ whatever that specifically means. I don’t doubt that there is an appetite for more measures coming from the likes of Whitty and his colleagues. Is this because they are control freaks, power hungry or worst of all secretly fascist? I find that distinctly unlikely and worth us remembering that it’s a great human failing to attribute the worst motives to people we disagree with doubly so at a time of stress or misery.
Sean Fear has suggested that the relationship between the government and Whitty et all was like that between the government and the military in times of war. That’s true and ultimately it is up for the government to decide because advisers only advise. Commanders often have much sympathy with their frontline troops and I suspect Whitty is no different. Clearly the last two years have been a huge burden on health service staff and here we are again asking them to make another big commitment. Not that January is ever an easy month for them of course. I can understand why Whitty would want to minimise the burden on his staff but ultimately it is not for the government to prioritise the staff of the health service above everything else. It is this I suspect that might explain the ‘enthusiasm’ for stringent control measures right now.
One other thing. Dr John Campbell made the point yesterday that hospital staff can be a rather superstitious bunch. Don’t say things are going quite well or better than expected for fear of tempting fate. Sports fans will be familiar with the curse of the commentator, say some is batting really well he’s never getting out, or such and such never serves a double fault and you know what is likely to happen next. Well maybe not but people avoid doing it anyway. I imagine that the pandemic has taken it’s toll on all the government’s advisers. I can understand why if you think you have continually been surprised on the downside with regards to covid it would be difficult to accept any good news that comes along. Omicron looks less severe? Let’s not get our hopes up or tempt fate. There’s a lot of shame (shaming?) in false optimism that gets corrected by events so it’s easier to focus on the negatives. I’ll risk it and be cautiously optimistic.
Out of curiosity how has John Campbell got such a profile? Ive seen a few bits of his stuff and he appears somewhat normal which is maybe why hes got the profile...
He left medicine for medical teaching, and clearly he’s a very good teacher. When he’s communicating the conclusions of others, he’s excellent value, and has achieved a lot in helping to spread informed medical opinion to the wider public.
The risk is those (so far few) occasions when he slips his own opinions into the analysis. Since there’s no objective reason to conclude that he has any particular skill at analysing the situation.
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
The panic, hysteria and delusion is predominantly coming from the "mad scientists gonna lock us down forever cos they luv it" brigade.
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
On the whole I prefer to live than to die. Humans are conditioned that way.
I would also say, despite giving Johnson a hard time, we have as the human race handled this pandemic better than any previous one of similar severity. Would you really swap Covid for the Black Death?
Similar severity? Do you have the first idea what the CFR of the Black Death was?
"The median delay (lag) between symptom onset and hospital admission varies between 1 and 6.7 days depending on age and whether the patient lives in a nursing home."
Let us make a reasonable assumption, which is that the 1 day lag applies to the frail elderly and most Covid hospital admissions will be much closer to 7 days after symptomatic infection.
We also know that recorded cases, many of which must logically be the result of people taking tests after the onset of symptomatic infection, really started to take off on December 13th.
If hospitalisations are going to start following the same steep trajectory as cases in the Omicron wave, it seems reasonable to assume that we are, therefore, likely to see the first evidence for this in the next couple of days.
Should the admissions data from Monday and Tuesday look alarming, we may be treated to another No.10 press conference on Wednesday...
except hospital admission data is currently for December 13th
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
On the whole I prefer to live than to die. Humans are conditioned that way.
I would also say, despite giving Johnson a hard time, we have as the human race handled this pandemic better than any previous one of similar severity. Would you really swap Covid for the Black Death?
I don't think we could cope with the equivalent of the Black Death.
Imagine, 22 million people dying over the course of 18 months. You wouldn't even be able to find enough people to sing off the death certificates. Medieval people were much closer to sources of food than we are, so we'd face mass starvation, in addition to pestilence.
"The median delay (lag) between symptom onset and hospital admission varies between 1 and 6.7 days depending on age and whether the patient lives in a nursing home."
Let us make a reasonable assumption, which is that the 1 day lag applies to the frail elderly and most Covid hospital admissions will be much closer to 7 days after symptomatic infection.
We also know that recorded cases, many of which must logically be the result of people taking tests after the onset of symptomatic infection, really started to take off on December 13th.
If hospitalisations are going to start following the same steep trajectory as cases in the Omicron wave, it seems reasonable to assume that we are, therefore, likely to see the first evidence for this in the next couple of days.
Should the admissions data from Monday and Tuesday look alarming, we may be treated to another No.10 press conference on Wednesday...
except hospital admission data is currently for December 13th
That's what we can see from the collated data on the dashboard, but it's a reasonable assumption that ministers have information (even if not complete from all NHS trusts) that is rather more recent than that.
Should the admissions data to which Sajid Javid has access for the early part of the coming week look sufficiently alarming, that's the point at which more emergency levers may start to be pulled.
"An important point. Chairman of Sage modellers presumes someone else in gvt is modelling the economic and social harm of a new lockdown. But no one is (and that’s not his fault).
"How can ministers decide how to “balance the harms” if they’re only given one side of the story?"
It's the same point I made last night. The government is like a big corporation wondering whether to launch a risky new product. They bring in their advisors, and all they ask the advisors is: what is the downside of launching this, how bad can it get?
They then get a series of forecasts ranging from "big loss" to "total bankruptcy"
They don't ever ask the other side of the question, what is the upside, how good can it be, which might get the answers "huge profit" to "global domination". They never hear the possible positives
So this corporation always errs on the side of caution, never innovates, and becomes Pan Am, Kodak or Nokia
If that is true, then surely it is Rishi's responsibility as CoE to ensure the Treasury is modeling the options? Black eye for a future PM wannabe.
Apparently the Treasury DID do this last winter - model the social/economic downsides of lockdown, but they got a terrific roasting for "valuing money over life" (completely absurd of course) and now they are all too scared to even mention it
We are so badly governed it is beyond belief. I for one cannot wait until GPT6 or the Aliens simply take over
The reality behind Covid isn't too difficult to percieve: essentially; mass panic, hysteria and delusion. In such an atmosphere it is foolish to even try and engage in such discussion. It just feeds off a 21st century western obsession with safety. The impulse to prevent avoidable death is overwhelming. So society will destroy itself, in trying to keep itself safe.
The panic, hysteria and delusion is predominantly coming from the "mad scientists gonna lock us down forever cos they luv it" brigade.
I don't believe the boffins are "mad", but it has to be asked why SAGE & Co are so relentlessly and wrongly pessimistic, time and again, and so eager for lockdown. It is a legitimate and important question
Always relentlessly and wrongly pessimistic?
Well, if you only take the most pessimistic ones in isolation, have them misrepresented so that the central projection is called "the optimistic scenario," the one that's on there as "We can't exclude this because Scotland followed this trajectory" is "the central scenario," and the one that's "This would be implausibly bad unless we had mega-waning and/or a really bad variant unexpectedly crop up" is "the pessimistic scenario."
All curated through a media that relies on desperate attention-seeking and not understanding what's going on, plus commentators who's entire theme is "If the modellers say something bad we could have more restrictions, so discredit them and mock them."
And then we see comprehensive bedwetting and conspiracy theories that they're all fascists, they hate freedom and us, and they are desperate to lock us down because they like lockdowns, aren't they evil.
I had gone through the models and come up with a pretty optimistic place, but, hey, why bother presenting that? I'd be totally out of tune with the atmosphere here, wouldn't I?
Maybe I should just find a tweet from someone on the antivaxxer/conspiracy theorist Hart group, like David Paton, or Claire Craig and present that instead.
I believe you are correct, and I chuckled at the comment down thread labelling him a "right wing strategist". I suppose we are all Tories now.
Problem is I think evidence exists that will show that what is being said is correct.
Remember that during the 2015 Labour leadership election, Corbyn was repeatedly asked whether he condemned murders by the IRA but refused to answer, saying only: 'I condemn what was done by the British Army as well as the other sides.'
and all 4 murders from 1979 to 1990 were by the IRA...
"The median delay (lag) between symptom onset and hospital admission varies between 1 and 6.7 days depending on age and whether the patient lives in a nursing home."
Let us make a reasonable assumption, which is that the 1 day lag applies to the frail elderly and most Covid hospital admissions will be much closer to 7 days after symptomatic infection.
We also know that recorded cases, many of which must logically be the result of people taking tests after the onset of symptomatic infection, really started to take off on December 13th.
If hospitalisations are going to start following the same steep trajectory as cases in the Omicron wave, it seems reasonable to assume that we are, therefore, likely to see the first evidence for this in the next couple of days.
Should the admissions data from Monday and Tuesday look alarming, we may be treated to another No.10 press conference on Wednesday...
Complicated a bit by the recent rise in Delta cases especially in London. Hopefully Delta will quickly get wiped out by Omicron but it’s not happening yet.
All things being equal I’d expect London to do worse than the rest of the country because vaccination rates are lower, though our natural infection levels may compensate for that.
I believe you are correct, and I chuckled at the comment down thread labelling him a "right wing strategist". I suppose we are all Tories now.
Problem is I think evidence exists that will show that what is being said is correct.
Remember that during the 2015 Labour leadership election, Corbyn was repeatedly asked whether he condemned murders by the IRA but refused to answer, saying only: 'I condemn what was done by the British Army as well as the other sides.'
and all 4 murders from 1979 to 1990 were by the IRA...
Assuming you are talking about @ExStrategist - yes it is.
Oh dear could be in for a costly legal bill if anyone dobs in him.
Corbyn has form at setting his lawyers on people who make defamatory comments such as that one
If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website, where others’ money is at stake.
Which isn’t to say that Starmer is necessarily a winner. Labour is gambling a lot on presenting a leader with few obvious positives and hoping that voters’ revulsion at the Tories’ negatives is sufficient to gift them a bit of power. Most probably tempered by the necessity to be extraordinarily nice to either the SNP and/or the LibDems.
That’s the real world. In another universe, Corbyn is entering his second term and ramping up the wealth tax cheered on by you and me. Sadly, we are condemned to live in this universe, where his brother has just been arrested for inciting arson.
"The median delay (lag) between symptom onset and hospital admission varies between 1 and 6.7 days depending on age and whether the patient lives in a nursing home."
Let us make a reasonable assumption, which is that the 1 day lag applies to the frail elderly and most Covid hospital admissions will be much closer to 7 days after symptomatic infection.
We also know that recorded cases, many of which must logically be the result of people taking tests after the onset of symptomatic infection, really started to take off on December 13th.
If hospitalisations are going to start following the same steep trajectory as cases in the Omicron wave, it seems reasonable to assume that we are, therefore, likely to see the first evidence for this in the next couple of days.
Should the admissions data from Monday and Tuesday look alarming, we may be treated to another No.10 press conference on Wednesday...
except hospital admission data is currently for December 13th
That's because scotland gives very lagged admissions data.
If you split by nation England admission go to more recently as does total currently in hospital.
- Cases. Moving up, London soaring away - Admissions. Still loving up slightly overall, strongly in London. - Deaths - flat.
Looks to my optimistic eye that cases have stopped exponentiating already. Clearly WoW figures still huge, but in the exponential phase that's always true and you have to look even shorter-term, lumpy and unreliable though that data is. I know Sunday figures are normally a bit lower than Saturday's so let's not get too excited about the day on day fall - but if cases were accelerating away as fast as they were a few days ago we wouldn't see that drop. Let's also caveat with too early to tell, and that this isn't a single wave but the sum of lots of little waves - could be that London has peaked bu the surge in the rest of the country has yet to start. But even that would be better news than we have been accustomed to this past week.
Before I stomp off in a huff, I may as well drop in what I did see when I actually read the papers.
We know, from what was said, that SAGE and SPI-M-O were asked, basically: "If things do unfold badly, what will the signs be, how will we see it coming, what sort of things could happen, and what could we do against it? And when should we do it if that happens?"
The answer was: There's a lot we don't know, including, importantly, how immune evasive Omicron is, how good the boosters will or will not be, and we don't know about severity of Omicron. So we'll provide a bunch of scenarios based on that immunity question and set the default on severity as "no change" but call that out up front.
[after all, there's a simple method called "multiply by a constant" for a severity change]
The outcomes projected (under severity=1 and the combinations of efficacy and immune escape) were this:
As the assumptions were presented up front, and with information that's come in since 11 Dec, we know that booster efficacy is "high" and immune escape (for the purposes of these projections) is between "low" and "high" with a tendency towards low FOR INFECTION and it's looking more and more like "low" for admissions and deaths.
So we get this:
We also have more and more indications of lower severity (albeit not fully proven and still with some ambiguity), so we can see the admissions and deaths as being worst-case levels at 100% and could easily be a fraction of those (the specific fraction being to be established). And that admission levels may have less impact than before if hospitalisation durations and the fraction going to ICU are significantly lower (which is also becoming more indicated. I note Whitty emphasised that recently).
All of which looks pretty positive to me at the moment. Hard to put in a juicy attention-seeking headline, so not really suitable for the media, though - but I did notice that Whitty had been reported as wanting to wait until after Christmas for more data before deciding on any further restrictions. And, unlike the politicians, we know he has a grasp of exponential growth and will fully understand that the question is "Now or never?"
Which indicates he's all in on the above scenario plus lower severity. Because if you're not all in on that, you pretty much have to go "lockdown now."
Plus we have that South Africa seem to be topping out on cases even earlier, which might be that Omicron burns through the susceptible really fast and can't get much further, for whatever reason. If so, then cases levels may well top out a lot lower than the above, which also feeds through to the hospital admissions and deaths being yet lower.
Again, not certain - especially not in a different demographic and conditions - but another genuine potential positive.
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
Religion has little to do with it, of course.
We are not exposed to death on a regular basis the way previous generations were. When life was "nasty, brutish and short", death was a part of life. Siblings, friends, parents - all died while most people were still young.
Those generations who experienced the privations of war saw death up close on the home front from German bombs and later rockets and of course more people in the Armed Forces meant more people knew someone who was serving somewhere.
Nowadays, it's the old who see death among their contemporaries as their circles of friends and acquaintances diminish. The other side is most people haven't a clue what to do when someone dies - we are not educated in death, arguably it's one of the last taboos. I remember this from when my father passed away - I literally did not know what to do.
We should recognise there is a whole industry of death which works under the radar and often under very difficult circumstances.
I have a facebook friend who is a vicar. He is very interesting on the suject of death - not least because, societally, it is a subject we barely address at all. He takes a religious perspective, of course, but most of what he says on the subject works just as well without having any belief whatsoever. He also posts a lot of insanely woke shite which just makes me shake my head in disbelief. The sort of stuff which first year undergraduates would think twice before sharing. I know his job is to lead, not simply reflect, views of parishioners, but I can't imagine his views are anywhere near those of his mostly elderly, northern, working class and/or immigrant congregation.
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
Religion has little to do with it, of course.
We are not exposed to death on a regular basis the way previous generations were. When life was "nasty, brutish and short", death was a part of life. Siblings, friends, parents - all died while most people were still young.
Those generations who experienced the privations of war saw death up close on the home front from German bombs and later rockets and of course more people in the Armed Forces meant more people knew someone who was serving somewhere.
Nowadays, it's the old who see death among their contemporaries as their circles of friends and acquaintances diminish. The other side is most people haven't a clue what to do when someone dies - we are not educated in death, arguably it's one of the last taboos. I remember this from when my father passed away - I literally did not know what to do.
We should recognise there is a whole industry of death which works under the radar and often under very difficult circumstances.
I have a facebook friend who is a vicar. He is very interesting on the suject of death - not least because, societally, it is a subject we barely address at all. He takes a religious perspective, of course, but most of what he says on the subject works just as well without having any belief whatsoever. He also posts a lot of insanely woke shite which just makes me shake my head in disbelief. The sort of stuff which first year undergraduates would think twice before sharing. I know his job is to lead, not simply reflect, views of parishioners, but I can't imagine his views are anywhere near those of his mostly elderly, northern, working class and/or immigrant congregation.
If his views were closer to the mainstream he wouldn’t have chosen to waste his life doing something so essentially useless.
P.S. The thing that probably spooked the politicians was the scientists and modellers explaining that by the time you could tell which trajectory you were on from the cases and admissions numbers, it would already be way too late to decide to impose restrictions. You're on the coaster now, and the effects are already baked in by then.
That's why we're seeing the various leaks and stuff from the internal discussions of "Do we go all in or not?"
Because for all the stuff that it looks as though it's probably less on the hospitalisation rates and durations - there have been occasional signs the other way, and it's by no means certain.
So if you go for caution, you are more likely than not blowing away Christmas unnecessarily and damaging a lot of businesses. And if you don't, there is still a fairly chunky chance you've guessed wrong whilst going all in on the pot and throwing it all away at the last moment.
Not an easy choice to make, and that's why the ones on the periphery or the ones who have the strongest views are blowing off steam into the media, or those on the outside are reading the tea leaves and wondering if there's a big black dog coming down the road or if those leaves are just clumping up there.
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
Religion has little to do with it, of course.
We are not exposed to death on a regular basis the way previous generations were. When life was "nasty, brutish and short", death was a part of life. Siblings, friends, parents - all died while most people were still young.
Those generations who experienced the privations of war saw death up close on the home front from German bombs and later rockets and of course more people in the Armed Forces meant more people knew someone who was serving somewhere.
Nowadays, it's the old who see death among their contemporaries as their circles of friends and acquaintances diminish. The other side is most people haven't a clue what to do when someone dies - we are not educated in death, arguably it's one of the last taboos. I remember this from when my father passed away - I literally did not know what to do.
We should recognise there is a whole industry of death which works under the radar and often under very difficult circumstances.
I have a facebook friend who is a vicar. He is very interesting on the suject of death - not least because, societally, it is a subject we barely address at all. He takes a religious perspective, of course, but most of what he says on the subject works just as well without having any belief whatsoever. He also posts a lot of insanely woke shite which just makes me shake my head in disbelief. The sort of stuff which first year undergraduates would think twice before sharing. I know his job is to lead, not simply reflect, views of parishioners, but I can't imagine his views are anywhere near those of his mostly elderly, northern, working class and/or immigrant congregation.
What is this "woke shite" he says? Honour thy father and mother? Do not covet they neighbours goods?, thou shalt not commit adultery?
P.S. The thing that probably spooked the politicians was the scientists and modellers explaining that by the time you could tell which trajectory you were on from the cases and admissions numbers, it would already be way too late to decide to impose restrictions. You're on the coaster now, and the effects are already baked in by then.
That's why we're seeing the various leaks and stuff from the internal discussions of "Do we go all in or not?"
Because for all the stuff that it looks as though it's probably less on the hospitalisation rates and durations - there have been occasional signs the other way, and it's by no means certain.
So if you go for caution, you are more likely than not blowing away Christmas unnecessarily and damaging a lot of businesses. And if you don't, there is still a fairly chunky chance you've guessed wrong whilst going all in on the pot and throwing it all away at the last moment.
Not an easy choice to make, and that's why the ones on the periphery or the ones who have the strongest views are blowing off steam into the media, or those on the outside are reading the tea leaves and wondering if there's a big black dog coming down the road or if those leaves are just clumping up there.
P.S. The thing that probably spooked the politicians was the scientists and modellers explaining that by the time you could tell which trajectory you were on from the cases and admissions numbers, it would already be way too late to decide to impose restrictions. You're on the coaster now, and the effects are already baked in by then.
That's why we're seeing the various leaks and stuff from the internal discussions of "Do we go all in or not?"
Because for all the stuff that it looks as though it's probably less on the hospitalisation rates and durations - there have been occasional signs the other way, and it's by no means certain.
So if you go for caution, you are more likely than not blowing away Christmas unnecessarily and damaging a lot of businesses. And if you don't, there is still a fairly chunky chance you've guessed wrong whilst going all in on the pot and throwing it all away at the last moment.
Not an easy choice to make, and that's why the ones on the periphery or the ones who have the strongest views are blowing off steam into the media, or those on the outside are reading the tea leaves and wondering if there's a big black dog coming down the road or if those leaves are just clumping up there.
Very fair points. Easy for us on here to know what the right thing to do is when ultimately all that's at stake is being wrong in the eyes of some other people who don't even know who we are.
On another subject, 986,000 jabs delivered yesterday (including 1st and 2nd jabs). A new record. I forecast 1 million plus yesterday morning based on my own very narrow snapshot - not quite, but pretty satisfying effort nonetheless.
Assuming you are talking about @ExStrategist - yes it is.
Oh dear could be in for a costly legal bill if anyone dobs in him.
Corbyn has form at setting his lawyers on people who make defamatory comments such as that one
If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website, where others’ money is at stake.
Which isn’t to say that Starmer is necessarily a winner. Labour is gambling a lot on presenting a leader with few obvious positives and hoping that voters’ revulsion at the Tories’ negatives is sufficient to gift them a bit of power. Most probably tempered by the necessity to be extraordinarily nice to either the SNP and/or the LibDems.
That’s the real world. In another universe, Corbyn is entering his second term and ramping up the wealth tax cheered on by you and me. Sadly, we are condemned to live in this universe, where his brother has just been arrested for inciting arson.
A poster whose real ID was outed on PB some years ago just posted "Corbyn supported the murder of every MP who was killed in his lifetime up until Jo Cox. All four"
That is what i was talking about I have no idea where your comment If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website comes from but it is completely irrelevant to what I was commenting on.
BTW the 2017 result does not support Corbyn was never going to win comment either in my view, and if we ever get the Forde report that might become even more obvious
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
Religion has little to do with it, of course.
We are not exposed to death on a regular basis the way previous generations were. When life was "nasty, brutish and short", death was a part of life. Siblings, friends, parents - all died while most people were still young.
Those generations who experienced the privations of war saw death up close on the home front from German bombs and later rockets and of course more people in the Armed Forces meant more people knew someone who was serving somewhere.
Nowadays, it's the old who see death among their contemporaries as their circles of friends and acquaintances diminish. The other side is most people haven't a clue what to do when someone dies - we are not educated in death, arguably it's one of the last taboos. I remember this from when my father passed away - I literally did not know what to do.
We should recognise there is a whole industry of death which works under the radar and often under very difficult circumstances.
I have a facebook friend who is a vicar. He is very interesting on the suject of death - not least because, societally, it is a subject we barely address at all. He takes a religious perspective, of course, but most of what he says on the subject works just as well without having any belief whatsoever. He also posts a lot of insanely woke shite which just makes me shake my head in disbelief. The sort of stuff which first year undergraduates would think twice before sharing. I know his job is to lead, not simply reflect, views of parishioners, but I can't imagine his views are anywhere near those of his mostly elderly, northern, working class and/or immigrant congregation.
What is this "woke shite" he says? Honour thy father and mother? Do not covet they neighbours goods?, thou shalt not commit adultery?
Very little of that - mostly about the inherent evils of being white or male or British or all three, or the virtue of being transsexual. The usual tropes of the Titania McGrath lot. In person, he is exactly what you would expect from a vicar. People's internet personas are off things.
Assuming you are talking about @ExStrategist - yes it is.
Oh dear could be in for a costly legal bill if anyone dobs in him.
Corbyn has form at setting his lawyers on people who make defamatory comments such as that one
If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website, where others’ money is at stake.
Which isn’t to say that Starmer is necessarily a winner. Labour is gambling a lot on presenting a leader with few obvious positives and hoping that voters’ revulsion at the Tories’ negatives is sufficient to gift them a bit of power. Most probably tempered by the necessity to be extraordinarily nice to either the SNP and/or the LibDems.
That’s the real world. In another universe, Corbyn is entering his second term and ramping up the wealth tax cheered on by you and me. Sadly, we are condemned to live in this universe, where his brother has just been arrested for inciting arson.
A poster whose real ID was outed on PB some years ago just posted "Corbyn supported the murder of every MP who was killed in his lifetime up until Jo Cox. All four"
That is what i was talking about I have no idea where your comment If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website comes from but it is completely irrelevant to what I was commenting on.
BTW the 2017 result does not support Corbyn was never going to win comment either in my view, and if we ever get the Forde report that might become even more obvious
The Forde report? As if anyone gives a shit about that. OK, *some* still do, but seemingly most of those are no longer party members.
new research published by Warwick University that examined population movements between 346 local authorities from 2002-2015. It turns out there are significantly more moves between areas with similar political preferences
I believe you are correct, and I chuckled at the comment down thread labelling him a "right wing strategist". I suppose we are all Tories now.
Problem is I think evidence exists that will show that what is being said is correct.
Remember that during the 2015 Labour leadership election, Corbyn was repeatedly asked whether he condemned murders by the IRA but refused to answer, saying only: 'I condemn what was done by the British Army as well as the other sides.'
and all 4 murders from 1979 to 1990 were by the IRA...
Not nearly the same thing as “supporting”
Plus he said he condemned all murders on both sides so doesnt sound like Tims comment is defensible in law to me.
I expect the biggest problem is ministers asking questions of scientists they simply can't know the answers too, being given a range of modelled scenarios with unknown confidences based on what they asked, and then doing the politician thing of claiming knowledge they simply don't have.
Javid's "There are 200,000 Omicron cases" was an absolute classic of the genre.
P.S. The thing that probably spooked the politicians was the scientists and modellers explaining that by the time you could tell which trajectory you were on from the cases and admissions numbers, it would already be way too late to decide to impose restrictions. You're on the coaster now, and the effects are already baked in by then.
That's why we're seeing the various leaks and stuff from the internal discussions of "Do we go all in or not?"
Because for all the stuff that it looks as though it's probably less on the hospitalisation rates and durations - there have been occasional signs the other way, and it's by no means certain.
So if you go for caution, you are more likely than not blowing away Christmas unnecessarily and damaging a lot of businesses. And if you don't, there is still a fairly chunky chance you've guessed wrong whilst going all in on the pot and throwing it all away at the last moment.
Not an easy choice to make, and that's why the ones on the periphery or the ones who have the strongest views are blowing off steam into the media, or those on the outside are reading the tea leaves and wondering if there's a big black dog coming down the road or if those leaves are just clumping up there.
Paul Mainwood - a sensible commentator, remarked that he is glad he's not the one taking these decisions...
I believe you are correct, and I chuckled at the comment down thread labelling him a "right wing strategist". I suppose we are all Tories now.
Problem is I think evidence exists that will show that what is being said is correct.
Remember that during the 2015 Labour leadership election, Corbyn was repeatedly asked whether he condemned murders by the IRA but refused to answer, saying only: 'I condemn what was done by the British Army as well as the other sides.'
and all 4 murders from 1979 to 1990 were by the IRA...
Not nearly the same thing as “supporting”
Maybe then Corbyn shouldnt have hung out with Sinn Fein as his mates when they were advocating an armed strategy. Kind of helpful if he didnt want to be seen as supportive. It failed, thus joining the long list of things that Jeremy there associated with that failed.
Assuming you are talking about @ExStrategist - yes it is.
Oh dear could be in for a costly legal bill if anyone dobs in him.
Corbyn has form at setting his lawyers on people who make defamatory comments such as that one
If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website, where others’ money is at stake.
Which isn’t to say that Starmer is necessarily a winner. Labour is gambling a lot on presenting a leader with few obvious positives and hoping that voters’ revulsion at the Tories’ negatives is sufficient to gift them a bit of power. Most probably tempered by the necessity to be extraordinarily nice to either the SNP and/or the LibDems.
That’s the real world. In another universe, Corbyn is entering his second term and ramping up the wealth tax cheered on by you and me. Sadly, we are condemned to live in this universe, where his brother has just been arrested for inciting arson.
A poster whose real ID was outed on PB some years ago just posted "Corbyn supported the murder of every MP who was killed in his lifetime up until Jo Cox. All four"
That is what i was talking about I have no idea where your comment If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website comes from but it is completely irrelevant to what I was commenting on.
BTW the 2017 result does not support Corbyn was never going to win comment either in my view, and if we ever get the Forde report that might become even more obvious
It doesn’t really matter since, possibly sadly, I doubt that the question of anti-semitism had very much to do with Corbyn’s failure to defeat the Tories in either 2017 or 2019.
The mystery of left-wing Labour, for me, is that they want to behave in a way that would only work if we already had PR, whilst typically being among its most vocal opponents.
Assuming you are talking about @ExStrategist - yes it is.
Oh dear could be in for a costly legal bill if anyone dobs in him.
Corbyn has form at setting his lawyers on people who make defamatory comments such as that one
If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website, where others’ money is at stake.
Which isn’t to say that Starmer is necessarily a winner. Labour is gambling a lot on presenting a leader with few obvious positives and hoping that voters’ revulsion at the Tories’ negatives is sufficient to gift them a bit of power. Most probably tempered by the necessity to be extraordinarily nice to either the SNP and/or the LibDems.
That’s the real world. In another universe, Corbyn is entering his second term and ramping up the wealth tax cheered on by you and me. Sadly, we are condemned to live in this universe, where his brother has just been arrested for inciting arson.
A poster whose real ID was outed on PB some years ago just posted "Corbyn supported the murder of every MP who was killed in his lifetime up until Jo Cox. All four"
That is what i was talking about I have no idea where your comment If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website comes from but it is completely irrelevant to what I was commenting on.
BTW the 2017 result does not support Corbyn was never going to win comment either in my view, and if we ever get the Forde report that might become even more obvious
The Forde report? As if anyone gives a shit about that. OK, *some* still do, but seemingly most of those are no longer party members.
Well your comment is true. Same as mine. Tims not so much.
I believe you are correct, and I chuckled at the comment down thread labelling him a "right wing strategist". I suppose we are all Tories now.
Problem is I think evidence exists that will show that what is being said is correct.
Remember that during the 2015 Labour leadership election, Corbyn was repeatedly asked whether he condemned murders by the IRA but refused to answer, saying only: 'I condemn what was done by the British Army as well as the other sides.'
and all 4 murders from 1979 to 1990 were by the IRA...
Not nearly the same thing as “supporting”
Plus he said he condemned all murders on both sides so doesnt sound like Tims comment is defensible in law to me.
Perhaps we will see.
I do not for a second think that Corbyn supports murder of any MPs by anybody. But it would make for a fascinating court case. That he has associated himself with terrorists and terror groups for decades would come out, his wreath-laying for dead terrorists etc etc etc - it would all be laundered.
So why would Jezbollah put himself through all that?
Yes. There is also a problem in how we cope with death in a post-religious society. In a word, we don't. Without the solace of an afterlife, we refuse to contemplate the reality of death -
eg look at just how many people die every year. In Britain that is 600,000. 50,000 every month on average, but of course much more in the winter. How many are aware of this, or think about it? Vanishingly few. It is death.. It is too bleak. Turn on Strictly.
If we had more awareness of mortality we might be less frightened of it, and thus able to deal with things like pandemics a lot better
Religion has little to do with it, of course.
We are not exposed to death on a regular basis the way previous generations were. When life was "nasty, brutish and short", death was a part of life. Siblings, friends, parents - all died while most people were still young.
Those generations who experienced the privations of war saw death up close on the home front from German bombs and later rockets and of course more people in the Armed Forces meant more people knew someone who was serving somewhere.
Nowadays, it's the old who see death among their contemporaries as their circles of friends and acquaintances diminish. The other side is most people haven't a clue what to do when someone dies - we are not educated in death, arguably it's one of the last taboos. I remember this from when my father passed away - I literally did not know what to do.
We should recognise there is a whole industry of death which works under the radar and often under very difficult circumstances.
I have a facebook friend who is a vicar. He is very interesting on the suject of death - not least because, societally, it is a subject we barely address at all. He takes a religious perspective, of course, but most of what he says on the subject works just as well without having any belief whatsoever. He also posts a lot of insanely woke shite which just makes me shake my head in disbelief. The sort of stuff which first year undergraduates would think twice before sharing. I know his job is to lead, not simply reflect, views of parishioners, but I can't imagine his views are anywhere near those of his mostly elderly, northern, working class and/or immigrant congregation.
What is this "woke shite" he says? Honour thy father and mother? Do not covet they neighbours goods?, thou shalt not commit adultery?
What? Why would anyone think that anyone would think that a garbled Commandment or two was woke?
Reading that emoji as "vapid bilge" always works for me.
Assuming you are talking about @ExStrategist - yes it is.
Oh dear could be in for a costly legal bill if anyone dobs in him.
Corbyn has form at setting his lawyers on people who make defamatory comments such as that one
If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website, where others’ money is at stake.
Which isn’t to say that Starmer is necessarily a winner. Labour is gambling a lot on presenting a leader with few obvious positives and hoping that voters’ revulsion at the Tories’ negatives is sufficient to gift them a bit of power. Most probably tempered by the necessity to be extraordinarily nice to either the SNP and/or the LibDems.
That’s the real world. In another universe, Corbyn is entering his second term and ramping up the wealth tax cheered on by you and me. Sadly, we are condemned to live in this universe, where his brother has just been arrested for inciting arson.
A poster whose real ID was outed on PB some years ago just posted "Corbyn supported the murder of every MP who was killed in his lifetime up until Jo Cox. All four"
That is what i was talking about I have no idea where your comment If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website comes from but it is completely irrelevant to what I was commenting on.
BTW the 2017 result does not support Corbyn was never going to win comment either in my view, and if we ever get the Forde report that might become even more obvious
I'm sure we did this ad nauseum during the actual Corbyn years, and I sure as hell don't miss it, but here goes for old times' sake:
Jeremy Corbyn was accused of ‘appalling’ conduct yesterday after it emerged he had been arrested in 1986 for joining a pro-IRA protest.
The Labour leader had attended a picket outside the Old Bailey to ‘show solidarity’ with accused terrorists, including the Brighton bomber.
His support wasn't quite as vocal as his Shadow Home Secretary, who famously declared "Every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us", which must presumably include dead MPs, but I think there's still more than enough on the record from Corbyn himself to render that statement non-defamatory.
I see that Morrisons are selling pork fillets at £6/kg.
Weren't we promised a shortage of pork because all the pigs were going to be culled.
Meanwhile there are mounds of British carrots being flogged at 19p/kg.
Ditto British parsnips, cabbages, swede and doubtless others things we were told had rotted in the fields.
You do understand what all those cancelled Christmas dinners means don't you?
Absolute fucktons of large packs of everything to flood the market. Again.
Fun how everything can give us an angle to blame Boris. Low prices? Boris's fault! High wages? Boris's fault! I'm no fan of the man, but some things just don't call for blame.
P.S. The thing that probably spooked the politicians was the scientists and modellers explaining that by the time you could tell which trajectory you were on from the cases and admissions numbers, it would already be way too late to decide to impose restrictions. You're on the coaster now, and the effects are already baked in by then.
That's why we're seeing the various leaks and stuff from the internal discussions of "Do we go all in or not?"
Because for all the stuff that it looks as though it's probably less on the hospitalisation rates and durations - there have been occasional signs the other way, and it's by no means certain.
So if you go for caution, you are more likely than not blowing away Christmas unnecessarily and damaging a lot of businesses. And if you don't, there is still a fairly chunky chance you've guessed wrong whilst going all in on the pot and throwing it all away at the last moment.
Not an easy choice to make, and that's why the ones on the periphery or the ones who have the strongest views are blowing off steam into the media, or those on the outside are reading the tea leaves and wondering if there's a big black dog coming down the road or if those leaves are just clumping up there.
A difference is that in the lockdowns we weren't vaccinating huge numbers while cases increased.
Tomorrow there will be 50% of over 12s who have been triple vaccinated.
Assuming you are talking about @ExStrategist - yes it is.
Oh dear could be in for a costly legal bill if anyone dobs in him.
Corbyn has form at setting his lawyers on people who make defamatory comments such as that one
I don't think he'd want to try and prove that was defamatory. The Streisand effect applies...
He will and has the resources to do so
Really? How does a man who was bankrupted not so many years ago and has no source of income beyond his earnings as an MP have so much money?
Not bankrupted, that google knows about anyway.
He may not have been formally bankrupted, but his house was repossessed and his possessions forfeited to his creditors. He may have gone into a voluntary arrangement.
The gallant Burn-Murdoch quite righty highlighting the very many women who are improving our understanding of COVID after a frankly embarrassing article in one of the Sundays on "the dishy men who are informing us about COVID"
Comments
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2504
A big piece of science is saying "We don't know. The gaps in our knowledge are X, Y and Z".
I am not sure what you are trying to prove with these posts except that you are both ignorant and snarky. Not a good combination.
We are not exposed to death on a regular basis the way previous generations were. When life was "nasty, brutish and short", death was a part of life. Siblings, friends, parents - all died while most people were still young.
Those generations who experienced the privations of war saw death up close on the home front from German bombs and later rockets and of course more people in the Armed Forces meant more people knew someone who was serving somewhere.
Nowadays, it's the old who see death among their contemporaries as their circles of friends and acquaintances diminish. The other side is most people haven't a clue what to do when someone dies - we are not educated in death, arguably it's one of the last taboos. I remember this from when my father passed away - I literally did not know what to do.
We should recognise there is a whole industry of death which works under the radar and often under very difficult circumstances.
https://twitter.com/KevinPascoe/status/1472484644591484928
I sage
You rosemary
Covid thyme
However I do now have Covid. Very mild symptoms so far, hope it stays that way.
Also: although I don't agree with everything he says, he presents information in a much better way than 99% of the mainstream media journalists.
It's like someone who started a small channel on repairs of concrete and steel structures, who did not have that many followers until Champlain Towers collapsed earlier this year. Since then he's provided invaluable input into the collapse and his subscribers have jumped - although not as much as he deserves.
Ice Age.
More seriously, hope it is all ok.
I thought this was a betting site where people understood things like probability, life tables etc.
What's offensive about 'Franny' by the way?
Sorry to be morbid but predictions when it comes to medicine and science with so many variables is difficult.
Going back to our scientists and Covid, they saved many lives in my eyes even if their modelling may have looked at the worst case scenarios. We have fared better than a lot of countries out there, each death is a tragedy for families who have lost loved ones due to this horrible bug but the toll could have been so much worse.
Over what period? Since COVID? That is not the data I've heard for the US.
The first two doesn't really matter if they are true or not, there is zero risk. Ivermectin is definitely dodgy ground and the flawed vaccination technique could be spun by antivaxxers.
I would also say, despite giving Johnson a hard time, we have as the human race handled this pandemic better than any previous one of similar severity. Would you really swap Covid for the Black Death?
I thought it possible they were just needing a bit of a nudge to say something useful.
But I was wrong. They're just nuts. And not in a pleasant way either.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/deathsfromsuicidethatoccurredinenglandandwales/aprilandjuly2020
Couldn't immediately find more recent data.
"The median delay (lag) between symptom onset and hospital admission varies between 1 and 6.7 days depending on age and whether the patient lives in a nursing home."
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveytechnicalarticle/wavesandlagsofcovid19inenglandjune2021
Let us make a reasonable assumption, which is that the 1 day lag applies to the frail elderly and most Covid hospital admissions will be much closer to 7 days after symptomatic infection.
We also know that recorded cases, many of which must logically be the result of people taking tests after the onset of symptomatic infection, really started to take off on December 13th.
If hospitalisations are going to start following the same steep trajectory as cases in the Omicron wave, it seems reasonable to assume that we are, therefore, likely to see the first evidence for this in the next couple of days.
Should the admissions data from Monday and Tuesday look alarming, we may be treated to another No.10 press conference on Wednesday...
The risk is those (so far few) occasions when he slips his own opinions into the analysis. Since there’s no objective reason to conclude that he has any particular skill at analysing the situation.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-01096-y
Corbyn has form at setting his lawyers on people who make defamatory comments such as that one
- Cases. Moving up, London soaring away
- Admissions. Still loving up slightly overall, strongly in London.
- Deaths - flat.
Imagine, 22 million people dying over the course of 18 months. You wouldn't even be able to find enough people to sing off the death certificates. Medieval people were much closer to sources of food than we are, so we'd face mass starvation, in addition to pestilence.
Should the admissions data to which Sajid Javid has access for the early part of the coming week look sufficiently alarming, that's the point at which more emergency levers may start to be pulled.
I think it would be down to Tim to prove that what he said is correct
Always relentlessly and wrongly pessimistic?
Well, if you only take the most pessimistic ones in isolation, have them misrepresented so that the central projection is called "the optimistic scenario," the one that's on there as "We can't exclude this because Scotland followed this trajectory" is "the central scenario," and the one that's "This would be implausibly bad unless we had mega-waning and/or a really bad variant unexpectedly crop up" is "the pessimistic scenario."
All curated through a media that relies on desperate attention-seeking and not understanding what's going on, plus commentators who's entire theme is "If the modellers say something bad we could have more restrictions, so discredit them and mock them."
And then we see comprehensive bedwetting and conspiracy theories that they're all fascists, they hate freedom and us, and they are desperate to lock us down because they like lockdowns, aren't they evil.
I had gone through the models and come up with a pretty optimistic place, but, hey, why bother presenting that? I'd be totally out of tune with the atmosphere here, wouldn't I?
Maybe I should just find a tweet from someone on the antivaxxer/conspiracy theorist Hart group, like David Paton, or Claire Craig and present that instead.
Remember that during the 2015 Labour leadership election, Corbyn was repeatedly asked whether he condemned murders by the IRA but refused to answer, saying only: 'I condemn what was done by the British Army as well as the other sides.'
and all 4 murders from 1979 to 1990 were by the IRA...
All things being equal I’d expect London to do worse than the rest of the country because vaccination rates are lower, though our natural infection levels may compensate for that.
Which isn’t to say that Starmer is necessarily a winner. Labour is gambling a lot on presenting a leader with few obvious positives and hoping that voters’ revulsion at the Tories’ negatives is sufficient to gift them a bit of power. Most probably tempered by the necessity to be extraordinarily nice to either the SNP and/or the LibDems.
That’s the real world. In another universe, Corbyn is entering his second term and ramping up the wealth tax cheered on by you and me. Sadly, we are condemned to live in this universe, where his brother has just been arrested for inciting arson.
If you split by nation England admission go to more recently as does total currently in hospital.
Get in.
Let's also caveat with too early to tell, and that this isn't a single wave but the sum of lots of little waves - could be that London has peaked bu the surge in the rest of the country has yet to start. But even that would be better news than we have been accustomed to this past week.
Before I stomp off in a huff, I may as well drop in what I did see when I actually read the papers.
We know, from what was said, that SAGE and SPI-M-O were asked, basically: "If things do unfold badly, what will the signs be, how will we see it coming, what sort of things could happen, and what could we do against it? And when should we do it if that happens?"
The answer was:
There's a lot we don't know, including, importantly, how immune evasive Omicron is, how good the boosters will or will not be, and we don't know about severity of Omicron. So we'll provide a bunch of scenarios based on that immunity question and set the default on severity as "no change" but call that out up front.
[after all, there's a simple method called "multiply by a constant" for a severity change]
The outcomes projected (under severity=1 and the combinations of efficacy and immune escape) were this:
As the assumptions were presented up front, and with information that's come in since 11 Dec, we know that booster efficacy is "high" and immune escape (for the purposes of these projections) is between "low" and "high" with a tendency towards low FOR INFECTION and it's looking more and more like "low" for admissions and deaths.
So we get this:
We also have more and more indications of lower severity (albeit not fully proven and still with some ambiguity), so we can see the admissions and deaths as being worst-case levels at 100% and could easily be a fraction of those (the specific fraction being to be established). And that admission levels may have less impact than before if hospitalisation durations and the fraction going to ICU are significantly lower (which is also becoming more indicated. I note Whitty emphasised that recently).
All of which looks pretty positive to me at the moment. Hard to put in a juicy attention-seeking headline, so not really suitable for the media, though - but I did notice that Whitty had been reported as wanting to wait until after Christmas for more data before deciding on any further restrictions. And, unlike the politicians, we know he has a grasp of exponential growth and will fully understand that the question is "Now or never?"
Which indicates he's all in on the above scenario plus lower severity. Because if you're not all in on that, you pretty much have to go "lockdown now."
Again, not certain - especially not in a different demographic and conditions - but another genuine potential positive.
He is very interesting on the suject of death - not least because, societally, it is a subject we barely address at all. He takes a religious perspective, of course, but most of what he says on the subject works just as well without having any belief whatsoever.
He also posts a lot of insanely woke shite which just makes me shake my head in disbelief. The sort of stuff which first year undergraduates would think twice before sharing. I know his job is to lead, not simply reflect, views of parishioners, but I can't imagine his views are anywhere near those of his mostly elderly, northern, working class and/or immigrant congregation.
That's why we're seeing the various leaks and stuff from the internal discussions of "Do we go all in or not?"
Because for all the stuff that it looks as though it's probably less on the hospitalisation rates and durations - there have been occasional signs the other way, and it's by no means certain.
So if you go for caution, you are more likely than not blowing away Christmas unnecessarily and damaging a lot of businesses.
And if you don't, there is still a fairly chunky chance you've guessed wrong whilst going all in on the pot and throwing it all away at the last moment.
Not an easy choice to make, and that's why the ones on the periphery or the ones who have the strongest views are blowing off steam into the media, or those on the outside are reading the tea leaves and wondering if there's a big black dog coming down the road or if those leaves are just clumping up there.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=region&areaName=London
Easy for us on here to know what the right thing to do is when ultimately all that's at stake is being wrong in the eyes of some other people who don't even know who we are.
On another subject, 986,000 jabs delivered yesterday (including 1st and 2nd jabs). A new record. I forecast 1 million plus yesterday morning based on my own very narrow snapshot - not quite, but pretty satisfying effort nonetheless.
Fear Spurs will pay for their profligacy.
That is what i was talking about I have no idea where your comment If you can’t accept by now that Corbyn was never going to win, you really don’t belong on a betting website comes from but it is completely irrelevant to what I was commenting on.
BTW the 2017 result does not support Corbyn was never going to win comment either in my view, and if we ever get the Forde report that might become even more obvious
In person, he is exactly what you would expect from a vicar. People's internet personas are off things.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/19/ant-to-feel-at-home-move-to-a-place-where-people-share-your-political-views
Weren't we promised a shortage of pork because all the pigs were going to be culled.
Meanwhile there are mounds of British carrots being flogged at 19p/kg.
Ditto British parsnips, cabbages, swede and doubtless others things we were told had rotted in the fields.
Perhaps we will see.
https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1472603943314329604?s=20
Javid's "There are 200,000 Omicron cases" was an absolute classic of the genre.
Absolute fucktons of large packs of everything to flood the market. Again.
https://www.statsjamie.co.uk/5000deaths/
Boy is a loser.
The mystery of left-wing Labour, for me, is that they want to behave in a way that would only work if we already had PR, whilst typically being among its most vocal opponents.
So why would Jezbollah put himself through all that?
Reading that emoji as "vapid bilge" always works for me.
Jeremy Corbyn was accused of ‘appalling’ conduct yesterday after it emerged he had been arrested in 1986 for joining a pro-IRA protest.
The Labour leader had attended a picket outside the Old Bailey to ‘show solidarity’ with accused terrorists, including the Brighton bomber.
His support wasn't quite as vocal as his Shadow Home Secretary, who famously declared "Every defeat of the British state is a victory for all of us", which must presumably include dead MPs, but I think there's still more than enough on the record from Corbyn himself to render that statement non-defamatory.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4505610/How-Jeremy-Corbyn-arrested-joining-pro-IRA-protest.html
I'm no fan of the man, but some things just don't call for blame.
Tomorrow there will be 50% of over 12s who have been triple vaccinated.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1472518914328473605?s=20