1. Witkoff and Dmitriev cooked up a Kremlin wish-list to show the Ukrainians, and Dmitriev got feisty and leaked it prematurely to make it manifest, sensing Zelensky was too weak to say "no."
2. Trump told Witkoff, "Great job, Steve, keep it up, I'm with you all the way," without knowing the full details or anticipating what a shit show would ensue or appreciating just how unworkable this thing is. (He may have even been encouraged by Kushner in this respect; Jared believing he's Kissinger after Gaza.)
3. There is now a mad dash to accelerate a "framework" or "draft" or "living document" or "blueprint" written in invisible ink into a codified peace plan before Santa comes down the chimney because everyone with two IQ points in the administration and on the Hill is trying to find out just what the fuck is going on and how to stop it.
4. The Europeans are getting ready to visit "Daddy" again to talk some sense into him.
5. Official Moscow is hanging fire, waiting to see what happens now that Kirill has tossed a grenade into the works.
6. Rubio is hanging fire, waiting to see what happens now that Dim Philby has stepped on his own crank again.
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
That was always the problem. Once you open up, you are going to get infections. And unless you somehow keep the R below 1 there will be exponential growth. And we’ve since realised the costs of lockdown, both financial and social, so much so that some think there should have been no lockdowns at all.
I think you could have avoided deaths in the first wave, but probably overall it’s harder to say.
Wasn't the aim to slow, rather than prevent, infections so as not to overwhelm the NHS and have people dying from lack of treatment?
Yes, at the start that was the plan. But then the numbers were coming in and they realised that it was gonna be a huge first wave. Now it would have been shit, lots more dead, huge pressure on the health services, but in the longer run the later waves would have been smaller.
I'm struggling to see how lots more dead counts as a more positive outcome.
Because if we all had been infected by say May 2020, then subsequent waves would have been far better and with less damage to the economy. It’s possible that overall deaths might have been less. We will never know, and politically it was an impossible choice.
If we'd all been infected by May 2020, the result would almost certainly have been absolute carnage. Many, many thousands would have died unnecessarily due to lack of hospital capacity to keep them alive. Remember, many of those infected before vaccines arrived were only kept alive with the help of ventilators, including Mr Johnson himself IIRC.
I think with a crisis as severe as it was, the government should have invited the opposition into cabinet. Starmer (and Sturgeon) played politics with the emergency.
1. Witkoff and Dmitriev cooked up a Kremlin wish-list to show the Ukrainians, and Dmitriev got feisty and leaked it prematurely to make it manifest, sensing Zelensky was too weak to say "no."
2. Trump told Witkoff, "Great job, Steve, keep it up, I'm with you all the way," without knowing the full details or anticipating what a shit show would ensue or appreciating just how unworkable this thing is. (He may have even been encouraged by Kushner in this respect; Jared believing he's Kissinger after Gaza.)
3. There is now a mad dash to accelerate a "framework" or "draft" or "living document" or "blueprint" written in invisible ink into a codified peace plan before Santa comes down the chimney because everyone with two IQ points in the administration and on the Hill is trying to find out just what the fuck is going on and how to stop it.
4. The Europeans are getting ready to visit "Daddy" again to talk some sense into him.
5. Official Moscow is hanging fire, waiting to see what happens now that Kirill has tossed a grenade into the works.
6. Rubio is hanging fire, waiting to see what happens now that Dim Philby has stepped on his own crank again.
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
That was always the problem. Once you open up, you are going to get infections. And unless you somehow keep the R below 1 there will be exponential growth. And we’ve since realised the costs of lockdown, both financial and social, so much so that some think there should have been no lockdowns at all.
I think you could have avoided deaths in the first wave, but probably overall it’s harder to say.
Wasn't the aim to slow, rather than prevent, infections so as not to overwhelm the NHS and have people dying from lack of treatment?
Yes, at the start that was the plan. But then the numbers were coming in and they realised that it was gonna be a huge first wave. Now it would have been shit, lots more dead, huge pressure on the health services, but in the longer run the later waves would have been smaller.
I'm struggling to see how lots more dead counts as a more positive outcome.
Because if we all had been infected by say May 2020, then subsequent waves would have been far better and with less damage to the economy. It’s possible that overall deaths might have been less. We will never know, and politically it was an impossible choice.
Immunity to subsequent waves was limited. If we’d all been infected by May 2020, the sick would have completely overwhelmed NHS capacity and lots of people would have been dying at home who would otherwise have been treatable.
What a disaster that, flying in the face of the data we now have from Sweden and other states that opted for *less* stringent lockdowns rather than *harder, faster*, the British state should reach this moronic conclusion.
This is collective face-saving and motivated reasoning. The failure and panic that led to the lockdowns went so wide, and so deep, and involved so much of the political class, that to own up to it now would simply be too grave an admission. So instead we get this.
I think Sayers is omitting the important thing: the public were (at least initially) wildly pro-lockdown, and the de-jure lockdown by the Government was preceded by a widespread de-facto lockdown caused by people staying home because they were frightened. During COVID the British were given the choice between safety and freedom, and grabbed the former with both hands whilst kicking the latter in the nuts, whilst imposing the pro-lockdown views of the majority against dissenters by any means available, regardless of legality. Sumption is scathing about the initial legality of the lockdown and the implications for future governance, and I agree with him.
Yes, well that's the problem with the tyranny of the majority.
It treads on the very issues that I discussed with @MaxPB the other day.
On the pandemic, it was an awful thing on so many levels, healthwise, the deaths and lingering damage, physical and mental, the huge financial cost, the encroachment on personal freedoms, all of it was terrible, but I think the government did ok on the whole and the population (esp the key workers and young people who bore the brunt and the bio sector who came through with the vaccine) did more than ok. If I'm looking to attach blame there's an obvious culprit to my mind and it isn't Boris Johnson or Sage or anybody else who was in the frame when it hit. I blame the virus. Covid.
Agreed, overall the government broadly did the right thing in the face of huge uncertainty. And I think Britain as a country really pulled together and we can all be proud of that. Mistakes were made, obviously - there was some bad behaviour among government figures and officials who thought they were above the rules, unsurprising really when you think about the people involved and how they had been brought up. It's a sad thing but we are a hierarchical society and some people really do think they are better than everyone else. Personally my main recollection is the very real sense of fear when it all started. I genuinely did wonder whether my family would survive it, but thank God we did.
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
That was always the problem. Once you open up, you are going to get infections. And unless you somehow keep the R below 1 there will be exponential growth. And we’ve since realised the costs of lockdown, both financial and social, so much so that some think there should have been no lockdowns at all.
I think you could have avoided deaths in the first wave, but probably overall it’s harder to say.
Wasn't the aim to slow, rather than prevent, infections so as not to overwhelm the NHS and have people dying from lack of treatment?
Yes, at the start that was the plan. But then the numbers were coming in and they realised that it was gonna be a huge first wave. Now it would have been shit, lots more dead, huge pressure on the health services, but in the longer run the later waves would have been smaller.
I'm struggling to see how lots more dead counts as a more positive outcome.
Because if we all had been infected by say May 2020, then subsequent waves would have been far better and with less damage to the economy. It’s possible that overall deaths might have been less. We will never know, and politically it was an impossible choice.
Immunity to subsequent waves was limited. If we’d all been infected by May 2020, the sick would have completely overwhelmed NHS capacity and lots of people would have been dying at home who would otherwise have been treatable.
I don’t disagree, but I think prior infection has reduced severity.
On the pandemic, it was an awful thing on so many levels, healthwise, the deaths and lingering damage, physical and mental, the huge financial cost, the encroachment on personal freedoms, all of it was terrible, but I think the government did ok on the whole and the population (esp the key workers and young people who bore the brunt and the bio sector who came through with the vaccine) did more than ok. If I'm looking to attach blame there's an obvious culprit to my mind and it isn't Boris Johnson or Sage or anybody else who was in the frame when it hit. I blame the virus. Covid.
Agreed, overall the government broadly did the right thing in the face of huge uncertainty. And I think Britain as a country really pulled together and we can all be proud of that. Mistakes were made, obviously - there was some bad behaviour among government figures and officials who thought they were above the rules, unsurprising really when you think about the people involved and how they had been brought up. It's a sad thing but we are a hierarchical society and some people really do think they are better than everyone else. Personally my main recollection is the very real sense of fear when it all started. I genuinely did wonder whether my family would survive it, but thank God we did.
Read the Inquiry report. The suggestion that the “government broadly did the right thing in the face of huge uncertainty” is debunked.
The 2 big problems are…
A. Everyone’s going around ringing alarm bells, but Boris in the centre is all don’t worry, it’ll be fine. (Devolved governments not much better.)
B. Hancock is going around saying we’ve got a plan… but they didn’t have a plan.
"The report goes on to cite modelling, reporting that a lockdown one week earlier might have saved 23,000 lives, but there is no interrogation of the inherent uncertainty in such modelling. It accepts the “reasonable worst-case scenario” without probing why alternative models were not stress-tested. There was blind faith in models, but no curiosity about whether their inputs were garbage, which they were."
1. Witkoff and Dmitriev cooked up a Kremlin wish-list to show the Ukrainians, and Dmitriev got feisty and leaked it prematurely to make it manifest, sensing Zelensky was too weak to say "no."
2. Trump told Witkoff, "Great job, Steve, keep it up, I'm with you all the way," without knowing the full details or anticipating what a shit show would ensue or appreciating just how unworkable this thing is. (He may have even been encouraged by Kushner in this respect; Jared believing he's Kissinger after Gaza.)
3. There is now a mad dash to accelerate a "framework" or "draft" or "living document" or "blueprint" written in invisible ink into a codified peace plan before Santa comes down the chimney because everyone with two IQ points in the administration and on the Hill is trying to find out just what the fuck is going on and how to stop it.
4. The Europeans are getting ready to visit "Daddy" again to talk some sense into him.
5. Official Moscow is hanging fire, waiting to see what happens now that Kirill has tossed a grenade into the works.
6. Rubio is hanging fire, waiting to see what happens now that Dim Philby has stepped on his own crank again.
This is a Witkoff Witless Special, or a leak from Russian sources.
I don't see that Trump & Co have the cards to make this stick.
It is hard to reconcile some American measures with others, almost as if policy is driven by two factions not talking to each other. The USA's secondary sanctions have done a good deal to reduce Russia's oil exports, as of course have Ukraine's drones and missiles in a two-prong attack.
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
And that's what we don't, and probably never will, know. How much government incompentence in the media is actual government incompetence, and how much is media dishonesty. It's a shame to have to question the competence of the government or the honesty of the media, but that's where we are.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
At the time, the coronavirus seemed a destructive malevolence almost outside control yet it wasn't quite like the apocolyptic tales of science fiction or even the cultural resonance of the Black Death - it was clear while there was death, there wasn't wholesale mortality. Cities weren't emptying, going silent but health facilities were being overwhelmed by the nature of the virus which required more oxygen and respirator capacity than was available.
It's worth mentioning the death toll was mitigated by modern technology - had this happened even 30 years ago, there would have been more deaths.
The decision to "lock down" was primarily to reduce that pressure on the health facilities until more could be made available. I suspect those in charge knew from an early stage mortality rates were not going to be unmanageable and it was also clear from an early stage external transmission of the virus in normal circumstances was rare - the problem was large numbers of people in confined spaces (history could have told you that).
It's also now likely the virus was in the country in February and probably anything we tried in March was too little and too late - whether it came back with the half term holidaymakers or whether it was in even earlier I don't know.
One of the aspects which exacerbated the situation was the prevalence of elderly people who didn't need to be in hospital to receive care but for whom no alternative care regimen had been put in place - this remains one of the ongoing aspects of the care debate, getting those who no longer need hospital care to more appropriate places of care.
I also suspect economic, psychological and cultural considerations around lockdowns had differing elements of priority at different times but it's also worth noting many agencies performed admirably - long standarding protocols based on resilience forums at local Government level enabled, I think, a decent response from councils, the NHS, Police and other groups.
But why did coronavirus seem like such a destructive malevolence? It was because the government created a unit to frighten us into submission.
Not true, remember the news from Italy at the beginning.
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
The only thing I'm 100% sure that they got wrong was allowing Cheltenham to go ahead. That was the UK super-spreader, and certainly how I got covid the first time - from colleagues that went there.
There were x million workers using the Tube at that time. Cheltenham was a minor blip.
Sure, but X million from London. Cheltenham brought together people from all around the UK.
I worked then in an office of 300 or so. The first to fall were all the Cheltenham attendees, and then those that sat next to them etc. I find it hard to imagine that a similar effect wasn't at work elsewhere. So I think I can reasonably conclude that it was a significant factor in the spread.
The first hit local to me was before restrictions, a colleague hosted a get-together and about 2 or 3 weeks later two of the guests were dead. That was before we read about the choir in USA who had one last rehearsal together before their restrictions came into force, with a very similar outcome. Frightening times.
On those stats 25 million Brits would have died.
That was one of the curious things about it - that under apparently the same conditions one got it badly but another didn't get it at all.
Or so it seemed. Many cases were asymptomatic, which made it that much more difficult to control the spread.
Those darned asymptomatic cases..where healthy people are told they're ill..🧐💩
They were infectious, that was the problem (and a particular issue with covid). They weren't healthy. Just seemed to be, unless one tested.
Edit: I particularly say that because asymptomatic covid has a real risk of long term effects, like symptomatic does. Not so much, but it's definitely there.
Not sure asymptomatic COVID actually exists tbh, read about a case where a cyclist noticed his heart rate was elevated for his normal effort, had a COVID test and was positive. Now that's a minor symptom and one that's tricky to notice but it's not truly asymptomatic
But there are plenty of actual examples. Enough to write scientific research papers on people who haven't had anything obvious but score positive, often to their surprise.
In any case, there is a normal level of fluctuation of mood, feelings, etc. It's only cos the cyclistr was so obsessive with fitbits and all that he even noticed.
Edit: rather impressive really.
My Trust was part of a study in the summer of 2000, in which we were all tested for covid antibodies. Obviously hospital staff were particularly exposed as we were working and often in contact with infectious patients, though I was covering non-Covid patients at that time. We had virtually no PPE, indeed were banned from wearing masks so those working with covid patients could have them.
Only 10% of us had antibodies, and when the results came back some (like me) were surprised to be negative and others surprised to be positive. For herd immunity the immunity rate would have to be close to 80%. So despite heavy exposure occupationally, with many ethnic staff and Leicester being a particular hotspot (we never fully unlocked that summer, unlike the rest of the UK) we were only a tiny way towards herd immunity.
"letting it rip" would have been carnage. I lost a dear friend in that wave.
One of the reasons I am not as critical as Heather Hallett over Johnson's performance is I am still standing. If he had taken advice and gone down the Sweden route, I might not be here.
From those that survived, good on you Boris. For those that didn't, not so much.
"The report goes on to cite modelling, reporting that a lockdown one week earlier might have saved 23,000 lives, but there is no interrogation of the inherent uncertainty in such modelling. It accepts the “reasonable worst-case scenario” without probing why alternative models were not stress-tested. There was blind faith in models, but no curiosity about whether their inputs were garbage, which they were."
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
And that's what we don't, and probably never will, know. How much government incompentence in the media is actual government incompetence, and how much is media dishonesty. It's a shame to have to question the competence of the government or the honesty of the media, but that's where we are.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
I think it probably 60/40 media disinformation/ incompetence that has unravelled Starmer. Mind you the unravelling and the incompetence has accelerated exponentially recently.
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
And that's what we don't, and probably never will, know. How much government incompentence in the media is actual government incompetence, and how much is media dishonesty. It's a shame to have to question the competence of the government or the honesty of the media, but that's where we are.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
I think it probably 60/40 media disinformation/ incompetence that has unravelled Starmer. Mind you the unravelling and the incompetence has accelerated exponentially recently.
I agree and I now think it's very salvagable. Unless Reform combust the only realistic choice is Labour probably with help from the Libs and maybe the Greens. Starmer can only improve. Everyone's pissed off with him at the moment but he's not doing a lot wrong.
Why couldn't there have been a lockdown for vulnerable people, and no lockdown for everyone else? I assume because it was believed that somehow the non-vulnerable people would accidentally infect the vulnerable ones no matter how much effort was expended to prevent that.
I remember the weeks running up to lockdown very well.
Monday 9th March: full stadium for Leicester City playing Aston Villa (we won 4 nil). That was the last game that I attended for a year. Clinics getting patient cancellations and no shows at a rate of 50%+ all week, Hand gel and gloves locked away at the end of clinics as it was being nicked. Panic buying in the shops, with bare shelves in parts.
Thursday 12th. Talk of imminent lockdown so did a scoop and run to pick up Fox jr2 at his student house, emptying his room. Eerie emptiness punctuated by sirens and flashing lights, and hacking coughs from neighbouring flats. 2 of his flatmates had already gone, one remained, unable to get back to Portugal as no flights.
Sunday 15th: very small congregation at Church. Prayers for when we would meet again.
Monday 16th: PM says stay at home if possible. Our estates team built perspex screens overnight to protect reception and patients
Monday 23rd: Official lockdown starts.
It was a weird time, but the country was already locking itself down. Without economic support many businesses would have simply disappeared. The choice wasn't lockdown or no lockdown, it was controlled or uncontrolled lockdown
The countries that managed best were those with a strong sense of social obligation like Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Scandanavia etc where people behaved responsibly to protect others, not ones of a libertarian mindset where only the individual matters, not their neighbours. Ironically it meant that many of them never legally locked down like we did.
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
Nope. This whole period of failed purdah leading up to budget has been public real time access straight in the CotE brain. Each single brain thought looks like a flip flop since the last brain thought - it’s not media’s fault it’s just rank bad politics to conduct thinking and deliberating that should be behind doors out in such public view as this.
Yes it was. She was extremely badly advised. Continually appearing to change her mind made her look weak and incompetent. The worst possible look for a chancellor. Whoever told her to get infront of the camera should be looking for another job.
At the time, the coronavirus seemed a destructive malevolence almost outside control yet it wasn't quite like the apocolyptic tales of science fiction or even the cultural resonance of the Black Death - it was clear while there was death, there wasn't wholesale mortality. Cities weren't emptying, going silent but health facilities were being overwhelmed by the nature of the virus which required more oxygen and respirator capacity than was available.
It's worth mentioning the death toll was mitigated by modern technology - had this happened even 30 years ago, there would have been more deaths.
The decision to "lock down" was primarily to reduce that pressure on the health facilities until more could be made available. I suspect those in charge knew from an early stage mortality rates were not going to be unmanageable and it was also clear from an early stage external transmission of the virus in normal circumstances was rare - the problem was large numbers of people in confined spaces (history could have told you that).
It's also now likely the virus was in the country in February and probably anything we tried in March was too little and too late - whether it came back with the half term holidaymakers or whether it was in even earlier I don't know.
One of the aspects which exacerbated the situation was the prevalence of elderly people who didn't need to be in hospital to receive care but for whom no alternative care regimen had been put in place - this remains one of the ongoing aspects of the care debate, getting those who no longer need hospital care to more appropriate places of care.
I also suspect economic, psychological and cultural considerations around lockdowns had differing elements of priority at different times but it's also worth noting many agencies performed admirably - long standarding protocols based on resilience forums at local Government level enabled, I think, a decent response from councils, the NHS, Police and other groups.
But why did coronavirus seem like such a destructive malevolence? It was because the government created a unit to frighten us into submission.
Not true, remember the news from Italy at the beginning.
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
The only thing I'm 100% sure that they got wrong was allowing Cheltenham to go ahead. That was the UK super-spreader, and certainly how I got covid the first time - from colleagues that went there.
There were x million workers using the Tube at that time. Cheltenham was a minor blip.
Sure, but X million from London. Cheltenham brought together people from all around the UK.
I worked then in an office of 300 or so. The first to fall were all the Cheltenham attendees, and then those that sat next to them etc. I find it hard to imagine that a similar effect wasn't at work elsewhere. So I think I can reasonably conclude that it was a significant factor in the spread.
The first hit local to me was before restrictions, a colleague hosted a get-together and about 2 or 3 weeks later two of the guests were dead. That was before we read about the choir in USA who had one last rehearsal together before their restrictions came into force, with a very similar outcome. Frightening times.
On those stats 25 million Brits would have died.
That was one of the curious things about it - that under apparently the same conditions one got it badly but another didn't get it at all.
Or so it seemed. Many cases were asymptomatic, which made it that much more difficult to control the spread.
Those darned asymptomatic cases..where healthy people are told they're ill..🧐💩
They were infectious, that was the problem (and a particular issue with covid). They weren't healthy. Just seemed to be, unless one tested.
Edit: I particularly say that because asymptomatic covid has a real risk of long term effects, like symptomatic does. Not so much, but it's definitely there.
Not sure asymptomatic COVID actually exists tbh, read about a case where a cyclist noticed his heart rate was elevated for his normal effort, had a COVID test and was positive. Now that's a minor symptom and one that's tricky to notice but it's not truly asymptomatic
But there are plenty of actual examples. Enough to write scientific research papers on people who haven't had anything obvious but score positive, often to their surprise.
In any case, there is a normal level of fluctuation of mood, feelings, etc. It's only cos the cyclistr was so obsessive with fitbits and all that he even noticed.
Edit: rather impressive really.
My Trust was part of a study in the summer of 2000, in which we were all tested for covid antibodies. Obviously hospital staff were particularly exposed as we were working and often in contact with infectious patients, though I was covering non-Covid patients at that time. We had virtually no PPE, indeed were banned from wearing masks so those working with covid patients could have them.
Only 10% of us had antibodies, and when the results came back some (like me) were surprised to be negative and others surprised to be positive. For herd immunity the immunity rate would have to be close to 80%. So despite heavy exposure occupationally, with many ethnic staff and Leicester being a particular hotspot (we never fully unlocked that summer, unlike the rest of the UK) we were only a tiny way towards herd immunity.
"letting it rip" would have been carnage. I lost a dear friend in that wave.
My unscientific take on it is this. Original covid wasn’t that infectious. I spent many a tea/coffee break with my colleague who had covid without realising in March 2020. He had taste and smell,disturbance, a fever etc and then tested positive for antibodies in May. Yet I didn’t get it from him. Later strains were way more infectious.
One of the weird bits about covid is that peak infectivity occurred before symptoms, which is why we would get a wedding where one person infects a hundred, yet I could share a house with Mrs Foxy when she caught it, working in ITU, but I didn't catch it myself. She was symptomatic by that point, but no longer infective.
The plans were largely based on the influenza model, with peak infectivity after symptoms and a fulminant but short infection. Covid is quite a different beast, and the next pandemic will be different again.
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
And that's what we don't, and probably never will, know. How much government incompentence in the media is actual government incompetence, and how much is media dishonesty. It's a shame to have to question the competence of the government or the honesty of the media, but that's where we are.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
I think it probably 60/40 media disinformation/ incompetence that has unravelled Starmer. Mind you the unravelling and the incompetence has accelerated exponentially recently.
I agree and I now think it's very salvagable. Unless Reform combust the only realistic choice is Labour probably with help from the Libs and maybe the Greens. Starmer can only improve. Everyone's pissed off with him at the moment but he's not doing a lot wrong.
“ not doing a lot wrong” 🥹
The PM and his government is committing the biggest possible mistake you can make in politics, and I can so easily prove this to you by asking you to tell us what Starmerism is.
This government doesn’t know what its purpose is. What’s it’s actually for? Some vague “do good” or “make things better”? It’s ideologically, politically and psychologically immature. And as such it follows we are watching it lose the will to live right in front of us on a daily basis.
I remember the weeks running up to lockdown very well.
Monday 9th March: full stadium for Leicester City playing Aston Villa (we won 4 nil). That was the last game that I attended for a year. Clinics getting patient cancellations and no shows at a rate of 50%+ all week, Hand gel and gloves locked away at the end of clinics as it was being nicked. Panic buying in the shops, with bare shelves in parts.
Thursday 12th. Talk of imminent lockdown so did a scoop and run to pick up Fox jr2 at his student house, emptying his room. Eerie emptiness punctuated by sirens and flashing lights, and hacking coughs from neighbouring flats. 2 of his flatmates had already gone, one remained, unable to get back to Portugal as no flights.
Sunday 15th: very small congregation at Church. Prayers for when we would meet again.
Monday 16th: PM says stay at home if possible. Our estates team built perspex screens overnight to protect reception and patients
Monday 23rd: Official lockdown starts.
It was a weird time, but the country was already locking itself down. Without economic support many businesses would have simply disappeared. The choice wasn't lockdown or no lockdown, it was controlled or uncontrolled lockdown
The countries that managed best were those with a strong sense of social obligation like Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Scandanavia etc where people behaved responsibly to protect others, not ones of a libertarian mindset where only the individual matters, not their neighbours. Ironically it meant that many of them never legally locked down like we did.
I kept a vague impressionistic diary from late January. I work with a lot of Chinese students and there was clearly 'something up'.
The main two early entries I remember without looking back at it are mentioning the rise in cases in Italy to a friend who couldn't understand why something like eight confirmed cases going to 80 in the space of a few days was something to keep an eye on. And bumping into a random acquaintance in early March who was already doing the 'elbow bump' thing rather than shaking hands, or god forfend, a hug.
Oh - and a random person on the local Reddit group asking if there was a bank holiday as all the shops were closed. Unemployed, didn't listen to the news as it was depressing. Had no idea lockdown had happened.
Now that I think about it - meeting that same friend a while later - when such thing were allowed - who was puzzled by all the little flags attached to bushes in the local park. Until I said they from little kids to mark their dead grandparents.
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
And that's what we don't, and probably never will, know. How much government incompentence in the media is actual government incompetence, and how much is media dishonesty. It's a shame to have to question the competence of the government or the honesty of the media, but that's where we are.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
I think it probably 60/40 media disinformation/ incompetence that has unravelled Starmer. Mind you the unravelling and the incompetence has accelerated exponentially recently.
I agree and I now think it's very salvagable. Unless Reform combust the only realistic choice is Labour probably with help from the Libs and maybe the Greens. Starmer can only improve. Everyone's pissed off with him at the moment but he's not doing a lot wrong.
People defecting from Labour to the Greens, Lib dems and Your Party over ReformLite immigration policies, Gaza, Trump are really being hoodwinked by Big Media?
Yes it was. She was extremely badly advised. Continually appearing to change her mind made her look weak and incompetent. The worst possible look for a chancellor. Whoever told her to get infront of the camera should be looking for another job.
OMG. We are in total agreement.
The Doomsday clock just ticked another minute to midnight. The Whore of Babylon will now explode, and the Beast arise from the Abyss.
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
And that's what we don't, and probably never will, know. How much government incompentence in the media is actual government incompetence, and how much is media dishonesty. It's a shame to have to question the competence of the government or the honesty of the media, but that's where we are.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
I think it probably 60/40 media disinformation/ incompetence that has unravelled Starmer. Mind you the unravelling and the incompetence has accelerated exponentially recently.
I agree and I now think it's very salvagable. Unless Reform combust the only realistic choice is Labour probably with help from the Libs and maybe the Greens. Starmer can only improve. Everyone's pissed off with him at the moment but he's not doing a lot wrong.
“ not doing a lot wrong” 🥹
The PM and his government is committing the biggest possible mistake you can make in politics, and I can so easily prove this to you by asking you to tell us what Starmerism is.
This government doesn’t know what its purpose is. What’s it’s actually for? Some vague “do good” or “make things better”? It’s ideologically, politically and psychologically immature. And as such it follows we are watching it lose the will to live right in front of us on a daily basis.
Once again I agree with you. They need an overarching idea. Before they got in I thought renewables would be it. Like Wilson's 'White Heat of Technology'. I've no idea what it was about but it sounded futuristic and something to aim for. Fiddling around with school dinners might make a head mistress sound good but it's not the stuff of a forward looking government. Stop fire fighting and think of something the country can get behind and get moving.
What a disaster that, flying in the face of the data we now have from Sweden and other states that opted for *less* stringent lockdowns rather than *harder, faster*, the British state should reach this moronic conclusion.
This is collective face-saving and motivated reasoning. The failure and panic that led to the lockdowns went so wide, and so deep, and involved so much of the political class, that to own up to it now would simply be too grave an admission. So instead we get this."
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
And that's what we don't, and probably never will, know. How much government incompentence in the media is actual government incompetence, and how much is media dishonesty. It's a shame to have to question the competence of the government or the honesty of the media, but that's where we are.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
I think it probably 60/40 media disinformation/ incompetence that has unravelled Starmer. Mind you the unravelling and the incompetence has accelerated exponentially recently.
I agree and I now think it's very salvagable. Unless Reform combust the only realistic choice is Labour probably with help from the Libs and maybe the Greens. Starmer can only improve. Everyone's pissed off with him at the moment but he's not doing a lot wrong.
“ not doing a lot wrong” 🥹
The PM and his government is committing the biggest possible mistake you can make in politics, and I can so easily prove this to you by asking you to tell us what Starmerism is.
This government doesn’t know what its purpose is. What’s it’s actually for? Some vague “do good” or “make things better”? It’s ideologically, politically and psychologically immature. And as such it follows we are watching it lose the will to live right in front of us on a daily basis.
Once again I agree with you. They need an overarching idea. Before they got in I thought renewables would be it. Like Wilson's 'White Heat of Technology'. I've no idea what it was about but it sounded futuristic and something to aim for. Fiddling around with school dinners might make a head mistress sound good but it's not the stuff of a forward looking government. Stop fire fighting and think of something the country can get behind and get moving.
What a disaster that, flying in the face of the data we now have from Sweden and other states that opted for *less* stringent lockdowns rather than *harder, faster*, the British state should reach this moronic conclusion.
This is collective face-saving and motivated reasoning. The failure and panic that led to the lockdowns went so wide, and so deep, and involved so much of the political class, that to own up to it now would simply be too grave an admission. So instead we get this."
I have repeatedly argued on here we locked down too much (less cooercian, more recommendations). But it is worth remembering that (a) the Swedes got progressively more restrictions as Covid went on, so that by the end it wasn't that different to most European countries; and (b) they themselves don't think their reponse was an enormous success, and think that if they did it again, they'd go down the Danish route.
In their own parliamentary report evaluating the response to the pandemic they say that their approach was predicated on the idea that in a pandemic scenario it would take many years to get vaccines in quantity, and that had they realized how quickly vaccines would become available, they would have acted differently.
I could be wrong, and incompetent as she is, I don't believe Reeves was the source on any of the 10,001 Telegraph exclusives. Far be it for me to suggest the Telegraph's source was er, the Telegraph.
And that's what we don't, and probably never will, know. How much government incompentence in the media is actual government incompetence, and how much is media dishonesty. It's a shame to have to question the competence of the government or the honesty of the media, but that's where we are.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
I think it probably 60/40 media disinformation/ incompetence that has unravelled Starmer. Mind you the unravelling and the incompetence has accelerated exponentially recently.
I agree and I now think it's very salvagable. Unless Reform combust the only realistic choice is Labour probably with help from the Libs and maybe the Greens. Starmer can only improve. Everyone's pissed off with him at the moment but he's not doing a lot wrong.
“ not doing a lot wrong” 🥹
The PM and his government is committing the biggest possible mistake you can make in politics, and I can so easily prove this to you by asking you to tell us what Starmerism is.
This government doesn’t know what its purpose is. What’s it’s actually for? Some vague “do good” or “make things better”? It’s ideologically, politically and psychologically immature. And as such it follows we are watching it lose the will to live right in front of us on a daily basis.
Once again I agree with you. They need an overarching idea. Before they got in I thought renewables would be it. Like Wilson's 'White Heat of Technology'. I've no idea what it was about but it sounded futuristic and something to aim for. Fiddling around with school dinners might make a head mistress sound good but it's not the stuff of a forward looking government. Stop fire fighting and think of something the country can get behind and get moving.
Tomorrow morning the count of Stranraer and rhins ward by election on D&G council begins. The seat was vacated by a retiring long serving councillor who latterly sat as an independent.
Reform are putting in a very strong challenge here. They haven't won a Scottish council by election (yet), this is as close to perfect conditions as they can ask for, large blue collar vote in Stranraer, big Tory vote to squeeze, a lot of Brexit votes and rural hinterland.
Outside of the north east, I don't think there's many wards in Scotland which will be more favourable to them. If they don't win, it will likely go Conservative, with an outside chance of independent
My guess is a Reform win with Tories 2nd (please don't shoot the messenger if I'm wrong)
Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..."
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
That was always the problem. Once you open up, you are going to get infections. And unless you somehow keep the R below 1 there will be exponential growth. And we’ve since realised the costs of lockdown, both financial and social, so much so that some think there should have been no lockdowns at all.
I think you could have avoided deaths in the first wave, but probably overall it’s harder to say.
Wasn't the aim to slow, rather than prevent, infections so as not to overwhelm the NHS and have people dying from lack of treatment?
Yes, at the start that was the plan. But then the numbers were coming in and they realised that it was gonna be a huge first wave. Now it would have been shit, lots more dead, huge pressure on the health services, but in the longer run the later waves would have been smaller.
I'm struggling to see how lots more dead counts as a more positive outcome.
Because if we all had been infected by say May 2020, then subsequent waves would have been far better and with less damage to the economy. It’s possible that overall deaths might have been less. We will never know, and politically it was an impossible choice.
Albeit, we do know what happened in Sweden (which admittedly had two advantages over us - i.e. lower population density and a much higher % of people living alone). And we also know that humans respond to what's going on - so in a world without lockdowns, you still get effective lockdowns as people worry about Covid incidence and shelter at home.
Personally, I think Southern California got it right. Restrictions, rather than lockdown, so no one was ever denied socialisation.
And restrictions where severity increased or decreased according to hospital ICU usage.
It was broadly transparent, and it kept most things open most of the time. And even when restrictions were most stringent, you were never denied the ability to go for a walk with a friend.
We also have the example of Japan, which experienced significantly lower numbers of deaths, and considerably less social disruption.
They reacted more quickly, attempted to minimise spread of infection (masking and social distancing) and had far less draconian or disruptive lockdown measures.
Note that their transmission rates per infected individual were much lower than ours.
Frankly, the idea that a 'get it out of the way' approach, which would have overwhelmed hospitals and likely caused mass panic worse than we actually experienced, would have seen better outcomes seems to me pretty implausible .
"Lockdowns could have been avoided entirely, Covid inquiry finds Drastic measures might not have been needed if ‘stringent restrictions’ had been put in place before March 16 2020"
Yes, but. That’s hindsight talking. Show me an example of a western, open nation that locked down early enough to avoid a big wave in 2020. Aus and NZ don’t count due to their isolation.
Japan. You're ignoring "lockdown might have been avoided entirely".
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
That was always the problem. Once you open up, you are going to get infections. And unless you somehow keep the R below 1 there will be exponential growth. And we’ve since realised the costs of lockdown, both financial and social, so much so that some think there should have been no lockdowns at all.
I think you could have avoided deaths in the first wave, but probably overall it’s harder to say.
Wasn't the aim to slow, rather than prevent, infections so as not to overwhelm the NHS and have people dying from lack of treatment?
Yes, at the start that was the plan. But then the numbers were coming in and they realised that it was gonna be a huge first wave. Now it would have been shit, lots more dead, huge pressure on the health services, but in the longer run the later waves would have been smaller.
I'm struggling to see how lots more dead counts as a more positive outcome.
Because if we all had been infected by say May 2020, then subsequent waves would have been far better and with less damage to the economy. It’s possible that overall deaths might have been less. We will never know, and politically it was an impossible choice.
If we'd all been infected by May 2020, the result would almost certainly have been absolute carnage. Many, many thousands would have died unnecessarily due to lack of hospital capacity to keep them alive. Remember, many of those infected before vaccines arrived were only kept alive with the help of ventilators, including Mr Johnson himself IIRC.
I think with a crisis as severe as it was, the government should have invited the opposition into cabinet. Starmer (and Sturgeon) played politics with the emergency.
Agreed on that.
Opposition criticisms were frequently as lacking in analysis as was government policy.
F1: I'll post the blog a bit later but I've backed Antonelli each way for qualifying at 9.5 (boosted). He was narrowly behind Norris at the top of FP2, the circuit really suited the Mercedes last year, and he had a very strong outing in Brazil last time.
Another normal day in the greatest democracy on the planet:
"Democrats expressed outrage after Donald Trump accused a group of Democratic lawmakers of engaging in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH” and that they should be arrested after they posted a video in which they told active service members they should refuse illegal orders."
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
That was always the problem. Once you open up, you are going to get infections. And unless you somehow keep the R below 1 there will be exponential growth. And we’ve since realised the costs of lockdown, both financial and social, so much so that some think there should have been no lockdowns at all.
I think you could have avoided deaths in the first wave, but probably overall it’s harder to say.
Wasn't the aim to slow, rather than prevent, infections so as not to overwhelm the NHS and have people dying from lack of treatment?
Yes, at the start that was the plan. But then the numbers were coming in and they realised that it was gonna be a huge first wave. Now it would have been shit, lots more dead, huge pressure on the health services, but in the longer run the later waves would have been smaller.
I'm struggling to see how lots more dead counts as a more positive outcome.
Because if we all had been infected by say May 2020, then subsequent waves would have been far better and with less damage to the economy. It’s possible that overall deaths might have been less. We will never know, and politically it was an impossible choice.
Albeit, we do know what happened in Sweden (which admittedly had two advantages over us - i.e. lower population density and a much higher % of people living alone). And we also know that humans respond to what's going on - so in a world without lockdowns, you still get effective lockdowns as people worry about Covid incidence and shelter at home.
Personally, I think Southern California got it right. Restrictions, rather than lockdown, so no one was ever denied socialisation.
And restrictions where severity increased or decreased according to hospital ICU usage.
It was broadly transparent, and it kept most things open most of the time. And even when restrictions were most stringent, you were never denied the ability to go for a walk with a friend.
Easier to do your socialising outdoors in southern CA.
I am finding it very hard to get het up by the Covid report. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yes we know that shagger was the worst possible leader in a time of crisis. But good men, better men, competent men are also just as capable of inaction when faced with "that can't be right" data.
I am more interested in what we can change next time than calling for vengeance against people who have long since been booted out of office.
I am finding it very hard to get het up by the Covid report. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yes we know that shagger was the worst possible leader in a time of crisis. But good men, better men, competent men are also just as capable of inaction when faced with "that can't be right" data.
I am more interested in what we can change next time than calling for vengeance against people who have long since been booted out of office.
The COVID-19 inquiry is far too interested in the minutiae. The fact that The resilience and preparedness of the United Kingdom report mentions underlying health conditions like obesity only once in 200 pages is ridiculous. Should have take up at least 50% of that report given how important they were for determining whether someone ended up in hospital.
It's not that the most important lessons won't be learned - they aren't even being taught.
I am finding it very hard to get het up by the Covid report. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yes we know that shagger was the worst possible leader in a time of crisis. But good men, better men, competent men are also just as capable of inaction when faced with "that can't be right" data.
I am more interested in what we can change next time than calling for vengeance against people who have long since been booted out of office.
I think most of us could have predicted most of that report about five years ago.
Politicians all crap, civil servants all wonderful, no lessons to learn, now write the nine-figure cheque for the lawyers writing the report please.
Now, if they could produce a report from the perspective of something like a transport accident investigation, going into detail about what led to the decisions that were made, what might be done differently next time, and with comparison of approaches taken in other countries, that one might be worth reading.
I am finding it very hard to get het up by the Covid report. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yes we know that shagger was the worst possible leader in a time of crisis. But good men, better men, competent men are also just as capable of inaction when faced with "that can't be right" data.
I am more interested in what we can change next time than calling for vengeance against people who have long since been booted out of office.
The report does go into that in some detail.
I know, but all the headlines are Boris and Cummings.
"Lockdowns could have been avoided entirely, Covid inquiry finds Drastic measures might not have been needed if ‘stringent restrictions’ had been put in place before March 16 2020"
Yes, but. That’s hindsight talking. Show me an example of a western, open nation that locked down early enough to avoid a big wave in 2020. Aus and NZ don’t count due to their isolation.
Japan. You're ignoring "lockdown might have been avoided entirely".
Japan is not a western country. And they have previous with SARS etc.
I’m not advocating that we should have let it rip. I think it would have been very, very bad, with overwhelmed hospitals etc. But there is a counter argument that it ‘could’ have been similar in deaths overall, just shifted forwards. I guess the argument is that those who died of covid were always going to, before vaccination at least.
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
That was always the problem. Once you open up, you are going to get infections. And unless you somehow keep the R below 1 there will be exponential growth. And we’ve since realised the costs of lockdown, both financial and social, so much so that some think there should have been no lockdowns at all.
I think you could have avoided deaths in the first wave, but probably overall it’s harder to say.
Wasn't the aim to slow, rather than prevent, infections so as not to overwhelm the NHS and have people dying from lack of treatment?
Yes, at the start that was the plan. But then the numbers were coming in and they realised that it was gonna be a huge first wave. Now it would have been shit, lots more dead, huge pressure on the health services, but in the longer run the later waves would have been smaller.
I'm struggling to see how lots more dead counts as a more positive outcome.
Because if we all had been infected by say May 2020, then subsequent waves would have been far better and with less damage to the economy. It’s possible that overall deaths might have been less. We will never know, and politically it was an impossible choice.
Albeit, we do know what happened in Sweden (which admittedly had two advantages over us - i.e. lower population density and a much higher % of people living alone). And we also know that humans respond to what's going on - so in a world without lockdowns, you still get effective lockdowns as people worry about Covid incidence and shelter at home.
Personally, I think Southern California got it right. Restrictions, rather than lockdown, so no one was ever denied socialisation.
And restrictions where severity increased or decreased according to hospital ICU usage.
It was broadly transparent, and it kept most things open most of the time. And even when restrictions were most stringent, you were never denied the ability to go for a walk with a friend.
Easier to do your socialising outdoors in southern CA.
Meanwhile, the proto-fascist calls for the death penalty against seditious lawmakers reminding military personnel of their obligations to the constitution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice...
I am finding it very hard to get het up by the Covid report. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yes we know that shagger was the worst possible leader in a time of crisis. But good men, better men, competent men are also just as capable of inaction when faced with "that can't be right" data.
I am more interested in what we can change next time than calling for vengeance against people who have long since been booted out of office.
I think most of us could have predicted most of that report about five years ago.
Politicians all crap, civil servants all wonderful, no lessons to learn, now write the nine-figure cheque for the lawyers writing the report please.
Now, if they could produce a report from the perspective of something like a transport accident investigation, going into detail about what led to the decisions that were made, what might be done differently next time, and with comparison of approaches taken in other countries, that one might be worth reading.
This suggests you have not read the report. It does not say civil servants are all wonderful. It goes into some detail about how decisions were made.
At the time, the coronavirus seemed a destructive malevolence almost outside control yet it wasn't quite like the apocolyptic tales of science fiction or even the cultural resonance of the Black Death - it was clear while there was death, there wasn't wholesale mortality. Cities weren't emptying, going silent but health facilities were being overwhelmed by the nature of the virus which required more oxygen and respirator capacity than was available.
It's worth mentioning the death toll was mitigated by modern technology - had this happened even 30 years ago, there would have been more deaths.
The decision to "lock down" was primarily to reduce that pressure on the health facilities until more could be made available. I suspect those in charge knew from an early stage mortality rates were not going to be unmanageable and it was also clear from an early stage external transmission of the virus in normal circumstances was rare - the problem was large numbers of people in confined spaces (history could have told you that).
It's also now likely the virus was in the country in February and probably anything we tried in March was too little and too late - whether it came back with the half term holidaymakers or whether it was in even earlier I don't know.
One of the aspects which exacerbated the situation was the prevalence of elderly people who didn't need to be in hospital to receive care but for whom no alternative care regimen had been put in place - this remains one of the ongoing aspects of the care debate, getting those who no longer need hospital care to more appropriate places of care.
I also suspect economic, psychological and cultural considerations around lockdowns had differing elements of priority at different times but it's also worth noting many agencies performed admirably - long standarding protocols based on resilience forums at local Government level enabled, I think, a decent response from councils, the NHS, Police and other groups.
But why did coronavirus seem like such a destructive malevolence? It was because the government created a unit to frighten us into submission.
Not true, remember the news from Italy at the beginning.
I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?
The only thing I'm 100% sure that they got wrong was allowing Cheltenham to go ahead. That was the UK super-spreader, and certainly how I got covid the first time - from colleagues that went there.
There were x million workers using the Tube at that time. Cheltenham was a minor blip.
Sure, but X million from London. Cheltenham brought together people from all around the UK.
I worked then in an office of 300 or so. The first to fall were all the Cheltenham attendees, and then those that sat next to them etc. I find it hard to imagine that a similar effect wasn't at work elsewhere. So I think I can reasonably conclude that it was a significant factor in the spread.
The first hit local to me was before restrictions, a colleague hosted a get-together and about 2 or 3 weeks later two of the guests were dead. That was before we read about the choir in USA who had one last rehearsal together before their restrictions came into force, with a very similar outcome. Frightening times.
On those stats 25 million Brits would have died.
That was one of the curious things about it - that under apparently the same conditions one got it badly but another didn't get it at all.
Or so it seemed. Many cases were asymptomatic, which made it that much more difficult to control the spread.
Those darned asymptomatic cases..where healthy people are told they're ill..🧐💩
They were infectious, that was the problem (and a particular issue with covid). They weren't healthy. Just seemed to be, unless one tested.
Edit: I particularly say that because asymptomatic covid has a real risk of long term effects, like symptomatic does. Not so much, but it's definitely there.
Not sure asymptomatic COVID actually exists tbh, read about a case where a cyclist noticed his heart rate was elevated for his normal effort, had a COVID test and was positive. Now that's a minor symptom and one that's tricky to notice but it's not truly asymptomatic
But there are plenty of actual examples. Enough to write scientific research papers on people who haven't had anything obvious but score positive, often to their surprise.
In any case, there is a normal level of fluctuation of mood, feelings, etc. It's only cos the cyclistr was so obsessive with fitbits and all that he even noticed.
Edit: rather impressive really.
My Trust was part of a study in the summer of 2000, in which we were all tested for covid antibodies. Obviously hospital staff were particularly exposed as we were working and often in contact with infectious patients, though I was covering non-Covid patients at that time. We had virtually no PPE, indeed were banned from wearing masks so those working with covid patients could have them.
Only 10% of us had antibodies, and when the results came back some (like me) were surprised to be negative and others surprised to be positive. For herd immunity the immunity rate would have to be close to 80%. So despite heavy exposure occupationally, with many ethnic staff and Leicester being a particular hotspot (we never fully unlocked that summer, unlike the rest of the UK) we were only a tiny way towards herd immunity.
"letting it rip" would have been carnage. I lost a dear friend in that wave.
My unscientific take on it is this. Original covid wasn’t that infectious. I spent many a tea/coffee break with my colleague who had covid without realising in March 2020. He had taste and smell,disturbance, a fever etc and then tested positive for antibodies in May. Yet I didn’t get it from him. Later strains were way more infectious.
The logical basis for which is that natural selection favours those virus variants that are more contagious, for obvious reasons, and less deadly, because their hosts survive for longer and feel well enough to be out and about spreading it around. So over time, a new virus will tend towards becoming contagious but essentially benign - the very words a certain PB’er used to describe the original virus, which wasn’t particularly either of those.
I expect the myriad variety of cold viruses we get each winter contains the remnants of pandemics from times past.
Comments
I don't see that Trump & Co have the cards to make this stick.
It treads on the very issues that I discussed with @MaxPB the other day.
It’s immaterial as it was never an option.
The 2 big problems are…
A. Everyone’s going around ringing alarm bells, but Boris in the centre is all don’t worry, it’ll be fine. (Devolved governments not much better.)
B. Hancock is going around saying we’ve got a plan… but they didn’t have a plan.
"The report goes on to cite modelling, reporting that a lockdown one week earlier might have saved 23,000 lives, but there is no interrogation of the inherent uncertainty in such modelling. It accepts the “reasonable worst-case scenario” without probing why alternative models were not stress-tested. There was blind faith in models, but no curiosity about whether their inputs were garbage, which they were."
https://trusttheevidence.substack.com/p/covid-inquiry-module-2-report-published
He always seemed mild mannered to me.
(And yes, the same was true of Rishi, Liz, even Boris... except that the configuration of media forces affected them differently.)
From those that survived, good on you Boris. For those that didn't, not so much.
Did the Oxford "we might have already all been infected in Summer 2020" modelling people ever retract?
With can of Monster Aussie Lemonade in one hand, and Black Sheep Best in tother.
Monday 9th March: full stadium for Leicester City playing Aston Villa (we won 4 nil). That was the last game that I attended for a year.
Clinics getting patient cancellations and no shows at a rate of 50%+ all week, Hand gel and gloves locked away at the end of clinics as it was being nicked. Panic buying in the shops, with bare shelves in parts.
Thursday 12th. Talk of imminent lockdown so did a scoop and run to pick up Fox jr2 at his student house, emptying his room. Eerie emptiness punctuated by sirens and flashing lights, and hacking coughs from neighbouring flats. 2 of his flatmates had already gone, one remained, unable to get back to Portugal as no flights.
Sunday 15th: very small congregation at Church. Prayers for when we would meet again.
Monday 16th: PM says stay at home if possible. Our estates team built perspex screens overnight to protect reception and patients
Monday 23rd: Official lockdown starts.
It was a weird time, but the country was already locking itself down. Without economic support many businesses would have simply disappeared. The choice wasn't lockdown or no lockdown, it was controlled or uncontrolled lockdown
The countries that managed best were those with a strong sense of social obligation like Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Scandanavia etc where people behaved responsibly to protect others, not ones of a libertarian mindset where only the individual matters, not their neighbours. Ironically it meant that many of them never legally locked down like we did.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsmanchester/andy-burnham-bronze-sculpture-to-be-unveiled-in-manchester-this-week-in-powerful-and-necessary-statement/ar-AA1QKSbA?ocid=BingNewsSerp
It doesn't, to my eye, look very much like Andy Burnham.
(I was, by the way, pleased to come across the statue of Donald Dewar in Glasgow. But presumably that went up after his death?)
The plans were largely based on the influenza model, with peak infectivity after symptoms and a fulminant but short infection. Covid is quite a different beast, and the next pandemic will be different again.
The PM and his government is committing the biggest possible mistake you can make in politics, and I can so easily prove this to you by asking you to tell us what Starmerism is.
This government doesn’t know what its purpose is. What’s it’s actually for? Some vague “do good” or “make things better”? It’s ideologically, politically and psychologically immature. And as such it follows we are watching it lose the will to live right in front of us on a daily basis.
The main two early entries I remember without looking back at it are mentioning the rise in cases in Italy to a friend who couldn't understand why something like eight confirmed cases going to 80 in the space of a few days was something to keep an eye on. And bumping into a random acquaintance in early March who was already doing the 'elbow bump' thing rather than shaking hands, or god forfend, a hug.
Oh - and a random person on the local Reddit group asking if there was a bank holiday as all the shops were closed. Unemployed, didn't listen to the news as it was depressing. Had no idea lockdown had happened.
Now that I think about it - meeting that same friend a while later - when such thing were allowed - who was puzzled by all the little flags attached to bushes in the local park. Until I said they from little kids to mark their dead grandparents.
https://x.com/cricketwyvern/status/1991555619422368094
https://www.youtube.com/@Campbellteaching/videos
The Doomsday clock just ticked another minute to midnight. The Whore of Babylon will now explode, and the Beast arise from the Abyss.
@freddiesayers
What a disaster that, flying in the face of the data we now have from Sweden and other states that opted for *less* stringent lockdowns rather than *harder, faster*, the British state should reach this moronic conclusion.
This is collective face-saving and motivated reasoning. The failure and panic that led to the lockdowns went so wide, and so deep, and involved so much of the political class, that to own up to it now would simply be too grave an admission. So instead we get this."
https://x.com/freddiesayers/status/1991539939423498587
Will you stop doing that. It’s weird.
https://x.com/JohnRentoul/status/1991622228090482755
George Osborne reveals that Shabana Mahmood is a "gold subscriber" to his podcast with Ed Balls
In their own parliamentary report evaluating the response to the pandemic they say that their approach was predicated on the idea that in a pandemic scenario it would take many years to get vaccines in quantity, and that had they realized how quickly vaccines would become available, they would have acted differently.
Reform are putting in a very strong challenge here. They haven't won a Scottish council by election (yet), this is as close to perfect conditions as they can ask for, large blue collar vote in Stranraer, big Tory vote to squeeze, a lot of Brexit votes and rural hinterland.
Outside of the north east, I don't think there's many wards in Scotland which will be more favourable to them. If they don't win, it will likely go Conservative, with an outside chance of independent
My guess is a Reform win with Tories 2nd (please don't shoot the messenger if I'm wrong)
Macclesfield Central (Cheshire East) Council By-Election Result:
🌍 GRN: 41.8% (+19.7)
🌹 LAB: 28.6% (-25.7)
➡️ RFM: 15.8% (New)
🌳 CON: 9.1% (-4.5)
⚖️ EQU: 2.5% (New)
🔶 LDM: 2.2% (-7.7)
Green GAIN from Labour.
Changes w/ 2023.
Conservative gain from Green
Con 1,521
Green 1,245
Reform 264
Labour 138
Lib Dem 101
Turnout 42%
Con 46.53% [+9.75]
Grn 38.09% [-9.58]
Ref 8.08% [new]
Lab 4.22% [-7.65]
LD 3.09% [-0.59]
You don't see that every week.
Series winner
Aus 1.63
Eng 3.45
Draw 11
1st Test
Aus 1.81
Eng 2.62
Draw 16
Tie 130/500
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/en/cricket/the-ashes-betting-12444379
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
Forget the plane. Get them on a boat. Make them endure a boat. Old school.
It’s a very green pitch, here’s Root’s duck
https://x.com/vkrkmb/status/1991707116802035873
172 all out, in only 33 overs.
https://bsky.app/profile/cstross.bsky.social/post/3m63awbrc6lqj
Looks like LLMs are *very* vulnerable to attack via poetic allusion: "curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90% ..."
https://arxiv.org/html/2511.15304v1
They reacted more quickly, attempted to minimise spread of infection (masking and social distancing) and had far less draconian or disruptive lockdown measures.
Note that their transmission rates per infected individual were much lower than ours.
Frankly, the idea that a 'get it out of the way' approach, which would have overwhelmed hospitals and likely caused mass panic worse than we actually experienced, would have seen better outcomes seems to me pretty implausible .
You're ignoring "lockdown might have been avoided entirely".
Opposition criticisms were frequently as lacking in analysis as was government policy.
I am not aware of any match of significance.
And wish to stay that way.
It’s the hope that kills you.
Betting PostF1: I'll post the blog a bit later but I've backed Antonelli each way for qualifying at 9.5 (boosted). He was narrowly behind Norris at the top of FP2, the circuit really suited the Mercedes last year, and he had a very strong outing in Brazil last time.
This series is surely the end for McCullum and Stokes, Crawley, possibly a few more, hopefully Key.
For next England coach, a dark horse might be Richard Dawson, currently of Glamorgan and a hundred times better a coach than McCullum.
Is there a parallel between the people who are fundamentalists on the BIble, and those who are dedicated Originalists on the Constitution?
https://youtu.be/I_JuYsrv4T4?list=PLBpiUxZcKxXTcvimScVkmRWMoDSJ9YTky&t=1268
"Democrats expressed outrage after Donald Trump accused a group of Democratic lawmakers of engaging in “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH” and that they should be arrested after they posted a video in which they told active service members they should refuse illegal orders."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/20/democrats-condemn-trump-military-video-post?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
https://morrisf1.blogspot.com/2025/11/las-vegas-grand-prix-2025-pre-qualifying.html
I am more interested in what we can change next time than calling for vengeance against people who have long since been booted out of office.
It's not that the most important lessons won't be learned - they aren't even being taught.
Politicians all crap, civil servants all wonderful, no lessons to learn, now write the nine-figure cheque for the lawyers writing the report please.
Now, if they could produce a report from the perspective of something like a transport accident investigation, going into detail about what led to the decisions that were made, what might be done differently next time, and with comparison of approaches taken in other countries, that one might be worth reading.
I’m not advocating that we should have let it rip. I think it would have been very, very bad, with overwhelmed hospitals etc. But there is a counter argument that it ‘could’ have been similar in deaths overall, just shifted forwards. I guess the argument is that those who died of covid were always going to, before vaccination at least.
NEW THREAD
I expect the myriad variety of cold viruses we get each winter contains the remnants of pandemics from times past.