Corona Virus main thread

[sonyc 5,484]

9 minutes ago, king canary said:

I think you've misread- she is a Labour voter but her constituency is firmly Tory and that tribalism is pretty much baked in. Same as when I lived in Tower Hamlets- so solidly Labour that a vote anywhere else is basically pointless.

Sorry King. I think I have interpreted and replied to a slightly different matter...your post is very clear.

I was wondering though that if a credible alternative emerged, then some Tory strongholds might weaken. Like under Atlee, and in the aftermath of a national crisis, the country changed allegiance.

Yet, I'm suspecting reading between the lines that it may not even do that in your mum's constituency!

[ricardo 7,334]

6 minutes ago, sonyc said:

Scientists argue just like politicians shock. 

I've read similar critiques ...and posted the Centre for Diseases article for the latest revised death rate this morning (0.26%).

He argues well in this article against Ferguson's thinking and modelling (and with sarcastic humour...for which he gets a brownie point from me) but he doesn't really give much guidance on what the government should have done with his improved modelling. Should we have locked down? Should we have had a two tier Strategy? A regionalised one (based on outbreaks?), Etc

Looking at the graphs of infections and fatalities from countries that had different degrees of lockdown or none at all, it is hard to disagree that they are all broadly similar.

What conclusion should we draw from that?

[Barbe bleu 809]

7 minutes ago, sonyc said:

Scientists argue just like politicians shock. 

I've read similar critiques ...and posted the Centre for Diseases article for the latest revised death rate this morning (0.26%).

He argues well in this article against Ferguson's thinking and modelling (and with sarcastic humour...for which he gets a brownie point from me) but he doesn't really give much guidance on what the government should have done with his improved modelling. Should we have locked down? Should we have had a two tier Strategy? A regionalised one (based on outbreaks?), Etc

If we went for a regional approach do we think that people would stay in theirs or would it encourage the sort of mixing that would be terrible?

I reckon that we are a very mobile society naturally who are getting beyond fed up and prepared to push at the laws anyway.  Regional opening might actually make the problem worse.

[sonyc 5,484]

Just now, ricardo said:

Looking at the graphs of infections and fatalities from countries that had different degrees of lockdown or none at all, it is hard to disagree that they are all broadly similar.

What conclusion should we draw from that?

That we shouldn't have had a lockdown? That the virus would simply affect the populations it would have done?

 

[Barbe bleu 809]

20 minutes ago, ricardo said:

Looking at the graphs of infections and fatalities from countries that had different degrees of lockdown or none at all, it is hard to disagree that they are all broadly similar.

What conclusion should we draw from that?

Do you have this information?  We saw the swedish one with a similar pattern but are there others?

Edited May 25, 2020 by Barbe bleu

[sonyc 5,484]

3 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:

If we went for a regional approach do we think that people would stay in theirs or would it encourage the sort of mixing that would be terrible?

I reckon that we are a very mobile society naturally who are getting beyond fed up and prepared to push at the laws anyway.  Regional opening might actually make the problem worse.

It wasn't my suggestion, I was wanting to know what strategy might have aligned to the thrust of the article. It's one thing criticising a model but a government needs to act on it appropriately. A regionalised strategy was one idea that emerged as an example. You can criticise as a scientist but it might have been more useful to also state what might be the alternatives and options relating to your thinking. 

Edited May 25, 2020 by sonyc

[Van wink 2,994]

33 minutes ago, sonyc said:

Well if Labour develop good statesmanship with competent, realistic policies that might bring society together along with green issues addressed in any campaign then I would be tempted 

As would many more. 

[ricardo 7,334]

12 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:

Do you ha r this information?  We saw the swedish one with a similar pattern but are their others?

I am looking at Worldometers and they all look pretty similar albeit some are at different stages. None appear to be showing a second peak, hopefully that is positive.

[Van wink 2,994]

15 minutes ago, sonyc said:

That we shouldn't have had a lockdown? That the virus would simply affect the populations it would have done?

 

Many more vulnerable people would have died.

[Van wink 2,994]

2 minutes ago, ricardo said:

I am looking at Worldometers and they all look pretty similar albeit some are at different stages. None appear to be showing a second peak, hopefully that is positive.

Don’t they all follow similar epidemic curves, all we tried to do was flatten it.

[Barbe bleu 809]

17 minutes ago, sonyc said:

It wasn't my suggestion, I was wanting to know what strategy might have aligned to the thrust of the article. It's one thing criticising a model but a government needs to act on it appropriately. A regionalised strategy was one idea that emerged as an example. You can criticise as a scientist but it might have been more useful to also state what might be the alternatives and options relating to your thinking. 

I don't disagree at all.  I would say also that it is very easy to 'prove' a model is wrong after the event.  

If you are to criticise it should really be done before the event and you should offer an alternative.  Picking over a corpse doesn't help revive it.

To be fair to the author though he doesn't claim to have expertise in this area just an interest (as far as I can tell from a scan of the blog) in what he sees as 'bad science' . 

 

[ricardo 7,334]

10 minutes ago, Van wink said:

Don’t they all follow similar epidemic curves, all we tried to do was flatten it.

I think the opposite position is that we could have also flattened it by drawing a ring around the vulnerable and letting everyone else carry on as normal. That seems to be Gupta's  position if I am understanding it correctly.

With different countries using different strategies it should be possible in retrospect to see who got it right.

[sonyc 5,484]

3 minutes ago, ricardo said:

I think the opposite position is that we could have also flattened it by drawing a ring around the vulnerable and letting everyone else carry on as normal. That seems to be Gupta's  position if I am understanding it correctly.

With different countries using different strategies it should be possible in retrospect to see who got it right.

That has been my roughly my take on all that I've read, with the one key question remaining about what we would have done with mass gatherings (shops, sport etc). As I'm not sure about the latter, clearly the likes of Atalanta, Cheltenham, Liverpool are questions hanging in the air.

[BigFish 1,986]

1 hour ago, sonyc said:

Scientists argue just like politicians shock. 

I've read similar critiques ...and posted the Centre for Diseases article for the latest revised death rate this morning (0.26%).

He argues well in this article against Ferguson's thinking and modelling (and with sarcastic humour...for which he gets a brownie point from me) but he doesn't really give much guidance on what the government should have done with his improved modelling. Should we have locked down? Should we have had a two tier Strategy? A regionalised one (based on outbreaks?), Etc

Important to realise he is not a specialist, not an academic, just a mouthy GP.

[ricardo 7,334]

15 minutes ago, sonyc said:

That has been my roughly my take on all that I've read, with the one key question remaining about what we would have done with mass gatherings (shops, sport etc). As I'm not sure about the latter, clearly the likes of Atalanta, Cheltenham, Liverpool are questions hanging in the air.

Well, I'm  on record on this thread in saying the lockdown came a week to ten days too late and also to continue accepting flights from Milan went on far longer than reasonable. 

[Yellow Fever 3,734]

1 hour ago, sonyc said:

Scientists argue just like politicians shock. 

I've read similar critiques ...and posted the Centre for Diseases article for the latest revised death rate this morning (0.26%).

He argues well in this article against Ferguson's thinking and modelling (and with sarcastic humour...for which he gets a brownie point from me) but he doesn't really give much guidance on what the government should have done with his improved modelling. Should we have locked down? Should we have had a two tier Strategy? A regionalised one (based on outbreaks?), Etc

The point about science is that you can debate, argue, harangue - but eventually you accept the facts. Does your hypothesis fit the facts  and make useful predictions or not. Even our accepted models on say 'gravity' are known to be incomplete and not above reproach - just come up with a better one!

[Creative Midfielder 1,985]

1 hour ago, king canary said:

My mum is the same- Labour voter in a safe Tory seat. FPTP is a system basically designed to breed political apathy. 

That is exactly right, political apathy and preservation of the status quo is baked into our system, and by that measure alone it has been extraordinarily successful. But by any normal measure e.g. the economy, quality of public services, level of consumer and environmental protections, social welfare, community cohesion and even some pretty basic stuff, e.g. the transport system, the UK system has performed very poorly by comparison to our peers for a very long time now.

Unless people are sufficiently discontent to shake off this apathy then we will continue to fall further and further behind other countries who make wiser choices. You would have thought after what we've been through this last decade that we might have reached that point but clearly we haven't, exactly as you said previously people still prefer to hold their nose and vote for the same old, same old......and here we are, we have got what people voted for (well 42.6% of them anyway, which is a big win in the UK system!).

Must confess I used to do the same (hold my nose) until I realised that it was also completely pointless, so decided a good while ago that win or lose I may as well vote for the candidate I really believe is best - of course if more people did that then there would be hope of change for the better but TBH I've got to the point where I just don't believe it is going to happen.

We've got 4.5 years ahead of trying to recover from this pandemic and from the first econmic depression for almost a century with far and away the least competent government in my lifetime in charge. Other than actually being at war, I'm really not sure how things could be much worse.....☹️

[sgncfc 1,221]

My initial thoughts haven't been changed too much by what each country has done - we should have followed the Asian countries prior experience of SARS and copied what they did. But we didn't, so lots of people have died unnecessarily and we have wrecked our economy. I'm not sure why we didn't trust the Asian experience - probably because of Western Europe's inherent distrust of that region - especially as their healthcare systems are generally much more efficient than ours are. Maybe we simply didn't have their capability and resources.

In the UK we were undoubtedly scared by the modellers, and the fact that their forecasts of doom coincided with Italy and Spain going through their peaks. Some of what we did was therefore understandable, but if we were going to lockdown, even at the time it was clear we should have done it earlier.

Johnson is just a politician. He has been seriously ill and clearly completely out of his depth politically throughout this entire period. His skillset is based on bluster and confidence and was therefore well matched to Brexit, and consequently completely mismatched to this kind of international calamity. He also has almost no capable support structure in his government - deliberately so, because it was designed to deal with a different issue. Almost all of the lieutenants he has in place are also outside their skillset, so it's not that surprising that the government is constantly trying to convince itself and everyone else that it knows what it's doing. The Cummings disaster is just another step along the path to total loss of credibility.

No one believes anything being said anymore do they? We are lucky that the virus is burning out naturally - as SARS did; as MERS did, as H1N1 did. But it will be back - as all of those came back. We have no strategy to deal with it yet.

[daly 499]

Keelan

Never said I was a Boris lover but Corbyn was the main reason The Tories won so convincingly. 
Bit like choosing between Naismith and Lafferty

Both poor

[Van wink 2,994]

1 hour ago, ricardo said:

I think the opposite position is that we could have also flattened it by drawing a ring around the vulnerable and letting everyone else carry on as normal. That seems to be Gupta's  position if I am understanding it correctly.

With different countries using different strategies it should be possible in retrospect to see who got it right.

I can see the logic in that but we didnt really know, and still dont fully know, who all the vulnerable groups were.

[Barbe bleu 809]

5 minutes ago, sgncfc said:

My initial thoughts haven't been changed too much by what each country has done - we should have followed the Asian countries prior experience of SARS and copied.

In the UK we were undoubtedly scared by the modellers, and the fact that their forecasts of doom coincided with Italy and Spain going through their peaks. Some of what we did was therefore understandable, but if we were going to lockdown, even at the time it was clear we should have done it earlier.

We dis try to copy the Asian countries especially South Korea.  Containment by contact tracing was our primary response.  South Korea did it very well but we didn't.   There are probably many reasons it failed (not least  that picking out flu like symptoms during cold and flu season was always going to be hard) but the truth is you cant just turn on an extensive network of tracers, an engaged public and fairly intrusive government surveillance like a light switch.

In terms of lockdown the swedish will say that if you sont do it earlier it is pointless but at against this is are two facts:  (1) that the modelling  clearly predicted that if we went to early all we would do is trash the economy and get it all again later. And (2) the test data showed (probably wrongly) that we didn't have much disease in mid march.

Is the problem that we might have 'followed the science' a little too closely?

[Barbe bleu 809]

8 minutes ago, Van wink said:

I can see the logic in that but we didnt really know, and still dont fully know, who all the vulnerable groups were.

True, but if no one of retirement age was exposed we would be better off than any european nation right now.

Is this our biggest failure?

[Yellow Fever 3,734]

10 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:

We dis try to copy the Asian countries especially South Korea.  Containment by contact tracing was our primary response.  South Korea did it very well but we didn't.   There are probably many reasons it failed (not least  that picking out flu like symptoms during cold and flu season was always going to be hard) but the truth is you cant just turn on an extensive network of tracers, an engaged public and fairly intrusive government surveillance like a light switch.

In terms of lockdown the swedish will say that if you sont do it earlier it is pointless but at against this is are two facts:  (1) that the modelling  clearly predicted that if we went to early all we would do is trash the economy and get it all again later. And (2) the test data showed (probably wrongly) that we didn't have much disease in mid march.

Is the problem that we might have 'followed the science' a little too closely?

Most of the evidence points to the virus arriving largely when we thought - not months earlier and unless you can explain the lack of excess mortality earlier its mute. The flattening of the curve in all almost all countries to some level is most easily explained not by some magical non AB herd immunity but by people increasing social distancing, taking precautions and hence limiting/slowing the spread

As to 2nd flare ups - both China and Korea have seen small episodes and I have zero doubt that if we 'went back to normal' we would ourselves rapidly see such a 2nd wave. There are lots of us who clearly haven't had it! That said the virus has already sadly taken a lot of 'low hanging fruit'  as in care homes and the like.

The main problem was simply Johnson as ever (as with Cummigs now) dithering and delaying on some sort of lockdown until too late. That cost lives.

[lake district canary 4,531]

3 hours ago, king canary said:

I slightly agree but I think you've got to factor in the role our electoral system plays in keeping this duopoly. Too many people in this country have votes that either dont count or only count if they hold their nose and vote for one of these two parties. 

 I agree you have to factor the electoral system into this and it is infuriating to live in a place where your vote basically doesn't count.

Until people get so fed up with the two party system that they stop voting for either of them, this mad duopoly is going to carry on. It could change - but we probably need a new party to come up with something that can grab a huge amount of people's attention and make the breakthrough.  Unfortunately the Libdems aren't up to the task, the Greens......well they could make headway if circumstances were right.....but to get enough people to vote for something other than tory or labour, it is going take something radical - or a green/liberal alliance based - or something totally new.. 

Brexit might still do it - if Boris and his crew carry on like they are, the brexit negotiations are likely to p*ss off enough voters to vote for another party next time.  Unfortunately, it looks as if Labour have someone in charge who has a bit about him so all the labour voters who voted tory will probably go back to labour.....but then if somehow the tories can completely break down as a party, it might just see a sea change in the two party system. 

There are other factors - further devolution may happen with NI being a particular issue with brexit and who might start heading towards independence and/or a united Ireland and Scotland is always likely to vote for independence if the brexit thing unravels.  Wales might tag along for the ride too when hey see NI and Scotland go.  All this will take years to happen, but the one thing I am totally sure of is that the way we choose our governments is so outdated as to be utterly impractical. Year after year of inept t*t for tat politics, style over substance and a media that can't help itself is gradually producing a dystonic society. 

All those films that depict different versions of dystonia don't look half so far fetched as they used to.  I always think of The Running Man where the dystonia is almost complete - with people engulfed and addicted to the media/government led games.....accept as in the film there will always be people who will fight for freedom.  To stop us heading towards that kind of world, it will need a huge change in society because as it stands with Trump in America and the UK echoing the way the US are doing things with it's "style over substance", the way forwards is going to be rocky.  

Bringing it back to today, the way the virus situation has been handled from the word go was predictable, with no preparation or planning and then half measures - but then we did vote Boris in, so maybe it is all our fault..........

 

 

 

[BigFish 1,986]

50 minutes ago, daly said:

Keelan

Never said I was a Boris lover but Corbyn was the main reason The Tories won so convincingly. 
Bit like choosing between Naismith and Lafferty

Both poor

Sad, but true

[wcorkcanary 4,329]

1 minute ago, BigFish said:

Both poor

Both quite well off actually  seeing as they were happy to take the Clubs money even when it was clear they had no future here. 😉💰💰💰....apart from future wages of course.

[BigFish 1,986]

Johnson's ambition to be world leading takes another leap forward. UK 543 Italy 539 (deaths per million)

[sonyc 5,484]

I see Cummings is giving us the honour of a statement. Clearly, this will be an attempt to close off debate, encourage some sympathy and buy off the public with an apology. The Scottish CMO did the same but then Sturgeon removed her. 

Anyone predict anything different?

 

[Barbe bleu 809]

Issues inherent in the FPTP voting system, 

Brexit

Inadequacy of minor parties

UK nationalist movements and independence.

Dystopian societies

Media addiction 

The Running Man (!)

Trump.

Having now pretty much abandoned discussion of the virus can anyone tell me where we can discuss the most important issue of the year or do I find something else to do?

 

15 minutes ago, lake district canary said:

 I agree you have to factor the electoral system into this and...  maybe it is all our fault.........

 

[Herman 9,700]

He's going to sack Johnson.