Corona Virus main thread

[Barbe bleu 812]

4 hours ago, Creative Midfielder said:

 

Whilst I'm trying not to drop too deeply into 'I told you so mode', there is one particular bugbear of mine which I posted  quite a few times about and attracted a lot of critcism (and/or derision) from certain posters that get a good airing - the failure to learn lessons from other countries:

A lot of what you say is rightly derided.  It's your eagerness to latch onto any thing that will allow an attack, no matter how tenuous, that allows for derision. There is more often than not a pretty good argument in you, it just gets a bit wrapped up in paranoia and enthusiasm

That said, if you claimed that we should learn from other countries then you were correct to do so, I dont recall anyone on here saying otherwise but that doesn't make you wrong.   

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

And now we know why Boris beggared off on a free holiday this week.

Good time to build some castles out of sand? 

[Herman 9,712]

21 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:

A lot of what you say is rightly derided.  It's your eagerness to latch onto any thing that will allow an attack, no matter how tenuous, that allows for derision. There is more often than not a pretty good argument in you, it just gets a bit wrapped up in paranoia and enthusiasm

That said, if you claimed that we should learn from other countries then you were correct to do so, I dont recall anyone on here saying otherwise but that doesn't make you wrong.   

Quite a few were saying that we should look to other countries like New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea. Some were even saying Sweden. I'm not sure what happened to them though. 😀

[Creative Midfielder 1,985]

1 hour ago, ricardo said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_North,_Lord_North

😃

Indeed another Eton boy (you have wonder whether the UK wouldn't be a much better place if Eton had never existed) and I guess that you having to go back over 200 years to even find a contender rather tells its own story.

Is Johnson worse than Lord North? I would certainly argue that he is, though in truth it is very difficult to do a genuine comparison of the relative performance of two Prime Ministers so far apart in time and in the political scenarios they had to handle.

Of course it is also a somewhat vague & subjective question so no real surprise that different people will arrive at different answers. IMO Johnson fully deserves my billing as 'worst ever' but perhaps if I removed the 'ever' and replaced it with the 'worst in the last 200 years' then we might finally agree about something?

[Creative Midfielder 1,985]

1 hour ago, Barbe bleu said:

A lot of what you say is rightly derided.  It's your eagerness to latch onto any thing that will allow an attack, no matter how tenuous, that allows for derision. There is more often than not a pretty good argument in you, it just gets a bit wrapped up in paranoia and enthusiasm

That said, if you claimed that we should learn from other countries then you were correct to do so, I dont recall anyone on here saying otherwise but that doesn't make you wrong.   

Really?? You don't think many thousands of people dying unnecessarily are worth an 'attack' on the cause?

What is equally bizzarre, is that even now you still appear to be characterising as ‘tenuous’ what has in many cases now been confirmed by 2 HoC Select Committees in an unusually forthright way.

As for learning from other countries if you don't recall my posts being derided, or in your case 'dismissed' might perhaps be more accurate, then you have an appalling memory.

[Barbe bleu 812]

1 hour ago, Creative Midfielder said:

Really?? You don't think many thousands of people dying unnecessarily are worth an 'attack' on the cause?

What is equally bizzarre, is that even now you still appear to be characterising as ‘tenuous’ what has in many cases now been confirmed by 2 HoC Select Committees in an unusually forthright way.

As for learning from other countries if you don't recall my posts being derided, or in your case 'dismissed' might perhaps be more accurate, then you have an appalling memory.

Read what is said.  Then read it again. 

What you thought you read and what you did in fact read are often not the same.

The government has been rightly criticised on these pages since the start, even by people you  (rightly or wrongly) would regard as natural supporters.    Yes, I do think attacks are warranted. I wouldn't say otherwise and in these pages I have been very critical as have many others.  But there comes a point where there is only so much 'why can't we be China/New Zealand/Vanuatu' nonsense that one can take.

[Creative Midfielder 1,985]

2 hours ago, Creative Midfielder said:

Is Johnson worse than Lord North? I would certainly argue that he is, though in truth it is very difficult to do a genuine comparison of the relative performance of two Prime Ministers so far apart in time and in the political scenarios they had to handle.

@ricardo - something that didn't occur to me in my original reply to you is there is, of course, one great similarity between North and Johnson..........it wasn't so much North's original incompetence in dealing with the North American colonies that 'cost us America' but the fact that he managed to elevate it to going to war with them, the Spanish, the French, and the Dutch.

Does that sound at all familiar?       Maybe the scenarios weren't quite as different as I originally suggested 😀

[ricardo 7,343]

National

38,520  - 181

rate of increase of 13.5% over 7 days

 

Local

Norwich infection rate     305.3  up 1.4% (7days)

16 patients in the N&N  5th Oct ( up 1 on previous report))

 

Vax ( vax percentages have been recalibrated to include 12-16 yr olds)

1st Dose      29,172             85.6% done                            Norwich numbers   74.6% 

2nd Dose     23,632             78.6% done                                                               68%

In Hospital

11-10-2021	7,003
10-10-2021	6,861
09-10-2021	6,704
08-10-2021	6,758
07-10-2021	6,785
06-10-2021	6,844
05-10-2021	6,863
04-10-2021	6,789

[ricardo 7,343]

Reality v Models

[ricardo 7,343]

Spikes and troughs in different places at different times.

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

1 hour ago, Barbe bleu said:

Read what is said.  Then read it again. 

What you thought you read and what you did in fact read are often not the same.

The government has been rightly criticised on these pages since the start, even by people you  (rightly or wrongly) would regard as natural supporters.    Yes, I do think attacks are warranted. I wouldn't say otherwise and in these pages I have been very critical as have many others.  But there comes a point where there is only so much 'why can't we be China/New Zealand/Vanuatu' nonsense that one can take.

Any reason you call it nonsense?

[Barbe bleu 812]

28 minutes ago, keelansgrandad said:

Any reason you call it nonsense?

The NZ comparison is fairly ludicrous. It's an island nation thousands of miles from anyone else with only one major entry point and with far less exposure to international routes than, say, the UK.

It has different seasons to us so would have been at an entirely different part of the infection cycle to Europe when this first hit. 

Once in the population it would spread only with difficulty as population density is far less. Granted, Auckland is a fair sized city but a 1/4 acre plot doesn't really compare with UK inner cities. It has no major transit system to compare with the London tube or our national railways.

That's why NZ could lock down after the UK and open up earlier.  Much the same reasoning can probably be applied to why Sweden could refuse to lock down at all but still have below average infection returns.

As to China, who really knows what happened...  

I just chucked in Vanuatu because I liked the name

It's not so much fair criticism I object to, but the falling over oneself yo criticise when the evidence used to support the case is so ropey.  The UK got many things wrong and the ground for criticism is fertile so why resort to weak or lazy arguments?

 

 

 

Edited October 12, 2021 by Barbe bleu

[KernowCanary 214]

Hospital figures back up again…. f*ck you Boris and letting flights from India in. We were doing so well then that Delta “seeded” and we are now at 35,000 - 40,000 plus every night now!!.

[horsefly 4,287]

2 hours ago, Barbe bleu said:

The NZ comparison is fairly ludicrous. It's an island nation thousands of miles from anyone else with only one major entry point and with far less exposure to international routes than, say, the UK.

It has different seasons to us so would have been at an entirely different part of the infection cycle to Europe when this first hit. 

Once in the population it would spread only with difficulty as population density is far less. Granted, Auckland is a fair sized city but a 1/4 acre plot doesn't really compare with UK inner cities. It has no major transit system to compare with the London tube or our national railways.

That's why NZ could lock down after the UK and open up earlier.  Much the same reasoning can probably be applied to why Sweden could refuse to lock down at all but still have below average infection returns.

As to China, who really knows what happened...  

I just chucked in Vanuatu because I liked the name

It's not so much fair criticism I object to, but the falling over oneself yo criticise when the evidence used to support the case is so ropey.  The UK got many things wrong and the ground for criticism is fertile so why resort to weak or lazy arguments?

 

 

 

Can one assume you consider Japan and South Korea to be more apt comparisons?

[Barbe bleu 812]

14 minutes ago, horsefly said:

Can one assume you consider Japan and South Korea to be more apt comparisons?

Yes.  But the lessons to be learnt are very different. South Korea didn't go for lockdown and instead went all out for contact tracing.  Japan basically did nothing. Very different approaches to welding people into their homes.

There is something very odd about East and South East Asian returns generally , possibly hinting at a genetic, diet, past exposure, cultural related underpinning to a lot of the relative success but I doubt it'll ever really be known. 

For what it is worth my hindsight tuppence is that the biggest failure was to contain the very earliest cases and it was this failure that led to everything  that then happened up until delta came along.

..that and the assumptions people on power seem to have made about care home settings.  Possibly suggesting that decision makers thought that hospitals and care home functioned in similar fashions and didn't really bother to seek the true 'view from the ground' .

If I were to say which nation we should, epidemiologically speaking, have copied from its S Korea, but the level of surveillance required would pose very important ethical considerations.

 

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

2 hours ago, Barbe bleu said:

The NZ comparison is fairly ludicrous. It's an island nation thousands of miles from anyone else with only one major entry point and with far less exposure to international routes than, say, the UK.

It has different seasons to us so would have been at an entirely different part of the infection cycle to Europe when this first hit. 

Once in the population it would spread only with difficulty as population density is far less. Granted, Auckland is a fair sized city but a 1/4 acre plot doesn't really compare with UK inner cities. It has no major transit system to compare with the London tube or our national railways.

That's why NZ could lock down after the UK and open up earlier.  Much the same reasoning can probably be applied to why Sweden could refuse to lock down at all but still have below average infection returns.

As to China, who really knows what happened...  

I just chucked in Vanuatu because I liked the name

It's not so much fair criticism I object to, but the falling over oneself yo criticise when the evidence used to support the case is so ropey.  The UK got many things wrong and the ground for criticism is fertile so why resort to weak or lazy arguments?

 

 

 

Some of your comparisons seem equally wrong to me.

The UK is also a set of Islands.

Auckland is bigger than any UK city other than London. 1.5 miilion.

Over 80 % of the population lives in urban areas. In fact about 60% lives in just seven areas.

Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch are all major entry points internationally.

People in NZ use public transport at a higher level than the UK. Wellington, where I used to live, has a large overland train system, much like the DLR, to get commuters from the suburbs to the City.

New housing sections in NZ are no longer 1/4 acre pavlova paradises as a large portion of the population are moving toward the metropolitan areas.

There was ample opportunity for the virus to spread just as easily in NZ as the UK. The metropolitan areas are social areas, for instance more Kiwis eat out than UK residents. More people play sport. And January is one of big holiday months. 

So while there are differences, your contempt for others opinion is not justified to the extent you extol.

Plain fact is, they had someone in charge who made decisions and did not base their decision on an assumption like our PM that the public would not obey any measures, where in fact they did.

[Well b back 3,190]

24 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:

Yes.  But the lessons to be learnt are very different. South Korea didn't go for lockdown and instead went all out for contact tracing.  Japan basically did nothing. Very different approaches to welding people into their homes.

There is something very odd about East and South East Asian returns generally , possibly hinting at a genetic, diet, past exposure, cultural related underpinning to a lot of the relative success but I doubt it'll ever really be known. 

For what it is worth my hindsight tuppence is that the biggest failure was to contain the very earliest cases and it was this failure that led to everything  that then happened up until delta came along.

..that and the assumptions people on power seem to have made about care home settings.  Possibly suggesting that decision makers thought that hospitals and care home functioned in similar fashions and didn't really bother to seek the true 'view from the ground' .

If I were to say which nation we should, epidemiologically speaking, have copied from its S Korea, but the level of surveillance required would pose very important ethical considerations.

 

Hi BB

I am always happy to be corrected, but as I understand it the report says thousands died because it was decided the ‘ British would not be compliant ‘ with a lock down. This was so far from the truth and was surely a move to score political points. The words Kung Flu and the action of shaking hands with people on a COVID ward shew zero respect or understanding of COVID.

The other major problem was the people being released from hospital into care homes with no testing or isolation and no PPE in the care homes. Some may recall this was the fate of my mother in law who was receiving respite when people were released from hospital into that care home and she caught COVID from one such person and died.

[CANARYKING 634]

4 hours ago, ricardo said:

National

38,520  - 181

rate of increase of 13.5% over 7 days

 

Local

Norwich infection rate     305.3  up 1.4% (7days)

16 patients in the N&N  5th Oct ( up 1 on previous report))

 

Vax ( vax percentages have been recalibrated to include 12-16 yr olds)

1st Dose      29,172             85.6% done                            Norwich numbers   74.6% 

2nd Dose     23,632             78.6% done                                                               68%

In Hospital

11-10-2021	7,003
10-10-2021	6,861
09-10-2021	6,704
08-10-2021	6,758
07-10-2021	6,785
06-10-2021	6,844
05-10-2021	6,863
04-10-2021	6,789

Wow, another181 deaths and 38,000 cases, lockdown here we come.

[Barbe bleu 812]

1 hour ago, keelansgrandad said:

Some of your comparisons seem equally wrong to me.

The UK is also a set of Islands.

Auckland is bigger than any UK city other than London. 1.5 miilion.

Over 80 % of the population lives in urban areas. In fact about 60% lives in just seven areas.

Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch are all major entry points internationally.

People in NZ use public transport at a higher level than the UK. Wellington, where I used to live, has a large overland train system, much like the DLR, to get commuters from the suburbs to the City.

New housing sections in NZ are no longer 1/4 acre pavlova paradises as a large portion of the population are moving toward the metropolitan areas.

There was ample opportunity for the virus to spread just as easily in NZ as the UK. The metropolitan areas are social areas, for instance more Kiwis eat out than UK residents. More people play sport. And January is one of big holiday months. 

So while there are differences, your contempt for others opinion is not justified to the extent you extol.

Plain fact is, they had someone in charge who made decisions and did not base their decision on an assumption like our PM that the public would not obey any measures, where in fact they did.

I do want to be pedantic or argumentative in this, if only because I really like and respect  your posts KG but.... if the UK and NZ were equally exposed why were they able to lockdown after us and still avoid all but a smattering of outbreaks?

I would take issue with the categorisation of cities.  The city of Auckland may be larger than Manchester or Birmingham proper but it can't 'compete' on key metrics with the conurbations as a whole. I'm not sure it would even meet the west Yorkshire urban area in terms of population or density.  And of course the level of mixing (the really key criteria) in Auckland, Wellington or Christchurch is going to be absolutely tiny when compared to that in London where something  like 20 million people are in the greater London area or its hinterland

In terms of ports of entry wellington Airport is indeed an international airport but it almost exclusively serves Oceania. In 2019 about 60,000 overseas visitors from outside the continent  entered NZ at wellington.  By comparison about the same number of passengers came into Heathrow from Milan (a key city in all this) in December 2019 alone.   And its worth mentioning that pretty much all big UK airports fly to Milan (and some to Wuhan if I recall correctly too).

 According to Wikipedia wellington does indeed have a large train system and 900,000 journeys are made on it each month.  There were 1.8million journeys on the London tube (excluding overground and dlr services) each day in June 21.  The Newcastle metro system welcomes around 3 million passengers a month. I dont know how crowded wellington trains are in comparison but it's clear to me that we mix, a lot.

And that is before we begin to talk about housing standards in the UK. I am sure sonyc can tell us about uphill battles against overcrowding and poor conditions from his work experience.

Honestly there is no 'fair comparison' to be made in epidemiological terms. Good luck to NZ , even if they have abandoned zero covid they have done what they needed to do. 

 

 

Edited October 12, 2021 by Barbe bleu

[Creative Midfielder 1,985]

5 hours ago, Barbe bleu said:

Read what is said.  Then read it again. 

What you thought you read and what you did in fact read are often not the same.

The government has been rightly criticised on these pages since the start, even by people you  (rightly or wrongly) would regard as natural supporters.    Yes, I do think attacks are warranted. I wouldn't say otherwise and in these pages I have been very critical as have many others.  But there comes a point where there is only so much 'why can't we be China/New Zealand/Vanuatu' nonsense that one can take.

I'm sorry @Barbe bleu, I will put this as politely as I can and more politely than you deserve but that reply is entirely predictable and a perfect example of the type of dissembling that has been your trademark, certainly for the last 18 months on here.

I used to find it very irritating but nowadays the only reaction it produces is a wry chuckle. Unfortunately, it has also always made any attempt to hold a reasonable debate with you totally pointless – so for a quite a while now I have very rarely bothered even to try but strangely every now and then I still let myself get suckered in – clearly I must still try a bit harder in future to completely ignore your nonsense.

So, I’ll sign off by pointing out that you, as usual, completely misrepresented what I said about international comparisons which essentially was two very simple points:

•           Some countries had responded far more effectively to the pandemic than the UK

•          We should have learnt lessons from the best performers

Yes, I did post that sort of thing many times, partly because you particularly, although there were others as well, refused to accept the accuracy of those statements and/or that they had any relevance to the UK’s situation. But if we look the Select Committee’s report we see that they echo both those criticisms and at times in very trenchant language such as:

“We must conclude that no formal evaluation took place, which amounts to an extraordinary and negligent omission given Korea’s success in containing the pandemic, which was well publicised at the time,”

Over and out 😊

[Barbe bleu 812]

59 minutes ago, Well b back said:

Hi BB

...

The other major problem was the people being released from hospital into care homes with no testing or isolation and no PPE in the care homes. Some may recall this was the fate of my mother in law who was receiving respite when people were released from hospital into that care home and she caught COVID from one such person and died.

I agree with this fully.  About 15 months ago I posted that the lockdown issue was less important than the failure to carry out the "contain phase' successfully and that a lot of deaths were possibly due to decision makers not really understanding how care homes operated and why assumptions as to infection control were dangerous.

For instance, it took ages for there to be a ban on multi site working.   I suspect that this might have been in part due to no one really realising this happened. I dont know this for sure of course but it's easy to see how academically minded former hospital practitioners might be detached from the day to day and how unless they reached out for an alternative view their own prejudices and assumptions would always be reinforced.

Edited October 12, 2021 by Barbe bleu

[Barbe bleu 812]

26 minutes ago, Creative Midfielder said:

I'm sorry @Barbe bleu, 

 

•           Some countries had responded far more effectively to the pandemic than the UK

   

•          We should have learnt lessons from the best performers

 

“We must conclude that no formal evaluation took place, which amounts to an extraordinary and negligent omission given Korea’s success in containing the pandemic, which was well publicised at the time,”

 

Over and out 😊

 

Read my posts and then read them again before posting in response.  You falsely read assumptions into every one of them.

The selected bits of the quote above actually agree with pretty much everything i have said here over the last two years.

Read back if you want , if you do you'll see that I have said many times that the poor execution of the 'contain phase' (ie the bit S Korea did well at) is the main source of our problems. 

You've got yourself in a p*ssy fit because I pointed out that france tested a lot less than the UK so the simple comparison you tried doesn't really hold water unless you account for this

I bet at the start of this (when you scented blood) you said that the daily data was flawed and under reported, as  result of the lack of testing, the true extent of cases and deaths in the UK. You'll have been right about that then so why are you now In effect  arguing with yourself?

 

Edited October 12, 2021 by Barbe bleu

[KernowCanary 214]

35 minutes ago, CANARYKING said:

Wow, another181 deaths and 38,000 cases, lockdown here we come.

No more lockdowns, if we have another one just imagine the sh*t we will be in considering all the sh*t happening now.

The government may be inept, but they know full well that if that happens after the vaccine rollout, they will be remembered as failures. No government regardless of their ineptitude wants to be remembered in history for that.

Edited October 12, 2021 by KernowCanary

[sonyc 5,489]

45 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:

And that is before we begin to talk about housing standards in the UK. I am sure sonyc can tell us about uphill battles against overcrowding and poor conditions from his work experience.

Honestly there is no 'fair comparison' to be made in epidemiological terms.

Not sure I can add much in terms of housing density or overcrowding BB - I'd be inclined though to say bigger households mix more of course - though there is evidence recently that infection from one household member to another has been less prevalent than we may have thought was the case (cannot recall the source right now). Covid has confounded us all.

I cannot answer epidemiologically either and yet I do believe (strongly) that what posters are also saying is that the political response in NZ  has been sure footed and Ardern has been impressive and also shown a caring attitude. She has gained trust as a result.

Johnson cannot be said to have acted in the same manner (1. Uncaring: "let the bodies pile high" 2. A lack of decisiveness: veering into lockdowns and always under pressure from his own back benches, 3: just how many U turns did we witness on a whole range of issues - masks being one).

My post a few days ago was very critical of the UK's response and I also stated that in time people will remember.

Too many deaths ... many avoidable you have to argue don't you?

It IS a public health failure. A major one.

Just typical today that Johnson is surfing in Marbella. Another holiday 35 days after the last one and he knew that this report was being prepared for publication. 

NZ is about to be much more challenged for sure. But look in a few years time at XS deaths as one measure.  The people in NZ and in the UK will look back and have very different stories.

Edited October 12, 2021 by sonyc

[Well b back 3,190]

Just typical today that Johnson is surfing in Marbella. Another holiday 35 days after the last one and he knew that this report was being prepared for publication. 
 

Indeed @sonyc 1 hour five minutes of the day left and not one comment from the person that leads our country, I don’t use this word often but what a c***.

1 last thing on the report, amazingly the government ‘ were not confident ‘ there would be a vaccine first quarter 2021. Maybe they should have followed the COS thread, the media outside the U.K. were very confident the Oxford vaccine would work from about July. I find it hard to believe that Andrew, Sarah and co briefed the foreign media and India, but not the U.K. government. It’s like the land of the fairies.

[Yellow Fever 3,744]

I see PCR confirmed positives still going UP (42,776,  +13%) and number of tests DOWN. Go figure.

And yes looking in the rear view mirror the patients admitted / deaths also now increasing again no doubt from infections 2 to 3 weeks ago. As the Select Committee Covid report is topical I wonder if we have learnt anything useful from last time(s) around ?

Third times a charm ?

Edited October 13, 2021 by Yellow Fever

[ricardo 7,343]

National

47,776  - 136

rate of increase of 13.2% over 7 days

 

Local

Norwich infection rate     303.1  up 5.5% (7days)

16 patients in the N&N  5th Oct ( up 1 on previous report))

 

Vax ( vax percentages have been recalibrated to include 12-16 yr olds)

1st Dose      36,847             85.6% done                            Norwich numbers   74.7% 

2nd Dose     26,946             78.7% done                                                               68.1%

In Hospital

12-10-2021	7,011
11-10-2021	7,012
10-10-2021	6,866
09-10-2021	6,707
08-10-2021	6,760
07-10-2021	6,787
06-10-2021	6,846
05-10-2021	6,864

[ricardo 7,343]

Gentle up and down has continued for some time.

[ricardo 7,343]

On the whole the last 7 weeks have be fairly flat with slight upward and downward movements.

[KernowCanary 214]

Oliver Cromwell is another one worse than Boris. Just like this floppy ****, he cancelled Christmas.