But if it isn’t in the sun/mail nobody will care.
Gray - that presentation is 90 minutes long, but I had a flick and there’s some interesting predictions for London.
Julians, yeah it's odd, how does that work?.
Well this thread has completely gone to shit.
pandemic has been on the National Security risk register for yonks, but successive Governments have chosen to ignore / underplay it and undermine our resilience to respond.
Which is why I think the justifiable anger at the way the current government has handled it is bit too knee jerk - in 2009 apparently we were near the top of a WHO pandemic readiness league, any lessons learnt exercise or enquiry needs to go right back and see why we had no stocks of PPE ready, why the NHS/social care had so little capacity for a pandemic
My colleague at MK hospital says they are closing one of the covid wards, so lockdown working!
No route out of it without mass testing tho....
And testing centre here still not up & running, despite what Hancock keeps saying
Daft thing is if they'd left the rtPCR machines they nicked from all the unis, they couldve be been running weeks ago
Doesn’t Sweden have the lowest population density in Europe? Plus in a scandi winter they stay inside.
It hasn't, it's been good today, some great input, then kryton had a brainfart.
Edit - in response to Drac, sorry.
Spain
Italy
Belgium
Framce
Netherlands
UKPresumably we can expect our position to worsen as the others are ahead of us on the curve?
Out in Semi final on penalties I'm afraid....
This is meant in a light-hearted way.
Yeah one page of handbags, but a lot of good stuff.
Doesn’t Sweden have the lowest population density in Europe? Plus in a scandi winter they stay inside.
I think (saw it somewhere) about half the households in Sweden are single occupancy, which helps a lot.
kryton had a brainfart.
A user came on here and posted a very serious accusation. You might think that’s justified somehow but I didn’t - with regard to whom it is aimed at. That is my opinion. It’s done, finished.
Yeah ok i dropped the ball, I'm very sorry for not implementing a strategy for gaining the upper hand with regard to cover-19 but from now on i will be upfront and release all my data in a similar fashion to Tired of this parish.
As a result of my self imposed exile on the naughty step where i examined my faults so far i have informed the department of health that from this week onwards i will strive to produce a valid and repeatable accurate testing procedure using the finest laboratory equipment i can afford (perhaps i need to crowd fund?)
This will do as it has 150 experiments, a damn site more than i will need so once i have a proven testing procedure i'll move onto the common cold, HIV etc
Gray – that presentation is 90 minutes long, but I had a flick and there’s some interesting predictions for London.
Yeah... I haven't watched the video, just looked through the paper. Can't claim to understand it all, but yes it does give an interesting picture. No guarantees that it's more correct than any other of many approaches of course. One thing that's interesting in itself is just how much variation there is between different highly qualified groups in interpreting the current position, let alone predicting the likely future. I guess that all stems from the fact that we just can't currently test enough people to see definitively what the situation is at any given point in time.
Leadership across the Western World, [both Governments and Opposition parties] has been severely Lacking relation to the threat of a Pandemic.
The only Western leader of recent times who would have been on top of this is George W bush.
@TiRed - does your model follow the framework in the video below (but with the coin flipping bit he mentions - stolhistic?) Or do something different
Leadership across the Western World, [both Governments and Opposition parties] has been severely Lacking relation to the threat of a Pandemic.
The only Western leader of recent times who would have been on top of this is George W bush.
There's a fair few western leaders that seem to be on top of the pandemic, Merkle, Arden, Jakobsdóttir...
How come Boris seemed ok in his press release? Wasn't he in ICU a few days ago with I presume a very nasty cough and breathing difficulties? I spose Easter is the time of miracles..
The genetics thing that popped up on the last page is interesting and needs careful looking at, I think. Struck me that a lot of the UK's dead healthcare staff were Asian so I tried a count-up (source, Telegraph website dated today - probably credible for this purpose)
All of these folk were named, of course, most had pictures and a bit of potted history. I made my judgment from these.
34 dead
19 (56%) Asian (eastern Mediterranean to Phillipines)
5 (15%) Black (OK, I admit this was almost all just from pics)
9 (26%) White
1 (3%) unable to determine
(Edit: I know the NHS seems to run heavily on filippino nurses but still) Feels unbalanced and therefore "important" (hesitate to say significant)
I'm thinking that them being health workers makes them most likely to have caught this at work, removing
- some
of the socioeconomic aspect
(I'm claiming that the above assumption is slightly validated by the higher than expected proportion of women here at 44% ratehr than 20% generally reported in the "4 to 1" figure)
On immune system etc, a team from northern Italy reported a while ago that of over 500 pts with inflammatory bowel disease who were on their books, none had severe illness due to CV, nor even were tested for it. A lot of them were on really quite "gentle" immune modifying drugs for their IBD but a decent bunch (nealrly 40%) were on quite potent ones. None of this group was diagnosed as having COVID (though they weren't all tested of course - but the assumption would be that, if any did get it, none became ill enough to present to medical services and get testing)
500-odd isn't a big enough number; Nobody KNOWs how to interpret that, including the authors (see below) but it's certainly not looking like immunosuppression is massively harmful to your chances. Course, they may have isolated earlier & better than everyone else too.
The recent onset of this pandemic outbreak, which is still ongoing, and the lack of epidemiologically robust data, preclude us from drawing certain conclusions regarding its incidence and its effects in specific populations of patients. However, if we base our calculation on a mathematical model applied to the Wuhan region, which estimated a 86% undocumented cases, we could speculate that in Bergamo province a total of 46.220 patients were infected by SARS-CoV-2, accounting for 4% of the total population4. From this model we could estimate that 21 cases among our IBD cohort should have been infected
Makes you think ...
Sue Hill, vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said she believed UK deaths could rise to 30,000. She acknowledged that the government has a difficult job but said it gave the appearance of placing “political spin” over action.
Describing the daily Downing Street briefing as “a bit of a joke”, she said: “He [Boris Johnson or another cabinet minister] is sitting there speaking about subjects he doesn’t really understand and can’t answer questions about it. It’s political spin, isn’t it? They’re not doing themselves any favours.
“The thing that irritates me is cabinet ministers are standing up every day, addressing us as if we’re on a war footing and giving Churchillian quotes when they could be doing a few simple things like getting more bits of plastic and paper [which personal protective equipment is made out of] on to wards.”
does your model follow the framework in the video below
Almost, except the DATA is poorly described by those models as they assume mass action mixing (everyone contacts everyone else). Those models are statistically inferior to some other models such as Gompertz log-logistic growth model, where the break on exponential growth is a different shape. As for simulation of the models, well one can roll dice, and normally will if one can't write down the solution. For simple models you can solve them - for the ones in the video, you need to wheel out the differential equation engine. These equations are updated using Possion random numbers for new cases/deaths per day derived from the rate equations and simulated thousands of times to get a distribution. Good when there are 10 cases/day, not really needed when there are 1000s/day.
The really crazy thing is that the Pandemic Planning Comittee was set up by George W Bush.
Apparently, back in 2005 as New Orleans was drowning he began setting up a program to prepare for potential pandemics. He read a book about the Spanish Flu whilst on holiday and became obsessed by it. When he came back from his hols he wouldn’t shut up about it, his coleages thought him a little obsessed and tried to distract him from it. He wouldn’t give up on it and eventually managed to secure 7 billion in funding for the project. (there’s a speech he gave back in 2005 on you tube) Both Obama and Trump failed to keep up the stock levels of equipment as it either got used up or went out of date. It’s said that much of the material the US does have to fight the Pandemic is from what’s left over from the stockpile Bush set up.
Who’d have thunk?
Half way there… true that Trump wanted nothing do with the earlier work of the Pandemic Planning Committee, but he also got rid it in it’s more recent form, the more recent Global Health Security and Biodefense Unit. The shade you’re throwing at Obama is unjustified, he took the threat very seriously. There has only been one jackass of a President who didn’t care about being ready for a possible pandemic… the current one.
The biggest thing about Covid19 is that it has highlighted the weakness of both our politicians and journalists in regards to scientific knowledge rather than opinion or ideology. The number of people with a scientific background in parliament is pitiful, hence it is likely any government from our current group of politicians would perform similarly whatever their political persuasion.
Here you go, Obama’s people trying to prepare Trump’s regime for almost exactly what he is facing now:
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/16/trump-inauguration-warning-scenario-pandemic-132797
I disagree.
Option A - Chris Grayling
Option B - Yvette Cooper
There are some great MPs about, unfortunately just not in the cabinet as Boris filled it with Hard Brexit (remember that?) yes men (and women).
And you don’t even need to be party political about it:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4616502/user-clip-david-cameron-pandemic-preparedness
On both sides of the Atlantic, national populists have shown distain for scientists, especially those that make clear that an international approach is needed on issues such as pandemic control. They’re running back to them now, but only if they get to say “this great country” as often as possible in their own missives.
Kelvin,
Not throwing shade on Obama. I just didn't want to come across as partisan by redacting information from the source I got it from. I was also conscious that the narrative playing out was that Obama set up the committee, which I initially bought into. So wanted to be totally accurate.
Just like you, I didn't want to be party political about it!
I was aware how the Obama administration had tried to prepare the incoming administration on not only the potential for pandemics but other things like the apparatus for monitoring the dispersal of nuclear material post Soviet collapse which Trump disbanded.
The main, frankly quite astonishing thing is how seriously Bush took the threat considering what a clown he was in almost every other respect.
Doggone,
I don't doubt Cooper and Grayling would have done a better job than the current incumbent but they weren't exactly screaming from the sidelines. The only UK politician I am aware of who has been (tweeting if not screaming) from early on in this pandemic was Rory Stewart.
The narrative going round was that Trump disbanded the committee to spite Obama and that's fake news, something we should be really carefully about, we don't need to be giving the right wing press ammunition.
Nothing in what I've said is party political or prejudicial.( or in your post to be fair) There's only 3 people I've found who were sounding the alarm vigorously from early on in the curve, Nicholas Taleb, Anthony Scaramucci and Rory Stewart. None of them in positions of political power. Cooper and Grayling may not be in the cabinet but that shouldn't have disbarred them from screaming from the (smouldering) rafters.
What is indisputable is that Bush was screaming from the rafters before the match had been struck.
Inkster did you not make another thread specifically to keep political rambling separate from this one?
It was a fine idea.
It was a fine idea.
Plus one please
You don't have to be a scientist in parliament to take seriously what is said by epidemiologists. They are more likely to be disregarded, however, if what they propose is inconvenient and expensive. The decision to listen to Cummings and Halpern wasn't based on scientific ignorance, it was the hope of a few thousand dead codgers and a few nudges here and there and the problem would go away at minimal cost and solve a few other issues at the same time. Add into that scenario a few lunatic voices decrying experts and 'certainly not doing what the Europeans are doing' and you have a recipe for the disaster we now see. They are keen to cover this up but a lot of dead bodies scattered about makes it a bit more complicated even with a compliant press. I really do not think all politicians would have behaved in the same way simply because they were not scientists, this is about politics.
Let’s not forget it took a bit of nudge from the scientists
scientists-urge-government-to-enforce-social-distancing-now
Now about that step by step plan you keep saying your following?
Time for another post on Sweden...
I saw above that people were asking about population densities and whether that could be a factor in why we seem to be managing. Whilst it is true that we only have 10 million people in a country that is, well, large (3x the size of the UK maybe), that does not tell the whole story. Our population is heavily concentrated in a few urban areas and these areas are just as crowded as those in the UK. From memory, the large part of the folk live in either Stockholm, Malmö, Göteborg, Linköping or Uppsala, with Västerås and Örebro jostling for entry into the top five. After that, the towns are really just, well, towns. Once you start heading north there is really just forest from Uppsala upwards. Ask Howsyourdad1 what's between Gävle and Åre... (spoiler: Not much apart from forest and Östersund)
Back to Stockholm though, which has about a million people and is really dense. Apartment blocks are everywhere and it has a public transport system that is crammed on busy days. I can't really compare it to London, but it is certainly no less busy than any other major city. Yes, there may be more people living on their own, but they will be in apartment blocks full of 25-35 KVM flats and having to mix with people on the way down to the street and in the streets themselves. The odd thing is that this single living means that we have a higher than normal rate of suicides in single people, usually men, that find living on their own too much.
I genuinely cannot say why Sweden is doing better than other places (I hope it is though), but it might be that the government has been less able in recent years to privatise the health service (although the government before the Social Democrats took over tried to), or because the smaller population means that we can react faster to make plans and implement them. It could be that we have more preparedness for crisis, although that part of things seems to have slipped in recent years as the threat of Russian invasion has receded slightly (ignore the submarine incursions for a moment).
If we are ahead of things, I really think it is because our PM is both taking this seriously _and_ appears to be taking it seriously. The government has collected a lot of people around them that are able to communicate this to the population. Up until Easter we had daily briefings by the PM and a select panel of experts and decision makers; the PM was really just there to introduce the people around him and then let them carry the briefing. The experts stuck to facts, they offered advice, they asked us to act responsibility. There was no bluster and little politicing. The impression I got was that this was being taken seriously from the start and that all of us had a role to play. The population, for the most part, took this to heart and followed the guidance. It helps that Swedes have a natural predisposition to social distancing; they just asked us to crank that up to 11.
There will always be idiots, always the ones that want to go skiing at easter or go for food with their friends, but I hope that these will be fewer than they would be and that this can both slow the spread and protect the population. The spike I was expecting last week seems to have not truly appeared, but there does seem to be an increase of sorts. We'll have to see what the next week brings.
So, you have 1/6 of the U.K. population, & 1/10 of the deaths, growing at the same rate, doubling every 6 days.
So not really that much different then. If they are a week behind us, the per capita numbers are almost identical.
The governments appearing to do better at this are led by women? More likely to listen to advice, more compassionate maybe?
Maybe the lessons learnt about international cooperation and listening to experts will extend to climate change. Maybe.
We’re still at a point where large numbers of hospitalisations will be with those infected pre lockdown. Or passed on to household members etc.
Once the majority of newly reported infections are post lockdown we might be able to make a comparison of the different approaches. At least that’s my take on it.
The problem with comparing countries is that we aren't really comparing like for like, for example in UK and America, if you take out London and the SE and New York, numbers reduce significantly.
If you compare regions of the UK they'll fair similar to Sweden, Scotland is sitting at 110 deaths per million for exanple, Sweden at 89, UK as a whole 156. I don't have the number for London but it'll be much higher while conversely in other regions of England it'll be lower. So take out London and the SE and the UK is probably similar to Sweden. Not a million miles at least.
So it's just not really right to
directly compare country to country and draw simplistic conclusions. There are numerous factors in why some places get hit worse than others. I personally think incidence of global travel and interconnectivity must be playing some kinda factor. Would be really interesting to see a global animation of the virus traveling around the world and to compare it to main business and tourism routes and things like that just a hunch, but must be some kinda correlation there?
The virus also takes time to move around though so some countries just simply have more time, and there's different levels of preparedness and probably a million other factors that I can't think of you'd need to compare. Like how resilient a particular population is, how does the health of particular nation help or hinder in mitigating effects?
How the virus affects a nation isn't really a linear thing, so I don't think direct simplistic comparisons are really all that useful without the backup of alot more data.
But I don't expect that kinda sense to prevail mind you, people will still cry blue murder when all is done. But they'll probably be doing so without considering all factors.
Big one is people looking at the US and tutting their head, well obviously it's going to have big numbers but they're are still only at 67 deaths per million. That is significantly better than western europe has done.
This is a dress-rehearsal for the impact of CC. The populist/nationalist governments are making humanity weaker and it's more galling as, right now more than ever,we really need to work together.
It's so depressing. Trump, Boris etc are just behaving like bald men fighting over a comb whilst the world burns.
Boris singles out two foreign nurses for special praise! Lies are so deep rooted with this government, it would not surprise me one bit if this was in some way partly fabricated (the whole Boris in intensive care thing)
CC?
it would not surprise me one bit if this was in some way partly fabricated (the whole Boris in intensive care thing)
And all the Dr's and nurses, some of whom have been identified are in on the conspiracy ?
Don't be daft eskay, seriously.
As rightly said above, there's a thread for the politicos, all you kid on suits can go on there, keep this thread relevant to the actual situation.
Sesomah77
Would be really interesting to see a global animation of the virus traveling around the world and to compare it to main business and tourism routes and things like that just a hunch, but must be some kinda correlation there?
The reasons you give for London being worse hit than other parts of the country are all the reasons why our useless government should have been on top of this from the start.
Instead, they continued to allow people from Lombardy to fly into the country until very recently, and announced they would discuss Covid19 in COBRA - after the weekend.
Johnson was so blasé about it that he managed to catch it himself.
Let's not make excuses for them, they have been incompetent all the way along, even now.