That means that some outcomes from the ensemble of models will be much higher and maybe lower too.
There's more variability when you look at regional values.
Less and More we’re discussing lockdown dates today, they clearly said the models were wrong so maybe this one doesn’t fall at BoJo’s door.
he was estimating a doubling time of over 5 days
On March 18th this was the official position - as communicated by Boris. It wasn't however correct. Cases were actually doubling every three days and deaths every two days. We probably had a few days to act earlier, a week perhaps, but the statement about halving deaths is a conservative one given the calls for action up to two weeks earlier. These calls probably had some influence on transmission prior to lockdown. My first analysis was posted on March 14 and showed exponential growth of cases and deaths from that date. It didn't get any better during the following week.
On another note, over on lockdown skeptics I've been arguing about Sweden. Mortality rate in UK is 600/M. Sweden 450/M. Denmark and Germany 100/M. Finland and Norway 50/M. It is very hard to not compare Sweden with the other Scandinavian countries. To have created an intervention that has saved nine times more lives is nothing short of a miracle intervention in the medical world. Norway have no excess deaths in the 85+ age group according to euromomo. We have about 30,000.
Norway have no excess deaths in the 85+ age group according to euromomo. We have about 30,000.
That’s our ‘ring of steel’ around care homes.
Turns out that bullshit costs lives.
this one doesn’t fall at BoJo’s door
He wasn’t in. But of course it does.
International football matches and horse racing going ahead, while scientists and medical workers in other countries were screaming advice at us. This stuff isn’t about hindsight. It’s about a government being absent ‘till it was way too late, despite us having the advance warning that other countries unfortunately did not.
Still, can we now go and stay with grandparents in the countryside ‘just in case’ we need childcare? I want a holiday in Cornwall [don’t have somewhere to escape to in the North East].
johnson is PM so everything falls at his door.
All of this assumes, of course, that all countries are recording deaths in exactly the same way.
Otherwise, it's like comparing apples and a blue Ford Sierra.
It’s like counting thousand and thousands of apples. Don’t fall for that bullshit, there are plenty of ways to look at and compare the scale of the impact of the virus in comparable countries. The government were doing so daily, ‘till it became clear how badly they were doing.
feeding in to the SAGE were 3 main teams SPI-M, SPI-B & NERVTAG
https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid-19-response
at least some were concerned about the strategy 2 weeks before they did lockdown
https://www.channel4.com/news/uk-government-advised-to-have-lockdown-two-weeks-before-announcement-made
It was becoming obvious that government believed we were either further behind other countries than we were (or herd immunity was the goal?)
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1238242156365721609
data was out there
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1239276487062233089
and the reason Johnson gets so flustered by Beth Rigbys questions is that he was saying this
https://twitter.com/RhubarbWaffle/status/1261948748382511104
while scientists and medical workers in other countries were screaming advice at us.
I remember being in the office like the calm before the storm moment and our lot started WFH a week before It was advised by Gov.
People were watching the news and getting in place for the fan and shit to hit, it really wasn’t a surprise.
I spoke to my boss yesterday and he said that all our main contractors are revising plans to move to 1m distancing by next week
Its the right move but, will be funny to see who they run over whilst reversing the bus
That video, picturing the UK as The proverbial Superman. Now look, we are the Verruca on the foot of the European continent that no-one wants to get anywhere near.
Water off a ducksback for BawJaws, he could fill an hour of you've been framed with such vids now.
Otherwise, it’s like comparing apples and a blue Ford Sierra
Not really. Excess mortality is counting cars. We can argue about the model and colour, but not whether it’s a car. That’s why excess mortality is the gold standard. Everyone dies once for the recording process.
The data is tragic. For the wrong reasons. If you learned probability and z-scores at school, those tables to find the chance of something happening stop at a score of 4. The U.K. was 40 standard deviations over its historic mean! To quote...
“You’re going to need a bigger table”.
data was out there
The data showing a clear trajectory was getting posted on this bloody thread while he let people go for one last night down the pub. It was obvious to any lay person who looked at it that we were doubling at least every three days. But they dithered, and people died.
he let people go for one last night down the pub.
He didn't "let" them down the pub, thats inaccurate.
He provided advance notice of shutting them and the selfishness and stupidity of some people meant that they used the opportunity to get down the nearest boozer as soon as possible.
I'm sure there were many people sat at home thinking "there's no way I'm doing that", but you can't account for the ignorant. He should have shut them down immediately accounting for that stupidity, rather than provide advanced warning which is a continued mistake.
Any areas in England showing a rise in cases (not R estimation) then due to the relaxation?
Every local health board region in Wales is showing a decline in cases.
Was wondering about 'ole Boris, who got hit pretty hard with COVID-19. It seems there are lots of longer term complications with this disease (e.g. https://www.vox.com/2020/5/8/21251899/coronavirus-long-term-effects-symptoms), and these reports of him needing big naps etc and him basically not doing much....
I don't know what I'm wondering, but I am wondering
but you can’t account for the ignorant.
Yes you can.
He should have shut them down immediately accounting for that stupidity, rather than provide advanced warning which is a continued mistake.
See you explained the answer yourself!
Ha! Fair enough...
Any areas in England showing a rise in cases (not R estimation) then due to the relaxation?
Somerset and North Devon. Whether it is relaxation related is a moot point.
Personally, I believe that given the machinations of government (meetings cycles and information filtering), we probably had less than a week to pull the trigger. Friday 20th would have been my Churchillian media moment. That would have saved a weekend and about one doubling time. Lives saved is again debatable because the source was most likely hospital and nursing home.
The biggest failure, which I have said all along, has been not devolving testing which limited all other options. NHS announced a ramping up on 11 March. SOP was published on 16 March for NHS labs - this should have been rolled out to ANY available labs (not just NHS/PHE) to expand capacity. Emptying hospitals of untested elderly to nursing homes looks like a tragedy and the untested part will have been capacity-limited.
"We conclude that face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 40%"
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3620070
The governments tactic of signalling changes in advance is a disaster, and you'd have hoped they'd have learned from the last night in the pub debacle, but no, in the run up to the last bank holiday they announced relaxing restrictions to come into force the following Monday. Immediately a significant minority go out and break the current lockdown.
Why they feel the need to test the water when it comes to the nations health is beyond me and is definitely one that needs answering in front of a select committee.
Short Cummings seems to need to blind taste every policy announcement rather than govern like a government that has been elected to do. It's almost like they don't have the strength of their own convictions and are reliant on the dark art of spin.
If one good thing has come out of this, I hope a lot of us are going to be angry enough to hold this shower of shit to account, I had turned my back on politics after the last election, but this is making my piss boil and I intend to work out how to constructively channel this anger to affect change.
And I'll post this once again - all-cause over 65 mortality in Scandinavia with England added for good measure from https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#
If I was Swedish, I would want to know what my neighbors were doing so differently. I'm English...
You can’t leave the vulnerable to shield themselves… you have to control a virus like this by the actions of all of us who are not vulnerable. It was true in February, and it is still true.
It's telling / damming that this clip of Rory Stewart (a leadership contender at one stage) has surfaced...
https://twitter.com/WillBlackWriter/status/1270844518531846145
Various red-tops (I won't link to them) are going with variations of "fast food industry must share the blame over coronavirus".
Poor hygenie practise? Lack of distancing in restaurants pre-lockdown? Nope. Becasue they make people fat.
Whatever happened to personal responsibilty?
Why they feel the need to test the water when it comes to the nations health is beyond me and is definitely one that needs answering in front of a select committee.
They're kite-flying. They see what reaction they get then either confirm or deny it. This is how populism works. But you could see that they even lost their ever-loyal mates in the right wing press when they called this wrong, hinting at a lifting, then not following through after all their front covers had been splashed with YAY!! LOCKDOWNS OVER!!!! but it went down like a lead balloon with all but the seriously hard of thinking.
The thing that's bizarre about all this is that we have been told that the reason that Cummings is invaluable is because he can gauge the public mood and which way the wind is blowing. Well if that's the case then why is he effectively making policy by a rolling ongoing focus-grouping of the nation?
The governments tactic of signalling changes in advance is a disaster, and you’d have hoped they’d have learned from the last night in the pub debacle, but no, in the run up to the last bank holiday they announced relaxing restrictions to come into force the following Monday. Immediately a significant minority go out and break the current lockdown.
Why they feel the need to test the water when it comes to the nations health is beyond me and is definitely one that needs answering in front of a select committee.
Short Cummings seems to need to blind taste every policy announcement rather than govern like a government that has been elected to do. It’s almost like they don’t have the strength of their own convictions and are reliant on the dark art of spin.
This government - and many of its predecessors - is only interested in how things appear, what will "play well" with people whose votes they might gain or retain. The power of the focus group used to hold onto power.
The actual outcomes are secondary and can be explained away, have blame shifted elsewhere or can simply be diverted from.
They continue to be successful (if the measure of success is holding onto and consolidating power) because they understand the importance of messaging far better than their rivals, and have been able to conceal their subtle ability to control messaging behind a clownish facade. Ha ha ha, that Chris Grayling, giving out a ferry contract to a company with no boats! What an arsehole! Dominic Cummings! What a nasty piece of work in his scruffy clothes and toddler's hat, thinking the rules don't apply to him!
Meanwhile the concise, memorable three-word slogans keep coming, all the MPs are remembering to say "our country" and "our NHS" and the news keeps rolling, squeezing out the stories that really matter, such as the relationship between the government and Serco for instance, allowing them to continue pursuing their ideological aims.
These are dangerous times for this government though, as most people with the power to vote have a basic grasp of illness and death, unlike other things the government gets to decide, such as EU membership, foreign policy and the economy.
Can they ride it out? With a general election not due for another four years, and no fundamental shift in the modus operandi of the British media, I wouldn't bet against it.
that Will Black Tweet is the kind of thing we need to see on the news so that the hard of thinking can see what actually was going on back at the beginning of all of this, not what they remember or the govt has said was happening. Social media has it's issues but at times like this it's very handy for acting as a library of what was being said at the time.
Various red-tops (I won’t link to them) are going with variations of “fast food industry must share the blame over coronavirus”.
Poor hygenie practise? Lack of distancing in restaurants pre-lockdown? Nope. Becasue they make people fat.
Whatever happened to personal responsibilty?
You just have to look at the queues that formed for Burger King, KFC and McDonald's the instant they re-opened to realise that a large part of our society is addicted to their quick fix of jink food but, as with most addicts, it's never their fault but the fault of the companies for forcing them to eat there. Personal responsibility is an alien concept to most.
What did Hezeltine say about Johnson? Something like…
“He’s the kind of man who waits to see which door people are queuing to go through, then jumps to the front of the queue shouting ‘follow me’” (from memory, feel free to correct me)
Add into that the “source from no10” approach embraced by Cummings… ie. brief anything, and then either deny it or claim it as official, depending on the response, and we are where we are. Time for the media to put a name to all sub-announcements the PM’s team make, or refuse to carry them. That is the single most important step that needs to happen. Now.
The fast food thing is just a distraction. Don’t fall for it.
Various red-tops (I won’t link to them) are going with variations of “fast food industry must share the blame over coronavirus”.
Poor hygenie practise? Lack of distancing in restaurants pre-lockdown? Nope. Becasue they make people fat.
Whatever happened to personal responsibilty?
what like this red top
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9041657/takeaways-greasy-spoons-spared-nanny-state-calories/
It’s telling / damming that this clip of Rory Stewart (a leadership contender at one stage) has surfaced…
I remember it from the time. And there were plenty of other voices saying exactly the same thing, including on this thread. It's not hindsight now, the outlier status of the UK was pretty obvious in the run-up to lockdown. We were slower and weaker into lockdown, and despite being warned since January about the potential of this specific virus, and for decades about the dangers of a pandemic virus, we prepared nothing and left our most vulnerable citizens unprotected, and in many cases put them directly into harms way by filling their care homes with untested patients discharged directly from acute hospital beds.
The government is still dithering, fudging the guidance, confusing the population in the hope that the blame for this catastrophe can somehow be shifted onto the people or the scientists.
The fast food thing is just a distraction. Don’t fall for it.
The cake is a lie, eh?
If one good thing has come out of this, I hope a lot of us are going to be angry enough to hold this shower of shit to account, I had turned my back on politics after the last election, but this is making my piss boil and I intend to work out how to constructively channel this anger to affect change.
In many respects they don't give a shit, in fact this is proving to be a very useful distraction as the clock ticks down to Brexit Extension deadline, we trip over that date with no progress made and that sets in motion a No-Deal. Meanwhile, America moves in for the kill.
and in many cases put them directly into harms way by filling their care homes with untested patients discharged directly from acute hospital beds.
The ambulance-chasing end of the legal world are already circling this particular set of wagons...This govt hasn't granted immunity from prosecution any any doctor from discharging without a risk assessment (and where risk assessments were carried out, they were pretty sub standard from what I've seen) In the very near future, see those ads started to appear on day time TV...
Did your family member die all alone in a Care Home when they were discharged from Hospital? We can help, call our freephone number...
At the very least it will prompt holding a public enquiry (it'll be needed to set quantum) otherwise all the Trusts will be bankrupted.
Edit: Oh, and see all those care homes being prosecuted at the same time....Why did you accept these patients into your care home? what measures did you have in place to satisfy yourself they were free from covid19? What measures did you put in place to ensure no one else in your car home became infected? What measures did you put in place to ensure your staff and visitors were protected?
At least there will be one growth area in the economy
The cake is a lie, eh?
Ha!
'The coronavirus was introduced and spread throughout the UK by 1356 people who travelled here mostly from European countries, according to a preliminary study by researchers in the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed. The researchers analysed genetic sequences from 20,000 coronavirus cases in the UK and used this to build a family tree. This revealed the lineage of the different infections and allowed the team to trace their origins. They estimate that 34 per cent of these original coronavirus cases were people who arrived in the UK from Spain, 29 per cent from France and 14 per cent from Italy. The researchers estimate that most introductions of the virus to the UK happened in March'
When did we start testing at the borders?
When did we lockdown?
The researchers analysed genetic sequences from 20,000 coronavirus cases in the UK and used this to build a family tree
They will have used some sophisticated maths to try and build their most confident guess at a tree. Other trees are available with differing confidence. I'd be interested in how robust the conclusions are. Genotyping the virus is now the easy part. Reconstructing the history of the subtle changes is less so. Particularly in a virus with which we have had limited interaction. Did they also type viruses from outside the UK, or just UK samples and compare with reference? The null hypothesis could be that the virus also changed in Italy and Spain, so the changes acquired are independent, but the same in non-mixing countries. Maybe.
reports of him needing big naps etc and him basically not doing much….
Johnson had previous for not turning up to do his job long before he got ill. It's well documented that he missed five of the initial Cobra meetings and went off on holiday for a couple of weeks during the early part of the pandemic crisis.
GlennQuagmire
MemberAll of this assumes, of course, that all countries are recording deaths in exactly the same way.
Otherwise, it’s like comparing apples and a blue Ford Sierra.
Sorry but this is straight up bullshit. The numbers are not perfectly comparable, but that doesn't mean that they're meaningless. And the margins for error here are so spectacular, you could have powers of magnitude differences and Britain would still be a high outlier.
Back to apples- you have a sack of apples. It says "contains approximately 50 apples". You count it once, you get 50. Someone else counts it, gets 49. You weigh it and use the average weight of an apple to get 48. You count 100 other bags and get an average of 51.
"All the answers are different and were gathered in different ways! This means we have absolutely no idea how many apples are in a bag, and that guy over there with one apple may have just as many as we do!"
Have we done this?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53006938
So thats what 1.2 people contacted per tracer per week by our 25 000 tracers from 5300ish people infected who could be arsed to pass on any details whilst 2700ish further people were infected but couldnt be arsed to give any contact information.....is that world class Boris?
Why couldn’t they contact the rest? Why aren’t we hunting out the remaining 80% of untested cases we know are out there? How is it world beating?
Dido Harding describes it as '....not gold standard yet'.
If it wasn't so serious that would be laughable; a charitable discussion would be to describe performance to date as pathetic.
The system has been unable to reach 15% of close contacts identified - 4,809 people - either because they were unavailable, their contact details were wrong or they did not respond to texts, emails or calls from contact tracers.
Tracers are told to try calling 10 times in a 24-hour period.
Just for my personal perspective.
I've not met many people. A few for bike rides, and a few for work. (Hopefully remaining socially distant in both cases.) About half of those riding companions will not have my phone number (organise via FB), none of the work ones will have access to my personal mobile and my company will not give it out if they rang the office number.
As a millenial I have never owned a landline, and generally wont answer a call from an unknown number, especially a persistent one, as I've been the victim of far to many not at fault car crashes.
I could plausibly see that some people could be uncontactable, especially as the "pay £500 for a test" thing is going round the hystericals on social media.
So thats what 1.2 people contacted per tracer per week by our 25 000 tracers from 5300ish people infected who could be arsed to pass on any details whilst 2700ish further people were infected but couldnt be arsed to give any contact information
Every positive test fed into the system which actually had contact details gave 6 contacts. For every original positive test person, 1 out of those 6 couldn't be followed up. Probably not a bad success rate.
I'm more concerned with the fact it takes appears to be a workload for one tracer of one phone call per week. Maybe I'm in the wrong business - that certainly sounds like an easy gig.