Agreed, it's a stupid attempt to score political points.
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Dunno how they found out, leaks I imagine.
Ferguson is a pretty obvious one though. The ICL report came out and shortly after that we went from Plan herd immunity to Plan lockdown.
A few of the others I've seen in the press conferences, so apparently their identities aren't worth keeping secret.
I mean assuming it's unlikely all 23 are irreplaceable AND are all going to get killed in one coordinated terror attack, is there any valid reason for keeping membership of this committee a secret? You'd think the public would be reassured there's that many experts on the case.
There's certainly a public interest in the identities of these people being known, but that does have to be balanced with the state's interest in them being anonymous. It really does depend on their reasons.
It is a bit odd though that some are publicly facing while the rest are kept secret. Is this something other countries are doing as well?
idk but I don't see what value there is in comparing to other countries. Who's to say they're doing it right and not us? Those already in the public domain though, I see no reason to protect their identities.
I guess it would be more defensible if it were common practice in various countires to keep the identities of the experts on these panels secret. It would suggest there's some viable reason for doing it that I just haven't thought of.
As is, the more paranoid side of me thinks they're worried that the makeup of those on their panel might be called into question if it were known.
Other countries aren't quite as hated as the UK, so we can be forgiven for being more cautious, but your suspicion could be justified. There's acceptable reasons for secrecy, and there's unacceptable reasons. If I were pushed for my opinion, I'd lean towards the govt protecting themselves from scrutiny, but I don't know that and certainly wouldn't bet on it.
I would imagine that the majority of people who are contracted by the govt for various important functions are nameless. I don't have a problem with that. You said it yourself, and I do agree with you, ultimately the govt take responsibility for the advice they get and take. We just seem to disagree on how we should go about this accountability.
There will be an inquiry when this is over. I'll be following with keen interest. If that goes bad for the govt, Boris is done and probably the Tories, too. I won't be so quick to give them the benefit of the doubt when that time comes.
One of the members of SAGE (UK advisory panel on CV) speaks to the Guardian.
tl;dr - gov't was warned repeatedly about what was coming by their advisors, and failed to take action in time. Boris like "rabbit caught in headlights." Now gov't is trying to pass the buck by claiming they were "guided by science."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...navirus-crisis
Quote:
The first official report of somebody dying in hospital having tested positive for Covid-19 caught in the UK came on 5 March. Still, elderly and vulnerable people were not given any advice to shield themselves. A member of one Sage advisory committee said that around this time there was a gap between the scientific advice and political messaging. “The prime minister was going around shaking people’s hands to demonstrate that there wasn’t a problem. There was a disconnect at that point. We were all slightly incredulous that that was happening.”
Quote:
Given the repeated denials, it can be overlooked that the reason the world believes that attaining herd immunity was the government’s approach is largely because Vallance said it was.
Quote:
Asked on Sky News what proportion of the population would need to become infected to achieve herd immunity, Vallance replied: “Probably about 60% or so.”
Quote:
At a press conference the following day, Johnson famously said: “I must level with the British public: many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.”
Whitty announced then that the initial effort to contain the disease by testing and tracing had been abandoned, yet despite that, and Johnson’s dire warning, the measures discussed for the new “delay” phase were almost negligible. People over 70 were advised not to go on cruises. Johnson said even “household quarantine” would not be required until sometime “in the next few weeks”. The government’s published plan did say that social distancing and school closures could be considered.
Quote:
Vallance made his media appearances the following day, explaining the herd immunity approach. He was asked on Sky News why in the UK “society was continuing as normal”, and it was put to him that a 60% infection rate would mean “an awful lot of people dying”. Vallance replied that it was difficult to estimate the number of deaths, but said: “Well of course we do face the prospect, as the prime minister said yesterday, of an increasing number of people dying.”
Matt Hancock, the health secretary, issued the first denial that herd immunity was part of the government’s plan, despite Halpern and Vallance having days earlier indicated that it was, in a column in the Sunday Telegraph on 15 March. “We have a plan, based on the expertise of world-leading scientists,” Hancock wrote. “Herd immunity is not a part of it. That is a scientific concept, not a goal or a strategy.”
Quote:
Ferguson held a press conference on 16 March to explain the new findings. His colleague, Prof Azra Ghani, said: “Under strategies we were pursuing, we were expecting a degree of herd immunity to build up. If we now realise it’s not possible to cope with that in the current health system, and it may not be acceptable in terms of the numbers, then we need to try and reduce transmission.”
The Guardian asked Ferguson how that policy could be contemplated, if it predicted that 250,000 people would die. He emphasised that he was never sanguine about people dying, and made it very clear that it was the politicians, not the scientists, who decided on policies to pursue. “While policy can be guided by scientific advice, that does not mean scientific advisers determine policy,” he said.
Quote:
Prof Graham Medley, another Sage member, and chair of its influential modelling subcommittee, agreed that while the scientists gave their analysis on the epidemic to inform the politicians, deciding what to do was “a political decision”. Medley told the Guardian that Johnson, Hancock and other ministers continually saying they have been guided by the scientists has “sometimes gone a bit past the mark”. Asked if he meant that the politicians were passing the buck, Medley replied: “Yes.”
Quote:
Even after the stark warning that the NHS would be overwhelmed if the policy did not change, Johnson and his government still hesitated. He made another speech that day in which he advised “drastic action” was now needed, but the measures were advisory and still tentative. People over 70, pregnant women, and those with some health conditions were advised only to “avoid all unnecessary social contact”. Britons were asked “where they possibly can” to work from home, and Johnson told them “you should avoid pubs, clubs, theatres and other such social venues”, although all were permitted to stay open.
Quote:
During the week after 16 March, there was a fierce debate within government about whether a stricter lockdown needed to be imposed. “Several of us thought measures needed to be introduced earlier,” one source close to the Cabinet Office said. Hancock appears to have been under great pressure, stretched between that view and resistance elsewhere to taking genuinely drastic action. A senior source at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) recalled discussions about the herd immunity policy continuing, despite Hancock having disowned it, and a senior official still advocating it. “His basic view was that we were all going to develop antibodies, and ultimately the question was how to manage the release of the disease into the population over time.”
Quote:
The DHSC source sums up this period soberly: “They knew we would have to go into lockdown; they were debating when. Every single day they wasted, every day we weren’t in lockdown, was resulting in people contracting the disease – people who have since died.”
Quote:
Reflecting on the presence at Sage of Cummings and Warner, some attendees now say the group’s deliberations were affected by a sense of what could feasibly be done, with a government run by politicians to whom a lockdown looked unthinkable, although others say they were not. Then, that week, when stricter measures were needed, some say it was useful to have Cummings there, because they knew he would communicate that directly to Johnson.
One source in Downing Street who personally urged the prime minister to stop delaying and move into lockdown that week said his reticence was partly down to his “libertarian instinct”. “There was also a bit of ‘rabbit caught in headlights’.”
I've got a mild fever with chills :( had a headache yesterday before the fever set in; no other symptoms so far.
GL me, one time Lee...
Shit dude, hope you're ok.
Please don't inject disinfectant or set fire to any 5G towers.
Hope it's nothing. GL.
Yeah, it's funny, two days before the job I was working got shut down, I got the stomach flu. The fever came on first, and I was pretty worried--I've never been so happy to throw up and spew liquid feces out my butt!
But, yeah, there are plenty of non-covid bugs that it could be, and even if it were covid, most likely my symptoms don't go crazy.
That other time might have been it.
https://gut.bmj.com/content/early/20...nl-2020-321195
Well I'm not a doctor but maybe if you had kept your feces in a jar we could re-introduce them to your body somehow and that would protect you. Like a vaccine, or some kind of, like, medicine.
Bad day for the UK.
Seriously, who the fuck is doing ths counting/reporting/whatever on this site? How does it suddenly happen a country just gets 4k extra deaths one day out of nowhere?
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Edit:I mean, fine, but then go back and put the deaths on the day they happened, don't just add all the ones you're now claiming happened in the last six weeks onto one day's total. No wonder no-one can model this shit properly.Quote:
Public Health England (PHE) has developed a new method of reporting daily COVID-19 deaths, to give a more complete number of those who have died from the virus. For the first time from today, Wednesday 29 April 2020, the government’s daily figure will include deaths that have occurred in all settings where there has been a positive COVID-19 test, including hospitals, care homes and the wider community. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales already report out-of-hospital deaths. Today’s figures have been revised retrospectively by PHE since the first death on 2 March 2020 to include additional data sources. This will bring the total number of deaths in the UK to 26,097 from 2 March until 28 April, including 765 deaths reported in the 24 hours to 5 pm on 28 April
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gkj4W_grTyk/hqdefault.jpg
Yeah those reported numbers are so far off they should probably just look at excess all-cause deaths over other years.
https://www.euromomo.eu/
It's definitely better overall to use excess mortality, but they don't have raw numbers on that site, just graphs.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gkj4W_grTyk/hqdefault.jpgQuote:
While the network fully supports data sharing, the network hub is not mandated by the participating countries to release any national data. If you are interested in exploring the possibility to access national data, please approach countries individually.
So, this remesdivere (or w/e) drug that they've been testing on CV patients, and that now Fauci is calling promising? The research group doing the trial changed their measure for "success" after the trial began to something more successful.
Bad science is having a field day with CV, from people claiming everyone in NYC has been infected, to the Santa Clara study where the supposed death rate is less than seasonal flu.
The Fauch makes a pretty basic stats error in his interview about remsivere-w/e - referring to the improvement in death rate as having "not yet reached statistical significance" This is a nonsensical thing to say. Data don't "reach" statistical significance, they're either significant or they're not.
#FireFauci
Remdesivere press release touting "success" just happened to coincide with publication of a different remeversdir study suggesting it didn't work at all. Coincidence? Methinks not.
BoJo at his gaslighting best today:
"We have succeeded in avoiding the tragedy we saw in other parts of the world."
Soooo, I guess being 3rd in the world in deaths is a big success.
Let's be fair, let's measure our lack of success by the per capita death rate.
Should we include the city-states like Andorra and San Marino? Then we're 6th in the world per capita. Otherwise, 4th.
Immunity, food processing plants, pets, and social distancing covered here by Osterholm.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/...nars/episode-6
Those shitty little countries are a pain in the arse.
Fever is mostly gone, no new symptoms.
Not sure if I should be hoping it was Covid and it gave me some immunity, or hoping it wasn't so I didn't get anyone else sick when I went to the grocery store on the day the fever started (went in the morning before I felt it.)
Good to hear you're feeling better at least.
Winner.
So meanwhile in the UK, various right wing tabloids are crowing that we're about to open up. The Times is saying 'lockdown till June'.
Boris, who's been talking about how successful we've been at fighting CV, is about to reveal the winner tomorrow.
Does this look like we're ready to open up? Just wondering if I've forgotten how to read a graph.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
Look at the logarithmic graph, it's nicer to look at because the curve is converging into a comforting flat line, unlike the scary linear graph that it not curving at all and is practically a 45 degree straight line.
I actually meant Boris will tell us Sunday. I don't even know what day it is anymore.
Ong if you rotate the graph 180 degrees it looks absolutely fantastic.
If I were in charge, I would do everything in my power to ensure the graph is penis shaped. I appreciate that might mean going back in time to get convincing curvature on the tip, but I'll have no qualms spending taxpayer money trying to do it.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXnGRGZW...g&name=360x360
Well that worked well. But, it looks like we're going to have a new plan going forward.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXnGRGWX...g&name=360x360
Green means go and get sick, right?
Somehow, I don't think he's telling him what a great job he's doing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXqkBDmW...jpg&name=small
This is actually pretty good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeT6Aeof4Ok
That's me in the spotlight
abusing my position
:lol:
:puke:
That picture of Boris being pointed at is so fucking British. The only thing missing is rain.
Look at the body language though. Who's winning if those two have a fight? My money is on Boris.
I reckon as world leaders go, Boris is probably quite hard. I doubt he could beat Putin in a fight, but he'd shit on Trump. Merkel vs Sturgeon would be a great fight, I'd pay to watch that. Hardest is probably some general we've never heard of, or Kim Jong-un who of course is a black belt in every martial art ever.
Can someone explain this plan to me?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EXr5w9JX...png&name=small
First, R0 was well above 1 when they put in the lockdown. That's why we are where we are now. If it had never gotten above 1, then by definition, there'd not be a pandemic.
Second, Step 1 looks like they're going to allow blonde hair, bicycles, park benches, and notarised letters to begin with. I had no idea any of those things were even dangerous if you were doing them alone. Except maybe the blonde hair.
Third, what does "monitoring" mean and why does it only occur precisely between Step 2 and Step 3.
Last, Step 2 is a bit clearer. Looks like opening businesses and sending kids back to school. Kudos to whoever worked on that part of the visual.
Trudeau would kick the shit out of Boris. Trudeau vs. Putin would be a good fight, if only because Putin would fight dirty.
Merkel vs. Trump would make a good undercard, but neither of them are in shape obv. Same with Boris; I doubt he's worked out once in his adult life.
IDK what the R0 and R=1 stuff means. Can you explain that?
Maybe if you explain that, whatever the y-axis is supposed to represent might become clearer to me.
A graph with unlabeled axes is pointless. Whatever you're trying to convey, the graph is distracting.
Boris looks like the kind of guy who wrestled other boys at his posh school, and played rugby and did all the things that posh rugby boys do like bum each other aggressively. Don't underestimate someone who barges a kid out of the way when he's running with a rugby ball. That's a man who has killer instinct.
Boris has gotta be the hardest PM we've had since Thatcher.
Actually Gordon Brown could probably scrap. Close call between the two. Otherwise it's been all pussies.
Yeah it's not a real graph in any scientific sense of the word. Not sure it's meant to be (hope not), because it looks like it was drawn by a kid.
R I assume means R0, or infection rate (the average number of people each person with a disease infects - if R0> 1, then more people get infected, if R0< 1 then fewer get infected). There's no other logical explanation for having R=1 on the graph. So it seems like they're trying to say we locked down when R0 became 1, it's been going down, and now blonde people, people on bicycles and park benches, and notary publics are safe again.
To be honest, it looks like he tried to avoid hitting the kid but was too fat and clumsy to sidestep him.
Also, the kid took him down. So he's clearly got no balance either.
I'd put Boris on tier three, club fighter at best. KJU and him would both be gasping for air after about 30 seconds in a real fight.
Wait for it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXWVpcypf0w
It's R0 Boris, not R.
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/sta...72964447653892
The US has been steadily seeing 20k new cases per day for a long time.
I'm not sure what the numbers for the UK are. Looks like 4k new cases yesterday, but I didn't find a history.
I guess that's "flattening the curve" since it's now more of a linear increase, rather than an exponential increase.
It's just that I'd like to see the number of new cases per day going down, not remaining steady, before I consider the curve "flattened."
This gives reported numbers of cases and deaths from CV for all countries.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
"Flattening the curve" means lowering the peak so the health system doesn't get overwhelmed. Every country has done that to some extent. Going from that to knowing when to open things up is another question.
It's a bit tricky to know this, because none of the available numbers are really ideal. Case numbers depend on how many tests are being done, so if you're testing more you have "more" cases, but if you dont' test at all you have "no cases." Most countries are almost certainly missing a lot of cases, probably more than half. In the UK, e.g., there was a long period where they only tested people admitted to hospital with a fever and shortness of breath. So we have no idea how many people were sat at home with mild cases and how many were wandering around and were asymptomatic. My guess is that's probably where a lot of transmission is taking place during a lockdown.
A more reliable index is death rates, since these are a good reflection of actual case numbers (assuming they're being reported accurately, which is questionable in many countries). A even better index is excess mortality rates, since they can't be fudged. The only problem with this is that deaths lag behind infections by about 3 weeks, and there's also a lag between deaths and registration of same into the excess mortality figures, so you're really only seeing how a place was doing > 3 weeks ago, not today or yesterday or last week.
A complicating factor in the US is the geography, which has resulted in a combination of hot spots where density is high, to more rural places where infections spread more slowly. Any overall increase/decrease sums these factors, so while a reduction in NY deaths (e.g.,) willl lower the national average, an increase in other places balances it out to make the numbers look stable. Really it's just a lot of areas going up and a lot going down and some remaining stable.
All that said, the US and UK are fairly unusual in how long it is taking to go from the peak of deaths to some number closer to where you'd want to be before you'd think about opening up (ideally, zero, but more realistically, something much lower than the peak was). They're both going down very very gradually whereas most other countries that have already experienced a peak have gone down much more.
Boris has just announced that our already lax lockdown will be loosened, so we can expect UK death rates to go up again soon from ~500/day now back towards where our peak was ~1100. They have ramped up testing (though not high enough to make test, trace, isolate an achievable goal yet). I just hope they remember to order more PPE for health care workers this time.
I think one big mistake most countries are doing is thinking lockdowns are too expensive, and that they are the main reason for economic consequences. Without a doubt the more dramatic measures such as closing down restaurants incur severe cost, but it's not like they would operate normally if they weren't forced to close. In most countries, the US included, the heavy economic hits came before any lockdown measures, since the customers were for a large part already self-quarantining. Any country with any substantial amount of their GDP reliant on exports or tourism is going to be f'd no matter what they do nationally. Sweden, the poster child for herd immunity is still seeing their GDP plummet >5% this year, in line with many other countries with far harsher measures.
Maybe test-trace-isolate should have been the aim for every country that has the capabilities for it, I don't know. The economy is gonna tank no matter what, maybe that would limit the worst situation to the shortest possible time. Ramp up testing as much as possible, hire a few thousand people to do contact tracing, implement draconian measures for a couple months to cut down R0 as close to 0 as possible, and then start opening up. Although, as we can see from China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea, it's not gonna end there. New outbreaks will be happening and need to be managed, until there's a vaccine. Gonna be really interesting to see who looks smart and who like an idiot a year from now.
Well, one argument for doing it the Sweden way is we're all going to hit herd immunity at some point, and they're just doing it sooner rather than later. The guy (Engslbert or w/e his name is) in charge of it is a bit funny when he says that it's how everyone should be doing things though. In the UK, we've already had some weeks where the health services were overwhelmed or close to overwhelmed (depending on who you ask), and it's always going to spread more quickly in a dense country, so I think if we had stuck with our Plan A (no lockdown) we'd be even more fucked right now. All speculative of course, but it certainly wouldn't have been better, and could have been much much worse.
There's also overshoot, which means infections just reach some magic herd immunity number and stop spreading. It can go quite a bit higher than 60% or w/e depending on how fast it's spreading. So that means fewer deaths if things are more controlled, and you just creep up to herd immunity rather than let the virus run wild.
There's also the idea that you can get better treatments and possibly even a vaccine up and running before you hit herd immunity. So that's another argument for trying to delay things.
The economic costs are real, and with the whole world interdependent, it's going to hit everyone.
I really think test, trace, and isolate was/is the way to go with this thing. It may be intrusive, but fuck off it's a pandemic ffs. It still seems less bothersome than a continuous cycle of lockdown, loosen, wait three weeks for deaths to start rising again, then lockdown, then loosen, etc. for 18 months. I'd rather an app tracked me around and told me I had to stay inside for two weeks or w/e than what's happening now. SKO, SING, etc., may all still experience breakouts, but there's no doubt they've been far less serious than the ones most of us are having.
Yeah I agree. Some finnish experts who apparently personally know Tegnell said a while back, that they are pot committed to their strategy and too proud to change it, who knows. Either way I guess at this point it would be best if they do stick with it, that's some invaluable empirical data for the future.
Yeah, we'll have to wait awhile to find out how it went in Sweden I guess. Pretty sure that was never going to work here though.
One of the weird things here is how arbitrary some of the lockdown rules are. Like, you could go to work on the tube where you can't avoid getting close to people but if you stayed at home you could only go outside 1 hour a day for exercise, even if you could easily find a big park to sit in where you were >100m from anyone. You also couldn't travel in your own car, alone, to go sit out in the country somewhere, alone, but were supposed to walk your dog along the same busy street all your neighbors were using to walk their dogs.
The biggest park near where i live is about 20 sq. miles, and they closed off the parking for it because a few people early on were using it and not social distancing. So they essentially made the biggest empty space around closed to anyone who lived outside of walking/biking distance because of a few twits. So instead people have to walk their dogs in their local neighborhoods. It's retarded.
The public busses have been free to ride in StL for weeks. Passengers are required to enter and leave the bus via the back door, to maintain distance from the driver.
Next week, they're going to require a face mask to get on the bus.
Took long enough.
Ong ... can't believe you forgot this one..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWIUp19bBoA
in fact ...looks like the same move regardless of the sport
No mention of masks in the gov't latest advice here.
No mention of trace, track, isolate despite nearly every expert who doesn't work for them saying that's what's needed.
Still trying to tell us they're "led by science" without being willing to share what that science is or who is dispensing it.
Boris and Trump in a race to see which country can be the biggest shitshow right now. It's tough to out-do Trump but we've got the blitz spirit!
Those "scientists" are just jealous and butt hurt because they aren't on the inside.
Well, our shitshow has a certain quiet dignity to it that you Yanks will never know (cue God Save the Queen).
We may not insult reporters or put our in-laws in charge of things, or tout miracle cures that are actually danagerous, or be as openly corrupt in its execution. We don't draw attention to our shitshow in such gauche ways, no sir! Our shitshow is a finely crafted piece d'art. It is a James Bond shitshow in contrast to your WWE one.