Patronii in person, anti Dementors visit the zoo

[ISaySteadyOn]

Never started a long running thread before but I figure even lurkers should take a turn. Hope the title ok.

Someone mentioned criticism of Karl Friston's model/perspective on Twitter. What's the nature of the criticism - is it scientific criticism of his method or just "he's not an epidemiologist

That was me. I was only skim-reading but I think it was just general eye-rolling and scoffing and 'this is such shit science' type of stuff. A man called Rupert Beale is one of the people criticising him. (See here twitter.com/bealelab/status/1268614091062599680) I see Karol Sikora is now tweeting in his defence and trying to say, actually Friston is highly respected.

It's all just bollocks because lots of cases aren;t tested and don't have symptoms, so they can't know the numbers for sure or the R number. I'm so cynical now and feel they just manipulate the figures to suit the message they are giving.

So Germany doesn’t obsess about the r rate like the UK does, they realise it is not that useful (especially at low numbers of infections) on its own

My worst dementors friends are a bit obsessed about the R rate. They'll never have heard about it before this year and now it's all 'the R rate is --- Doom, fear, panic, evil Tories, we must never leave our houses again.' Except it can't be something we base major political decisions on when cases are decreasing.

The Oxford vaccine people were worried that there wouldn't be enough virus circulating in the UK to test theirs properly but are now testing in other countries

So if we don't even have enough cases to test a farking vaccine, why are the government still making up stories and massaging figures to keep us under their thumbs? This is totally, unbelievably surreal

The thing that’s a total joke is 1 in 1000 were apparently affected in the last 2 weeks in May but we are still at level 4. You couldn’t make it up

If England had 123 deaths the other nations a total of 19 which = 142.

Can someone explain to me why the official figure for deaths today =357,

Where did the other 215 come from then?

It’s care homes

They're testing them somewhere else, @Justasking.
Special unicorns do it up Chris Whitty's arse.

Either that, or they're desperately scraping around for ANYONE WHO MIGHT HAVE COUGHED IN THE LAST FORTNIGHT and might have mentioned it in the underlying factors of the death certificate.

Nicola Sturgeon is dementor in chief. Telling people not to engage in “high risk” activities like going into other people’s houses. Listen you don’t fool us. If less than 1 in 1000 people have it and neither my parents nor I have been anywhere, in what world is that a “high risk” activity?

Sturgeon is drunk on power. It’s gone to get head.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/05/britons-immune-coronavirus-mistakes-covid-19-spread?CMP=fb_cif This is by the guy criticising Karl Friston. It makes for depressing reading, if you don't want to read it. People are saying to him on Twitter, if there is going to be a second wave why aren't we seeing a rise in cases for people coming out of lockdown and so far he's refusing to answer, it seems. He's obviously highly capable and respected but I guess you're always going to get scientists who are hugely pessimistic. But that's the alternative view, if you want to look at the people criticising Karol Sikora.

Our testing station is virtually empty.

We’ve had 1 confirmed case in the last few days and our R rate is estimated at 0.42

Doesn’t seem to give the 2nd wave dementors pause for thought though

My favourite annual local event has just been cancelled. I was half expecting it, but still gutted. I can see it’s cancellation ruining my local town, most small businesses, shop, pubs, B&Bs, etc, make most of their annual income from that 1 week.

The Oxford vaccine people were worried that there wouldn't be enough virus circulating in the UK to test theirs properly but are now testing in other countries

Yes, yesterday I saw that they were heading to Brazil because of this to test it

I was just told that people only want lockdown to end so they can "go to the pub".

Oh I dunno, I don't even drink and going to the pub seems very appealing at present.

Hmm. Just had a link to our school explaining how being back is different- lots on 'keeping them safe' and it being 'very clean' lots of space etc. I think it is mainly for the parents, not sure. I wish we could stop with the staying safe message. Feel for the teachers though

DH has a theory that people think if we are kept locked down enough, it will somehow stop Brexit. I have no idea how that would work but it is an interesting idea.

Friston is respected. Most of the attacks on him I have seen on Twitter are people who don’t understand the wider applicability of statistical methods. Also the way he uses phrases and metaphors from other fields make it easy to think at first sight his stuff is bonkers.

If anyone is interested, a research group my Dh is part of came up with some similar findings to his in terms of the possibility of either existing immunity or an inert group, which was published as a preprint back in April, but deliberately without any fanfare because you wouldn’t want to have everyone believe you about something like that if it then turned out you were wrong. (Which if Friston turns out to be right means he will be able to say ‘told you so’ to an absolutely epic degree!)

At this point there is a huge political freight attached to Friston’s argument, ie lockdown v release, everything Boris’s fault v not, so it’s not so easy to find either intelligent critique on Twitter or appropriate levels of caution in the media interviews with Friston!

I was just told that people only want lockdown to end so they can "go to the pub".

Not sure why that’s a bad thing, the pub is an important part of life to many people. My dad is 72 and has cancer and has said he’d be there tomorrow if they opened.

@DominaShantotto, but it's you who explained the numbers so eloquantly on the previous thread, "every time we get the numbers remotely down they move the goalposts to add in anyone who could spell COVID 19 before they died as being killed by it"

Exactly.

And they're doing a similar thing with the daily new cases: the number who test positive - fairly straightforward, you would think, even if there are slight inaccuracies day to day - plus some random large number added so that suddenly around 2000 becomes 8000-9000. I'm on that Zoe project and I've read it and read it. As far as I can see they get their figures by taking the proportion of the 1.6 million UK contributors who reported one or more of the 11 'predictive' symptoms, up to 1 April, and extrapolated across the UK population. They say they take into account age-decade, location and gender but no hospital cases. I'd like to think that they are using more recent numbers, but I can't find it reported anywhere that they are.
They seem to be assuming that reporting the symptoms = being infected with Covid, but some of them look very much like other conditions, such as Hayfever, a cold, a stomach upset. Who knows if people think they should, or shouldn't report such symptoms anyway?

I think it's more likely that if we're kept locked down hard enough the economy will be so completely fucked that we won't really notice all the further damage done by Brexit.

One for the bingo card that seems to be in every thread "xxx number of people died yesterday". No no they didn't that many were reported, most of them go back several weeks and some will not even have had a positive test. It is usually followed by "more than every European country put together"

@amicissimma - that's so interesting. The Zoe rates suddenly went up locally and I was wondering why. If t's based on self reporting it clashed with the high pollen count and start f the worst of this season before the medication kicks in. I wonder if that explains it? Hmmm.

No the larger number comes from the ONS survey @amic. Which includes a random sample of all people including those without symptoms. More than half they find positive say they have had no symptoms (and don't go on to report any the following week either) So these people wouldn't be getting tested normally. So that's why about 2000 people a day test positive, but if we tested everyone on the country every day, we'd find about 5,600 are positive - but that's down a lot from 8000 the previous week, so really clear evidence from the ONS survey that it's falling.

Yes for xx people died yesterday.

We had a death announced earlier this week - it went back to mid-May but had only just been reported. No one has actually died since the 25th May.

Our
Local paper is terrible for reporting big headlines but not actually explaining the data properly

Another interesting thing that hasn’t been widely reported here, is that deaths according to ONS for Spring 2020 is actually lower than Spring 2019

Interesting point about Whitty. I've gone from being obsessed with him to thinking he's a beige joyless fucker who wants to keep us locked up forever.