Et tu Dominic? Political loyalty that didn’t last.,,

[VaVaGloom]

So Johnson and Cummings are at each other’s throats. Anyone else think that it’s karma for them being such self serving, conniving, utter shit weasels last year? It’s so fitting that they are self destructing their own abominable empire.

United they stood, divided they fall.

@CuriousaboutSamphire I was more grateful he listened and did a u-turn on schools opening than angry

Grateful he listened?! Now I am not a scientist or epidemiologist but looking at this chart does it seem sensible in any shape or form to reopen primary schools in January (with schools being acknowledged by the Government as a vector of transmission) as this was the course of action he chose despite knowing another lockdown was imminent.

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases

I don't imagine anyone would have necessarily done better, differently yes, better? Who knows?
Really, you can't imagine that any a politician could have used more caution, acted earlier and applied better judgement than Johnson?

This is why we need the inquiry to make sure lessons truly are learnt because this whole shitshow is not over yet. Hopefully the vaccination programme,when completed, will put us in better stead but we are not in a position to rest on our laurels yet.

Yoiu make some assumptions. I explained why I said I was more grateful than pissed of. He changed his mind when he got more evidence... the time of the data coming available was made clear at the time - and was partly responsible for the time lag between changes we have now. Oh, and schools as vectors of transmission turned out to be not a very high - see data of jobs of people who got covid. It wasn't teachers, it was factory workers, as we now know! There were lots of confounding variable within that second wave.

And I don't think caution and acting earlier are compatible, are they? Unless you can cherry pick the sitations you are referring to. Lock down earlier and harder, open up more slowly? You just mean "would have made other decisions that we can all see now with hindsight"

We do need an enquiry. But no right now. There will never be any laurels to rest on in this! There is so much that should have been done better, and will be next time - sadly!

Don't mistake me for a Johnson fan or Tory voter. I am neither.

@TomatoesAreFruit

What I find amazing about the whole Dominic Cummings thing is that he has recordings, phone records etc.

Surely, contractually, he would be obliged to return these on departure. It seems really incredible that he was permitted to hold onto this stuff.

I think it's already clear that DC does not play by the normal rules. He was the one who suggested, when working with Gove in the Education department, that they use their personal gmail addresses for govt correspondence so that they couldn't be easily accessible to govt oversight.

I have no doubt that there's a recording of the Johnson bodies conversation, however, we won't get to hear it, unless DC/Murdoch/Gove's plans don't work. It's literally DC's get out of jail free card. He knows he could be investigated over the Vote Leave funding, etc. I would imagine he's got a fine dossier of messages, emails and recordings from his time at No 10.

Thing is with Cumming's is he's closely tied to Gove. Johnson baiting Cummings was either a dumb move of poking the, easily bruised, bear's ego, or a tactical masterpiece. Maybe Johnson knows his days are numbered, that Gove is waiting in the wings. Gove may be trying to keep a low profile, but he's just as covered in shit from the Vote Leave shitty stick as Cummings and Johnson. If Johnson's going down, he's making sure that Gove goes with him...

Johnson could murder someone in the street and we would tut, shake our heads and continue to vote for him

Cummings is an obsessive details person Johnson is a braggart who relies on charisma
Mr wiff waff doesn't stand a chance the evil genius will stitch him up

@Miasicarisatia

Cummings is an obsessive details person Johnson is a braggart who relies on charisma Mr wiff waff doesn't stand a chance the evil genius will stitch him up

I agree that Cummings is a details person, however, I think his genius is overstated. Does an Evil Genius retrospectively amend his blog to make it look like he had super-predictive skills? No. His fatal flaw is wanting to be seen as always right - that can be exploited.

@CuriousaboutSamphire He changed his mind when he got more evidence... the time of the data coming available was made clear at the time - and was partly responsible for the time lag between changes we have now

On 29th December the number of new cases peaked at 81,527 (Rolling 7day case of 52,951). On 3rd Jan he appeared on Andrew Marr to insist schools were safe and to reopen the following day and that children must attend (rather confusingly even in Tier 4 areas although not in Tier4 London boroughs) there were 55,173 new cases (rolling 7 days average new cases 56,974)

On 4th Jan the day many primaries returned (unless the staff had taken emergency strike action or there were too many unwell to reopen) there were 76,151 new cases.

This was all in the public domain so he will have had even more data available to him, especially on the number of hospitalisations.What evidence was he short of on the morning of January 4th, the day he re-opened primary schools allowing all the mixing that entailed, that he'd received by that afternoon? He was sticking his head in the sand and made the absolute wrong call.

Oh, and schools as vectors of transmission turned out to be not a very high - see data of jobs of people who got covid. It wasn't teachers, it was factory workers, as we now know! There were lots of confounding variable within that second wave
But school pupils and their families won't necessarily feature in the data of jobs of people who got Covid due to -in-school transmission? Ask @noblegiraffe for the ONS graphs that show that in Autumn 2020 cases were rising fastest in school age population.

We could trade opinions on the same data for months - hell, we all have been. I'm not saying mistakes were not made, really I am not! But hindsight makes some of the timeframes seem larger than they were at the time.

Not one of us has THE TRUTH. Just opinions based on oour individual perspectives.

And much as I appreciate the data @noblegiraffe puts up, anyone can get data from the ONS. It's easy to do, and free. I've been using it for years.

Our Tory town MP is a Boris arse licking idiot who couldn't give a shit about the little people in her town. We are a very split WC/MC area and she just listens to the voices that support her.

Ian Levy, Tory MP, is the same. Anyone who doesn't agree with him is blocked from his social media and he won't reply to their correspondence, people get blocked just for saying they voted Labour. Someone in the constituency called him a dick on FB and when this person's mum wrote to Ian Levy about a totally unrelated matter, instead of answering her query he sent her a print out of her (adult) son's "dick" comment.

Oh, and schools as vectors of transmission turned out to be not a very high

Wasn't there evidence to show that in infected households with a school-age child, the child was the initial source of the infection? If I remember rightly it was 70-something percent of infected households with school age children. I'll see if I can find where I read it.

Johnson could murder someone in the street and we would tut, shake our heads and continue to vote for him

'We'?

I cannot imagine the circumstances in which would vote for any Tory let alone this pompous, self-aggrandising, corrupt prick.

@CuriousaboutSamphire

Yoiu make some assumptions. I explained why I said I was more grateful than pissed of. He changed his mind when he got more evidence... the time of the data coming available was made clear at the time - and was partly responsible for the time lag between changes we have now. Oh, and schools as vectors of transmission turned out to be not a very high - see data of jobs of people who got covid. It wasn't teachers, it was factory workers, as we now know! There were lots of confounding variable within that second wave.

And I don't think caution and acting earlier are compatible, are they? Unless you can cherry pick the sitations you are referring to. Lock down earlier and harder, open up more slowly? You just mean "would have made other decisions that we can all see now with hindsight"

We do need an enquiry. But no right now. There will never be any laurels to rest on in this! There is so much that should have been done better, and will be next time - sadly!

Don't mistake me for a Johnson fan or Tory voter. I am neither.

It was proven schools were vectors. A lot of it back into the community as under 12's were twice as likely to be household index case and 12-17yo 7 times as likely.

@TheSandman

Johnson could murder someone in the street and we would tut, shake our heads and continue to vote for him

'We'?

I cannot imagine the circumstances in which would vote for any Tory let alone this pompous, self-aggrandising, corrupt prick.

I assumed that @StealthPolarBear meant a collective "we", as in we the electorate.

I certainly wouldn't vote for Boris, but I reckon we as an electorate will let him get away with blue murder. Tutting while carrying on voting for him is exactly right!

It was proven schools were vectors. A lot of it back into the community as under 12's were twice as likely to be household index case and 12-17yo 7 times as likely.

And, as I said, taking adults by profession as your measure, people calling for teachers to be given priority were looking in the wrong place.

BOTH points are true. Often ALL points being ade are true. It being a virus and all.

With so many ever changing, interrealated confounding variables there can be no absolute right and wrong!

You don't have to accept that. But that is why making any decisons is difficult and why so many different areas of medicine, independent organisations, have been looking at this and feeding binto SAGE etc independently. No one of them has the whole picture.

But many here seem to think that the effects of ONE factor will prove something!

Absolutely collective we. While I won't vote for him, I'm not taking any other action other than tutting either. I'm not starting the revolution either :(

Samphire you're not considering the whole picture if you're looking only at teachers (who it was shown were at a higher risk of catching covid than the general population) when considering school data. School children were the most infected subset of the population (particularly secondary children) and the evidence was that they were taking it home to their families. Much more likely to be the first case in any household, more likely to transmit it to a family member than an adult. This was made very clear in a SAGE report in December.

Yes I think that the effects of ONE factor - cases being higher than they had ever been at the peak of the second wave - and Johnson seeing fit to reopen the primary schools at precisely that point for a single day before calling the inevitable lockdown, illustrates perfectly that he is incompetent at his job.

@noblegiraffe I wasn't. I was just holding them up as an example of another confounding factor, one that has routinely been mentioned across MN and nobody seems to have looked at the data on infection by job. Where it was factory workers who were amongst the highest risk of catching covid.

There are many factors and no one piece of data will ever be the sole reason for a policy change.

I'm just trying to make peole see that whatever they post as a fact in this can be countered because of the complexity and interralated nature of any procedures and changes.

The whole picture, as I tried to explain, requires very many indiciduals feeding into a number of organisations that in turn independently feed into SAGE etc.

No one poster here has a cat on hell's chance of seeing that whole picture!

@StealthPolarBear

Absolutely collective we. While I won't vote for him, I'm not taking any other action other than tutting either. I'm not starting the revolution either :(

Me neither. I should probably do more...

You said this, Samphire which isn’t true:

He changed his mind when he got more evidence... the time of the data coming available was made clear at the time - and was partly responsible for the time lag between changes we have now. Oh, and schools as vectors of transmission turned out to be not a very high

He didn’t change his mind when he got more evidence. The data on schools was overwhelming by December. Councils were closing schools for their own safety (and being forced to re-open by a legal challenge from the DfE). Secondary schools were closed for two weeks in Jan. The headteacher union legally requested that the government provide their evidence on school safety. Primary school teachers were refusing to go into school on health and safety grounds.

He didn’t change his mind in the face of new evidence, he was forced into submission and not allowed to ignore the dire situation any more by people who were not happy to let thousands of bodies pile up.

And we know kids were catching covid at school at a high rate and taking it home to their families. We had known for a while,

We don't know what else he was being told, what other factors he was looking at. We do know that there was change and that other factors were also at play. That much we were told at the time. There was great uncertainty and things were changing on a daily basis.

And stop with the 'thousand of bodies piling up" - using today's headlines for yesterday's news?

@noblegiraffe

Samphire you're not considering the whole picture if you're looking only at teachers (who it was shown were at a higher risk of catching covid than the general population) when considering school data. School children were the most infected subset of the population (particularly secondary children) and the evidence was that they were taking it home to their families. Much more likely to be the first case in any household, more likely to transmit it to a family member than an adult. This was made very clear in a SAGE report in December.

That's exactly how I understood it.

And by mainly focusing on adults in professions the government managed to hide this data.

Because the children were taking it home and those adults were then taking it to their work.

People seem to ignore than an adult in a factory may infect 10/20/30 others adults - but in a classroom they can usually infect 1 or 2 max.

I still cannot understand to this day why they ignored the data on children for so long - which purely seems based on the fact that for serious illness they were a low risk. But for passing it onto an adult who suffered serious illness they were the biggest risk by far.

I was just holding them up as an example of another confounding factor, one that has routinely been mentioned across MN and nobody seems to have looked at the data on infection by job. Where it was factory workers who were amongst the highest risk of catching covid.

Factories are often populated by 10-50 adults.

A classroom has 1-2 adults.

But where we had pupils taking it home to their parents who could then have been taking it to those factories - by just looking at the outcome and ignoring the source - we didn't take action quick enough.

Noble spotted the case rates in children before Boris had even bothered to check the data.

I assumed that @StealthPolarBear* meant a collective "we", as in we the electorate.

Well there's the rub. The collective electorate to which I belong, the Scottish electorate, don't vote for / and haven't voted for the Tories in sufficient numbers to make it anything like our fault for a couple of generations now.

But that's a different discussion for a different place though I do wonder - with the Holyrood election heaving into view and the Tories sliding into third place here - whether the timing of this obviously Gove inspired piece of backstabbery has something to do with stiffing Blo Jo with the breakup of the union (thus letting Gove step forward as the anointed saviour of England with Blo Job taking all the blame.)

I might not have a cat in hells chance of seeing the whole picture but I knew that schools shouldn't be reopening in January with cases skyhigh. I had nothing to gain from them being closed and had to face the homsechooling / home working scenario again - but knew it was necessary. Heck, even my primary school aged child could see it coming!

No-one's saying his time as PM has been easy but throughout his life Johnson has left a trail of sleaze and mistakes behind him. Now his old partner in crime is spilling the beans but no-ones surprised at what they are hearing as it's typical Johnson behaviour.

@TheSandman its not my fault either but i don't get a choice - my local seat has been Tory since the 1880s. Our electoral system is appalling.