Westminstenders: No pubs till Christmas?

[RedToothBrush]

Today the news has moved towards acknowledging covid-19 reality: Nicola Sturgeon has explicitly stated that some social distancing will carry on until the new year in all likelihood.

When Matt Hancock asked if this was true for England too, he refused to say yes but he said that Scotland was working from the same framework as England.

In case anyone does still need this spelling out, this means the outlook for the hospitality and leisure industries is bleak.

There are extremely unlikely to be many enjoying a holiday in the sun any time soon, whether it be in Devon or Spain.

We won't be celebrating birthdays in restaurants nor having a pint in the pub.

Conversations on the doorstep from a couple of metres away is as good as it gets.

That means if you can't adapt you may not survive.

To add into the mix changes to customs to those companies who are operating seems insanity. But that's a political not a scientific decision to be made.

Whether reality in this will kick in, in the next six weeks or so before EU budgetary decisions relating to an extension have to be made remains to be seen.

Until then, there is no news but covid-19.

Re developing immunity

We just don’t know. We don’t have the research yet.
What we do know is that, for some virus, it’s possible to catch them several times even though most people don’t. That’s the case for chicken pox.
The idea that you are not automatically immune has been there for a while (various ‘cases’ in different countries). But it’s very hard to tell atm seeing the low level of testing and how unreliable testing is

The problem with antibody tests is that if the true infection rate is relatively low, even a fairly good test (say fewer than 5% false positive results) means that a random person testing positive actually only has a very low chance of having been infected. It's Bayesian stats and is counter intuitive for many people, but can be explained clearly with visualisations. I've attached some good ones.

Try it out for yourself here: vaclab.unc.edu/other/UnderstandingRisk/ - look at the number of blue and red squares. The positive predictive value of a test is the probability that having had a positive test, you've actually had an infection. That's red divided by (red + blue).

For those interested in more on John Ioannidis, the contrarian scientist behind those controversial (imho badly done) serology surveys at Stanford and Santa Clara: undark.org/2020/04/24/john-ioannidis-covid-19-death-rate-critics/

There is some (probably - not yet peer reviewed) good serology research from the Pasteur institute in France. Preprint in English here:

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.18.20071134v1

Article on different serology tests here, also in English:

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.21.20068858v1

In the meantime, politicians should be reading this from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics: www.nuffieldbioethics.org/news/statement-covid-19-and-the-basics-of-democratic-governance

It boils down to "treat the public like adults" and I think Louise wouldn't like it at all.

Re immunity. Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

Re immunity. Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence.

Which is why we need well designed studies with validated tests and strong statistical analysis.

I honestly think ethics is the largest weak spot for Conservatives.
A prime example is my friend (the science teacher) saying "we all gave consent" when the public voted in Boris. They do not seem to have basic understanding of ethics or democracy, which is concerning and how we have who we have in power.
Mship I'm really enjoying your posts. Thank you.

@Adesignforstrife, totally agree!

Misti, just as much as I respect the Institut Pasteur, I wouldn’t use information that isn’t published and peer reviewed. Especially as this is such a new area with few reliable information

FFS

Raab says it would not be responsible to explain specific strategies for lifting lockdown

A prime example is my friend (the science teacher) saying "we all gave consent" when the public voted in Boris.

Jesuispoulet One could argue that Tory voters 'gave consent' to Johnson's Brexit approach as it was in the manifesto. But did they 'give consent' to the Tory method of handling a pandemic? There was of course no mention of that.

The manifesto was brief - this is the NHS part. They had little time to enact it all before Coronavirus hit. (Even if they were going to do it all anyway.)

www.conservatives.com/our-priorities/nhs

A manifesto can't predict what events will happen, so when we vote in a party are we accepting their ideas for dealing with everything?
Aren't we allowed to disagree later?

I posted my angry post before having read the Nuffield Council on Bioethics link that MShip posted.....

It just adds to my anger and frustration.

I think you could argue that Tory voters did give consent, come what may. Get Brexit Done was only defined as that slogan - with no detail whatever, yet they still want it to be carried out. So yes - they voted the Tories who now have a clean slate (or carte blanche) to do anything.

You don't need a definitive answer to the question of acquired immunity to be developing plans for a world where it isn't assumed. That's why project management exists.

However, I'm guessing the current UK strategy (if that's not to be too grand a word) is to simply wait until we reach a crossroads and then argue over which direction to take, rather than actual fucking plan for it.

Regarding shadowing the EMA ... I guess that's a perfectly valid outcome of Brexit. Indeed, we could shadow everything. As long as we accept the flipside is having fuck all input to their decisions.

I really hope the DM report that the government has ordered 50 million antibody tests is bollocks.

It will cause massive confusion.

It takes time for the body to develop antibodies (first immune response is non-specific, before it makes specific antibodies)

In principle you could have an active infection - either mild overall or in the early stages - and test negative - and thus potentially be infectious nonetheless. Or could have had a past mild infection but not made sufficient antibodies and test negative.

Added to the Korean research where people seemed to have cleared the infection, tested negative (2 negative tests in 24 hours) and later tested positive again - either from re-activation or a false negative (equally some doctors in China report cases apparently recovered, left hospital, then readmitted with worse symptoms); and you have a potential clusterfuck.

I really hope the DM report that the government has ordered 50 million antibody tests is bollocks

Well last Saturday they had also ordered 84 tonnes of PPE from Turkey.

Only they hadn't.

Fear
Uncertainty
Doubt

It's how you position the hysteria of the masses to drown out the criticism of the informed.

c.f.

"We have foiled 8,000 terrorist plots in the past 12 months"

What ?! nearly 25 a day ? Bollocks you have.

Yup and 100,000 tests a day by the end of April. Only we’re not.

Private Eye on PPE www.private-eye.co.uk/issue-1520/hp-sauce?fbclid=IwAR0PMyNBQ49cyjT7A0nfYR8AofyAigiF-9GfArazqM4xKc0_smSXojqx3NE

Regarding shadowing the EMA ... I guess that's a perfectly valid outcome of Brexit. Indeed, we could shadow everything. As long as we accept the flipside is having fuck all input to their decisions.

Yup and 100,000 tests a day by the end of April

Even at one person doing 20 tests an hour over a 12 hour shift means you'd need ... 350 people working flat out over 24 hours a day to achieve that. Just to take the blood.

Plus you'd need to organise the logistics of opening test centres and curating patients around them.

And to get one test every 3 minutes would required a feat of administration I simply can't credit any part of UK public services with.

So when they "magically" announce they have hit that target (because they will), pick the small print apart very carefully. It'll be like that LibDem assertion they were the most popular party in Wandsworth ? Which was true if you removed all other parties ...).

metro.co.uk/2020/04/22/army-appalled-way-nhs-handled-ppe-crisis-want-take-12593372/

Thanks MShip and Mistigri and others on question of immunity. Found the Nuffield article tremendously interesting and something to bring into future discussions with my students on governance and accountability.

Acknowledged personal interest aside, if we're unsure about immunity and hampered by false positives as well as false negatives, is another concern that those who already have had mild symptoms may be at risk for experiencing a return of Covid once lockdown is lifted?

Either through reinfection or reactivation due to a repeated / higher viral load exposure. Therefore could a second wave include younger demographics with an already covid compromised immune system ending up in hospital the 2nd time around?

In which case, all this prior talk of immunity certificates and antibody development could be leading the very people who ought to be concerned, to be blithely assuming they're safe.

Thanks MShip for the Nuffield Council article. Here’s a BBC one from a few days ago on the 5 tests

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52374513

Here’s the killer sentence from the Nuffield article...

“The UK has great intellectual resource that is frustrated in not being consulted or involved”

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about what that really means.

As I’ve said, I fear the primary motivations on the part of the media in asking questions about lockdown easing is simply to drive the story forward and/or to attempt to create a wedge between the PM and his designated “stand in”.

Now we are confident that the PM will return to work, surely it is obvious to anyone that is is preferable that actual decisions about easing lockdown would be best taken when the person who is actually PM and not his temporary deputy, is back in position. I’m not making a comment here on the relative merits of Johnson or Raab, just pointing out that from an accoutability POV, having the actual office holder back in charge is preferable?

That seems like plenty of reason enough to me to wait anyway, even if the 5 tests had been met, which it would seem to me they haven’t.

How the government can fairly be accused of “closing down public discourse” when it is opening itself to questions from the media every day at 5pm and has been for weeks, I fail to see. That the questioning the are receiving at these briefings is usually so inept is hardly the fault of the government.

I know it is popular on here to reserve particular scorn for the UK Government seemingly to the extent that any other is preferable, but it’s not a sentiment I could agree with, nor one I think is fair.

Louise as with so much of the govt's 'debate' it is not possible if we do not have the facts. As per SAGE, if the public are in the dark about forces behind the scenes and motivations, how can we expect the media to question? Yes, that should be there job, but if Brexit has shown us anything it is that this isn't reliable as a way of holding those in power to account.

Misti, just as much as I respect the Institut Pasteur, I wouldn’t use information that isn’t published and peer reviewed. Especially as this is such a new area with few reliable information

That's very admirable but are there any peer-reviewed serology studies out there? I think it's fine for the serious institutions to publish this information as long as the make it clear that it's not peer reviewed and as long as they are honest about their methods.

their job, FGS it's been a long morning already.