Westminstenders: Following the EU lead

[RedToothBrush]

Coronavirus poses a particularly Irish shaped question. How the UK responds to Irish plans for ending lockdown and whether Arlene continues to back an all Ireland plan will be fascinating to watch and see justified regardless of which way we go.

The UK for all its new found independence is looking very closely to the success / failure of EU strategies before making our own plan public. Mainly because we've yet to write one.

Johnson hasn't led much. He's delegated. Yet he gets all the praise for doing the sum total of fuck all and never being the bad guy. There always another fall guy to blame.

Economically we are stuffed and promises of a very quick bounce back don't look likely based on public confidence and willingness to return to places like pubs restaurants and shops.

Our ability to adapt to new conditions at short notice has been tested and businesses can not afford to do this again soon.

This is the background to which we go into talks. Both sides need an extension to serve their best interests. Johnson is determined to cut our nose of to spite our face for the sake of his legacy and to keep those paying the back handers and dodging tax happy.

lockdownsceptics.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

Wasn’t malaria endemic in the Fens and Romney Marsh?
I believe - though not sure why - that much of the population (in England at least) is still in its ancestral location.

In Scotland it would be the P7s - but there's only about 6 weeks to go of the "school year" transitioning to secondary, and then those going into S4 (Y11) and S5 (Y12). Most secondary schools start the next year's timetable at the latest at the beginning of June (ie after the SQA exams) in normal years, to get a few weeks under their belts before stopping for the summer holidays. By all accounts, most schools seem to have "transitioned virtually" already.

S5 is arguably the most important year in Scotland as that is when the majority of Uni entry exams are sat.

That code review article is genuinely worrying, DGR. "Led by the science" indeed.

borntobequiet That’s weirdly fascinating! Apparently the “cure” for fen malaria was locally grown opium, especially mixed in to a nice pint of beer*

*or “bear” if you’re local.

Yvonne Doyle in the press conference was really pouring salt onto the idea that schools would reopen soon. A few times she said if without a when and mentioned a large amount of prep work needed beforehand.

I'd personally prefer my DD not to go back until September, a bit more ambivalent with DS but that's due to her already having had a bad experience and her mental health taking a knock. We're only just getting her back to her now. We've been seriously considering withdrawing her if necessary if schools go back. DS otoh would be better off going back though he is fine at home. But neither are in the suggested year groups so that may solve my own issues.

Opium in the Greeney King? Thas all in yer loife.

Oh my god that code review. I write academic code, and the conclusion that academics shouldn't write code is ridiculous, but wow. That sounds like a nightmare. I did have the advantage of working as a software developer first though...

Wasn’t malaria endemic in the Fens and Romney Marsh?

Well, Mussolini eradicated it from Italy, so it's certainly no stranger to Europe.

HIGNFY jibes aside, I learned from a documentary on the Panama canal that one of the engineers that ended up in charge (you can deduce so much from that phrasing ) had to eliminate malaria before they could continue building ...

Clavinova If that essay doesn't get full marks, your DS will never let you forget it 😂
Good luck, anyway

Back on planet Brexit

Britain is to recruit 50,000 more customs agents, to handle post-Brexit trade according to a report in the Financial Times yesterday, at a cost to industry of at least £1.5 billion a year. The announcement of plans to build an academy in Kent to train the agents was made by Michael Gove.

But as Jean Claude Piris, a French diplomat and director-general of the EU Legal Service, pointed out on Twitter, this is more than the entire 33,000-employee payroll of the European Commission in Brussels.

(contd)

yorkshirebylines.co.uk/britain-to-recruit-more-border-form-fillers-than-the-eu-commission-has-staff-in-total/

DGR that report is gobsmacking - should totally demolish any belief in the outputs of the imperial modelling.

There is no way any prior modelling using that tool, unable to replicate results, could have passed peer review - so in effect the decisions that have been made, impacting everyone in the UK, have been based on an amateur lashup that presumably originated in either the Prof faffing about or some grad student playing with coding.

Thread safety is notoriously hard to retrofit, it should have been designed in. At the simplest level It's actually hard to think of a decent programming language these days that would permit humongous block of code to be created.
(reeks of the days of esoteric lisp models or "basic" monoliths)

It used to be common to come across some chunk of home made excel/vba that an accountant has knocked up and was effectively running the business - terrifying from a resilience perspective but I would have expected more of an academic modelling environment.
(have done quite a bit of work with with sumo.dlr.de and that is the sort of rigour I'd have expected.)

The chain of responsibility that permitted this to be used to lose tenure/pick up p45s as applicable.

DGR that report is gobsmacking - should totally demolish any belief in the outputs of the imperial modelling.

More astute readers will notice that very shortly afterwards I posted a story about Brexit needing 17,000 more employees than the entire EU has that will similarly be ignored in the press.

I'm really really hoping for a hat trick of "things you aren't supposed to hear about".

Oh, I did see it was lockdown-loose-Jenrick briefing today. Presumably to stick it to Ferguson ?

imo, schools should gradually restart from 1 June, but it should be optional until at least 1 Sept.

Trying to force those parents who are frightened would probably backfire badly
Howeve, if the (half-empty) schools work out a sensible system that workks
and there aren't any tragedies, then nearly all the remaining parents would be ready to join in by Autumn

Obviously there must be home schooling provision made for any shielded child or one with a shielded sibling or parent.

Shielded teachers are an issue that will have to be tackled too

As schools return, more of the economy can restart too
Again, forcing back frightened workers won't work
and there must be something like UBI for shielded workers who can't WFH

imo, everyone 60+ should receive UBI equivalent to full state pension, right up until they can actually draw their pension
In Germany, we are warned that the 60+ group should stay home as much as possible - much less usual here - with "Alterteilzeit etc - for that group to be still working

We've heard that 50,000 figure several months ago.
Reminiscent of all those extra nurses and police ?

Those customs agents haven't even been recruited yet ?
They have to be vetted, then trained .... not enough time before 31 December

Customs officers have been recruited in Germany - I think about 1,000 extra for Brexit - but they have had a lot longer training than that

One of the comments on the code review suggested this was old code and shouldn't be judged by modern standards.
When the results have so much impact then thats a nonsense argument. Reproducibility of model runs is fundamental - irrespective of what you're modelling.

Anyway I pulled up the sim main file:
github.com/mrc-ide/covid-sim/blob/master/src/CovidSim.cpp

I was writing code 30 years ago (predates cpp but that's irrelevant) and I'd have been embarassed to write something like this and be still using it 20 years later.

I'm going to pull it all down into an ide and look more closely, but a very lightweight scan gives me the impression that the author has fallen into the trap of believing you get more randomness by using random numbers as seeds - debunked in basic algorithmic theory in the 60s (famously by knuth) and something any academic modelling team ought to have been brought up on.

Re; customs agents..... won't they just conveniently decide its all too hard and outsource? To G4S most probably.......

I suspect that Ferguson and his scruffy model are useful scapegoats,

• and remember that model was written for bloody flu not COVID -

because I doubt whether any govt really bases their decisions on the opinion of one adviser,
especially one who is not even a permanent civil servant

Germany had similar to Whitty's calculation, except Merkel said 70% instead of 80%

This was Chris Whitty's estimate - not a model - just before lockdown:

No responsible government could ignore their CMO sttaing this:

https://www.ft.com/content/c43b9c3e-6470-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6a68

Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, said the “reasonable worst-case scenario”

was that 80 per cent of Britain’s 66m population would be infected, with an expected mortality rate of 1 per cent or less.

On that calculation a worst case death toll could be in the region of 500,000.

So the CMO just did a simple multiplication,
with his estimates for infection rate and death rate based on what he knew at the time from Italy

About as low tech as you can get
but with the limited knowledge and data available, probably the best prediction that could be made

Pointless having a complex math model, however well or badly written, when the input data is so fuzzy
That's a classic way of fooling yourself & others that you know more than you do.

^I suspect that Ferguson and his scruffy model are useful scapegoats,

• and remember that model was written for bloody flu not COVID -^

Yep. Time for Dom's mates to sweep in and rescue us from the academics. What helpful timing!

Also - an anonymous "code review" with no actual code cited by someone called "pseudonym" who says they worked at Google on a blog called "Lockdown Skeptics?"

We'll have The Express quoted here next.

YouGov COVID polling trackers of several countries:

UK has about average amount of fear of catching COVID - which is still a majority of the UK population
Hence why forcing people back won't work
Softly, softly does it

UK seems keener on schools being closed than our neighbours
Maybe because of the time lag of 2 weeks or so in the UK epidemic

I suspect that quite a lot of the high public support for the government over COVID is because the lockdown policy makes people feel safe

Relaxing the lockdown could lose some of this support

• and if exponential growth and deaths return, then some of those former supporters are going to be very angry and frightened

HUGE table of COVID tracker Apps planned / used around the world

Every bugger and their dog has invented an App

• and all of them look worrying enough to rule out getting sufficient public cooperation for them to actually be of use, even if they worked as advertised

https://www.top10vpn.com/research/investigations/covid-19-digital-rights-tracker/

I agree with BCF I think modelling is beside the point.

Basic maths indicated that even with a more conservative estimate of 70% of population infected, death rate of 1% = over 460,000.