Westministender: Amen to that!

[RedToothBrush]

On the Anniversary of the Battle of Britain, Johnson went to Westminster Abbey and was trolled. Its almost divine in its irony.

In a week where just about the entire right wing press has turned on him, for being... well shit... They have the dawning realisation that yes all those annoying lefties were right all along when they said he was full of nothing but hot air. He's been ridiculed for being paid £150,000 a year and not being able to feed his 5000 kids and the pictures to mark the anniversary of him becoming PM do little more than look like a man who couldn't tie his own shoe laces without a nanny to help him.

But its not really a laughing matter. This man doesn't understand what legal agreements he's signed so his solution to his ineptitude is to throw his toys out of the pram together with the rule of law. Which he also does not understand.

Johnson is also ever increasingly keen on ripping up inconvient human right and workers right and he has ample opportunity to do all this in the middle of a pandemic.

Unfortunately the hypocrisy of his cronies isn't exactly helping the behaviour of the public and you have to pity the poor behavioural scientists who have to tell him that 'of course the public are going to give you the vs when you tell them you shouldn't do this when your chief advisor claims to be maybe going blind'.

It seems the whole government strategy on managing the virus seems to be falling flat on its face rather sooner than planned cos they stuck Dildo in charge who wouldn't know her Rs from her elbow if it hit her in the face. And we've got Hancock going full on 1984, telling us not to believe the reports that no one can get a test because its all lies - except half the country has either first hand experience of the travesty of Track and Trace or has a close mate who they know is a hell of a lot more reliable than any of these fuckwits when it comes to telling the truth.

Meanwhile in America Bader Ginsburg has managed to die at possibly the most inconvient and dangerous time possible just as the future of democracy in the US is clinging on by its finger nails.

And yes. Money laundering. Haven't we talked about that a lot on these threads. Its almost as if FinCEN was predictable...

Taking back control was always about the elite taking back control from the masses. But if you've managed to keep following all this time, we've been saying that since April 2016 and no one listened then, so why would they start listening now?

Yes BigChoc as can my occupational pension. It is just that it would leave us nothing in the UK for visits and to spend on our family. At the moment we have all our expenditure on spreadsheets and take advantage of transfers with better (these things are relative) exchange rates. We know exactly what Brexit has cost us based on modelling historic exchange rates and it ain't pretty!
IIRC the UK banks will have to pay for passporting rights to overseas banks, so I think it will come down to sufficient numbers of customers in a particular country to make it worth their while.

The problem I have is that neither side is actually able to express more than opinions wo proper scientific backing behind them.
It’s obvious on Twitter (If you follow scientists - some of those threads are worth reading).

As far as I am concerned, the increased in the number of cases means nothing. It’s clear that we will have an increase associated with the increase of tests and the fact many people with extremely mild symptoms (or not symptoms) are getting checked out (or were....).
There is also the small issue of the false positive and the fact people will still test positive 2 mints after contracting the virus (and even though they are NOT contagious or ill anymore).

What we should see are numbers that are normalised and adjusted to take that into account if we want to do any comparaison at all with what was happening in March-April.

I’d also like to see some proper analysis of what is happening in Sweden. Everyone takes the bit that is working for them (look they had a peak just as bad as others and actually worse than other Scandinavian countries vs their number of positive tests is going down and it’s the only country doing so!!) But I have yet to see a proper explanation as to whether they chose the right approach or not (which was basically protect the more vulnerable and build immunity).

Imo neither side are coming out well. And yes this is in part because nothing is in black and white in science. But still....

The bottom line though is that some scientists are saying it WILL be a second wave in autumn/winter whereas others say this is not how this virus behaves and there is no reason to think it will....
The reality is we have no clue and we can only guess
(Eg imo you can’t say there will be a second wave like with the Spanish flu because the flu virus and corona viruses are two very different type of viruses.)

I'm enjoying today's 🐿 strategy of boneheadedly nitpicking at one part of a whole narrative of lifelong privileged incompetence.

When considering an alternative policy, we have to look at the hjistory and background of those advocating it

In Germany, Hendrik Streeck made a mistake early on choosing a particular newspaper, but he acknowledged that and he has a history of concern for the less well off in society.
So I can trust his advocation of an alternative strategy here and I consider it without worrying about hidden Social Darwinism

Most I have read advocating that the UK drops SD rules and "let the healthy get back to normal"
may currently express (faux) concern about the poor suffering more atm - but have never bothered about it in the past

If you check the publications they write for and the retweets of hard right Tories, then their agenda is often clear:
Fuck the vulnerable

Hilary
Indeed, my mistake. It was an MLR proposal that met the real world

As far as I am concerned, the increased in the number of cases means nothing. It’s clear that we will have an increase associated with the increase of tests and the fact many people with extremely mild symptoms (or not symptoms) are getting checked out (or were....).

This is actually wrong - it may have been 5 weeks ago - but is not true now. The positivity rate is going up. That is what is raising alarm bells. If you want clear headed analysis of the numbers look through the independent sages video casts.

Sikora is one of the Doctors in the spectator article /opinion price. He is a cancer specialist, who has lied about his credentials . He is also funded by a far right think tank who want to destroy the NHS and move to an insurance based system - so obv they can make loads of money. He has zero credibility.

@questionmark To get to Sweden's current situation required a very high death toll early on
They are still well below herd immunity for the winter - and immunity fades over the months - so we don't know if they will avoid a "2nd wave" of some level too

Infection rates are heavily dependent on population density - given similar age distribution

Even within the UK, the ONS data shows that densely populated conurbations have 5-6 x the death rate of sparsely populated areas

So we have to look at groups of similar countries:
Sweden vs its Scandi / Nordic neigbours who have similar v low population density & culture
The UK and other densely populated countries like Italy, France, Spain, Germany

Sweden has 5 -12 x the deaths / million of its neighbours

Before lockdown, the UK was following Italy's curves, not Scandinavia

Deaths / Million population

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

580 Sweden
49 Norway
62 Finland
110 Denmark

615 UK
591 Italy
113 Germany (an anomaly due to Merkel's v early lockdown & v effective public health services)
849 Belgium

# People / km2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listoffcountriesandddependenciesbyypopulationdensity

23 Sweden
17 Norway
135 Denmark

280 UK
200 Italy
233 Germany
376 Belgium

Another major difference to the UK is that Swedish authorities started with a high level of public trust, which they have not abused

Many people have changed their habits voluntarily, for the public good, or from self-interest

Dropping SD rules here would not work in the same way,
because of the ingrained dog-eat-dog attitude that has been ingrained for years, compared to the main Scandinavian philosophy of social solidarity

TheElementsOfMedical

You know me so well.

2017;
^"[Charles] Dunstone, who created TalkTalk in 2002, said that Harding had been a “tireless, energetic and effective force for good from the day she joined”.

“She has helped transform TalkTalk into a much stronger business,” he said. “She leaves with our thanks and very best wishes for the future.”

Neither of the policy extremes of Sweden nor New Zealand can be applied to a densely populated country with massive essential international connections

The UK has to examine e.g. Italy & Germany for what is apllicable, what can work and what can go wrong

We should be very suspicious of the intentions of those on the hard right like Toby Young and others of his ilk in the Telegraph or the Speccie
Their agendas are never ours

Shameful in a supposedly developed country, in a public health crisis:

Harding knows bugger all about public health
and has buggered up what she has done so far in her public health chumocracy

There are far better candidates with public health expertise - but they were not even allowed to apply

She got these jobs from who she knows, not what she knows

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/dido-harding-coronavirus-test-covid-19-glastonbury-b470500.htmll_

"The incredible story of how a woman called Dido Hardingg came to be in charge of her country’s testing programme during a once-in-a-century pandemic,
despite having no qualifications for the role, really begins a very long time ago.

Would she have got the job had she not already been made chair of NHS Improvement in 2017,
....
Would she have been made chair of NHS Improvement if she had not already been appointed a Conservativee^ peer in 2014?

Would she have been appointed a Conservative peer in 2014 if she and her Conservative MP husband John Penrose had not been great chums with then prime minister David Cameron?

Would she have been great chums with David Cameron if she had not hung out with him at Oxford,
during the (still ongoing) period in the former prime minister’s life in which you only really got to be his friend if you had parents who would buy you a £3,500 morning suit solely to be worn while smashing up the backroom of unsuspecting country pubs?

And would she have hung out with David Cameron at Oxford if she had not been born, 52 years ago, to the 2nd Baron Harding of Petherton?"

I know two people in my local area with long covid. They are both relatively young females (45 and 50)- no previous health complications and were both healthy before Covid. Now unable to work fulltime. (Neither needed ventilation in hospital- so are 'mild' cases.

One is unable to walk up her stairs without becoming breathless and is signed off work, and the other is suffering crippling fatigue. Whilst I am aware that other illnesses do cause chronic fatigue etc, two people I know personally seems to be a worrying number.

There are too many unknowns. Just because the death rate is not high at the moment long term chronic illness is possible, and something we all need to be thinking about.

It is so important that we have competent people running the test and trace service and people who know what they are doing not Tory chums. One of the fundamental parts of public health is test and trace and this has been undertaken for years for things such as food poisoning etc, so we must have the expertise to carry out these activities without paying Tory chums vast amounts of public money. I don't understand how people can stick up for them.

Questionmark I have seen a lot of statistical modelling that adjusted for the increased prevalence of testing etc. and show that independent of those factors there is an increased rate of transmission. Diversity of opinion is the working norm in science, but subject to peer review and achieving consensus based on the detailed evidence. Which is of course at the moment patchy. No Scientist I know of is predicting that it will be a second wave of the same nature as Spanish flu because that second wave was of a version of the first wave that had mutated considerably as flu viruses do. One of the few things we do know is that the RNA of this virus means that it is less prone to mutate to the same degree as flu. In fact has mutated in ways that have little impact on virulence but do provide for different treatment. Perhaps twitter isn’t the best place for science?

Perhaps go and look in your high street and observe that hardly anyone is observing the infection control measures, so obviously transmission rates of an easily transmitted virus go up. They are going up because the people who avoided catching it the first time are now putting themselves, or being put, in situations where they can catch it. Without an effective track trace and quarantine system the virus is getting another chance to run through the population. Herd immunity is up to, at a top estimate, 17 %, in London where the virus first ran unchecked before any infection control was put in place in mid March (the first warnings on socially distancing etc. pre lockdown). And hard not to notice that transmission rates in the rest of Europe have already gone up and now hospital admissions and deaths are beginning to follow .

Also when you look at that real picture for Sweden perhaps take into account that it was not solely a strategy of herd immunity The Swedish population were asked to work from home and socially distanced, their lockdown was voluntary but they complied to a similar degree to their Scandinavian neighbours. www.newscientist.com/article/2251615-is-swedens-coronavirus-strategy-a-cautionary-tale-or-a-success-story/

Like Japan, where mask wearing and other infection control measures have been cultural norms since Spanish flu, cultural factors matter too. And our culture provides a particularly fertile ground for the virus.....

Ok, clav, so because someone said something nice about Dido Harding when she left Talk Talk, she must therefore be the person best suited for the job she has now, which was just handed to her and for which no qualified people were allowed to apply. Riiiiiiight.

@pointythings

Ok, clav, so because someone said something nice about Dido Harding when she left Talk Talk, she must therefore be the person best suited for the job she has now, which was just handed to her and for which no qualified people were allowed to apply. Riiiiiiight.

I could also write a glowing resume of Dido Hardings "long and distinguished career as an entrepreneur, visionary, instinctively brilliant businesswoman who oversaw the transformation of one of the UKs most successful mobile and broadband providers."

It would of course be complete bollocks and a fiction. But eminently suitable for c'n'p-ing (certainly the "p-ing" bit, if I may be allowed a brief Benny Hill moment) all over the internet a squirrel bait.

OK, I'm up for it, give me another useless cockwombling waste of carbon and let's see if I can rehabilitate them for modern social media circulation ... come on ... give me a name. I appreciate we will have reached an apogee with Baron Harding (whatever happened to Baroness ?) but it's a distraction from the End Of The World.

QuestionMark Independent statisticians like David Spiegelhalter have calculated the rise in infections in genuine, not just a function of more tests.

You cn see for example how the % positivity is rising - and more significantly how hospital admission are, especially in Spain and France,
but also recently in the UK, with admission for Covid doubling ~ every 8 days atm

Clav has clearly never worked in business. It is the same syndrome that had Barclays sending the clearly cognitively limited Loathsome on her way with false praise after they kept her locked in a stationary cupboard for five years doing “special projects” . The extent of the false praise is inverse to actual competence whilst the nebulousness of it is the real measure. If someone has actually made a positive difference to a business it will be made explicit.

BigChocFrenzy
That's the same c&p you posted earlier - the columnist gets his facts wrong right at the start of his article - this time you have omitted;

"Would she have got the job had she not already been made chair of NHS Improvement in 2017, despite her having to step down from her previous role as chairman of TalkTalk – when four million of her customers had their personal data stolen."

We already know she didn't have to step down, and a fraction of the four million customers were affected - why should we take any notice of the columnist's article when his lead-in is nonsense?

113 Germany (an anomaly due to Merkel's v early lockdown & v effective public health services)

Not an anomaly to the relatives concerned - no doubt you have upset several posters on this forum.

@Emilyontmoor

Clav has clearly never worked in business. It is the same syndrome that had Barclays sending the clearly cognitively limited Loathsome on her way with false praise after they kept her locked in a stationary cupboard for five years doing “special projects” . The extent of the false praise is inverse to actual competence whilst the nebulousness of it is the real measure. If someone has actually made a positive difference to a business it will be made explicit.

You reach a certain point in the incompetence ladder where it becomes self protecting.

Many years ago, when I was a developer, the company I worked for desperately needed an Oracle developer, as Co-op Insurance Services (affectionately known as "Cunts In Suits") were Oracle based, and wanted to run our SQL product on their systems.

Rather than reskill existing employees, it was decided to hire an Oracle guru. Fuck knows how they found this useless tosspot but he couldn't even write SQL, let alone Oracle.

Rather than kick his arse out, the hiring manager had to cover his tracks and find excuses as to why he had to send this guy (who was hired as a contractor) on three £5,000+ training courses before he could start the project.

Mind you, the same company paid for a £50,000 rebrand that moved their logo from an art deco woman standing, to an art deco woman sitting. (Which may alert some people as to who the company was).

As they say in Spinal Tap ... "Don't go looking for it, it's not there anymore".

(When CIS finally pulled the plug, I discovered quite a few Oracle stored procedures were simply blank files ...

I worry that Questionmark is manifesting a very large wedge, to stopping this virus. At the extreme end we have the anti vaccs / 5G conspiracy theorists bottom feeding the internet and protesting in the cities and just a little less extreme the people you see in shops not wearing a mask and just looking to be challenged. But there also seem to be an awful lot of people who are at far less extremes of Covid denial backed up by armchair science. It is very common amongst my neighbours and I think it arises from the fact that the virus shattered their complacency and now their need for normal is going beyond anything Science can offer in contradiction, especially when there is no credible political leadership. If they haven’t experienced it, it doesn’t exist.

so because someone said something nice about Dido Harding when she left Talk Talk, she must therefore be the person best suited for the job she has now, which was just handed to her and for which no qualified people were allowed to apply

To be fair, it's entirely consistent with the same school of thought that, because in 1567 Hans Steininger died from tripping over his own beard in Braunau am Inn, therefore Brexit is great and BlowJohnson is marvellous.

Clav I omitted the Talk, Talk you objected to, in the hope you would look at the rest of the article

Harding got her jobs because of who she knows

How can you justify appointing her, instead of taking applications from those qualified ?

Well here's a candidate for rehabilitation. Although to be fair, compared to Harding, we are starting from a much higher bar ....

www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/theresa-may-confirms-she-will-vote-against-reckless-and-irresponsible-brexit-bill/21/09/

Theresa May shows some spine. On the basis we all seemed to agree at the time she was putting the Tory party ahead of the UK, there's a very real question about whether she has now realised that the Tory party is no longer the Tory party and was never worth saving. Or is this just an excellent chance to serve a cold dish of revenge for Boris ?

SInce you keep ignoring these points and defending her Talky Talky record instead, I'll repeat them:

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/dido-harding-coronavirus-test-covid-19-glastonbury-b470500.htmll_

"The incredible story of how a woman called Dido Harding came to be in charge of her country’s testing programme during a once-in-a-century pandemic,
despite having no qualifications for the role, really begins a very long time ago.

Would she have got the job had she not already been made chair of NHS Improvement in 2017,
....
Would she have been made chair of NHS Improvement if she had not already been appointed a Conservativee peer in 2014?

Would she have been appointed a Conservative peer in 2014 if she and her Conservative MP husband John Penrose had not been great chums with then prime minister David Cameron?

Would she have been great chums with David Cameron if she had not hung out with him at Oxford,

during the (still ongoing) period in the former prime minister’s life in which you only really got to be his friend if you had parents who would buy you a £3,500 morning suit solely to be worn while smashing up the backroom of unsuspecting country pubs?

And would she have hung out with David Cameron at Oxford if she had not been born, 52 years ago, to the 2nd Baron Harding of Petherton?"

@DGRossetti

Well here's a candidate for rehabilitation. Although to be fair, compared to Harding, we are starting from a much higher bar ....

www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/theresa-may-confirms-she-will-vote-against-reckless-and-irresponsible-brexit-bill/21/09/

Theresa May shows some spine. On the basis we all seemed to agree at the time she was putting the Tory party ahead of the UK, there's a very real question about whether she has now realised that the Tory party is no longer the Tory party and was never worth saving. Or is this just an excellent chance to serve a cold dish of revenge for Boris ?

... Theresa May clearly has ethics, but draws the line differently in the balance wrt party and ideology to where most of us here would (many of us don't have fixed party loyalty, or indeed any)