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?

@Emilyontmoor

As to why Harding? I suspect that with any other Tory with actual public health or business competence there was probably too big a risk they would spot the incompetence and waste and inefficiency in the private sector response and have the integrity to point it out. You need someone who can actually let the gravy train roll and not care about the human cost.

The non-appointment of Jim Hacker to education pops into mind.

Once again, NS is more sensible in her measures, more statesperson like in their delivery and the whole tone is different.
She 'trusts the Scottish people to do what's right' & sounds genuine
whereas BJ drones on about fines.

This is causing me lots of cognitive dissonance as I loathe the SNP and find NS sharp elbowed at best but she is a far far better politician and I believe she is a more responsible leader of her nation atm too.

I noticed her telling us not to book trips at half term, so I do think a 'circuit break' is on the way, in Scotland at least which seems sensible

@QuestionMarkNow Test positivity rate is rising, which is a clear indicator of increased prevalence independent of number of tests done and doesn't rely on any statistical modelling. The UK-wide data is messy due to the testing chaos at the moment, but you can see the rate is doubling roughly every week in the Scottish data. Plots are from Travelling Tabby.

Sorry, it's not independent of number of tests done, but it normalizes out the variance in number of tests per day. You can see from the Scottish tests/day that the numbers per day vary quite a bit (in part by day of week), but that the positivity rate is rising regardless.

@Emilyontmoor

Questionmark BCF has already posted graphs. I am sorry if I read that nuance wrong but my point was not that you were a conspiracy theorist or even Covid denier but that you may have been manifesting a more general cynicism. I quite take your point that the government advice is confusing and contradictory and invites cynicism but I really don’t think the actual science is. Complicated and full of gaps in knowledge yes but quite honestly so it is with most diseases as anyone who has ever needed to understand their own Cancer will tell you.

As to learning from other countries amen to that . I am actually just coming away from a meeting with a South Korean colleague where we have been sharing stories of the South Korean, Taiwan and Hong Kong responses. By no means paragons of efficiency but they still have managed to minimise deaths.

A graph doesn’t say a lot as it doesn’t tell you HOW those graphs have been constructed. Hence my question on where can I find that sort of information. So far I haven’t seen any research paper on that, with the explanation on how it has been done.

Cynicism... or just plain critical thinking, the type you are supposed to use when reading a research article?
FWIW, the ‘science’ is not clear cut at all.
Scientists are still debating on whether masks are necessary or not, on how Covid is transmitted etc.. there is very little consensus. So I would actually say that the science IS contradictory (like it is often the case in medicine btw - try ans read around what sort of diet is helpful to manage type 2 diabetes and you will see the contradictions for example...)

@TheMShip, positivity rates will increase just with people with very mild symptoms been tested vs only people with clear obvious symptoms.
At the height of the pandemic, only people in hospital with very clear symptoms were tested. I know plenty of people who would have filled the criteria now who didn’t get a test and therefore haven’t officially had Covid.
If the group of people you are testing is different, your positivity rate will be different.

The issue here (at least for me) isn’t to acknowledge that things are changing and getting worse. But the fact that you can’t compare it what was happening in April. Which is our automatic tendency.

One thing that I think is more comparable is the number of people in hospital (with caveat seeing that only the people who were REALLY unwell were accepted in hospital - turning blue etc... which I imagine is not the case atm)

A graph doesn’t say a lot as it doesn’t tell you HOW those graphs have been constructed.

Plus the choice of scale of axes can skew perception.

positivity rates will increase just with people with very mild symptoms been tested vs only people with clear obvious symptoms.

Yup. That's why I only showed the plots from the last 3 months, well after the peak, when most people with positive tests would be mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic.

I'm a scientist myself, and my team is part of more than one COVID research consortia, one of which is focused on severe cases (criteria = admission to ICU + other set metrics, which were fixed before the first patient was recruited and will not change). Based on the current rate of infection and how that is rising, we are expecting to recruit several thousand more patients to that particular study over the next few months. It's not a happy thought.

twitter.com/ByDonkeys/status/1308355009164304384?s=09

Oh, I almost forgot. Hospitalization rate plot for the last 3 months.

positivity rates will increase just with people with very mild symptoms been tested vs only people with clear obvious symptoms.

This is confusing me. Do you mean the opposite of what you've written?

A stitch in time more like a cheap sticky plaster that's not waterproof.

4,926 positive tests today and 37 deaths.

@Sostenueto

4,926 positive tests today and 37 deaths.

Quite a jump ...

QuestionMark "Why arent we able to learn from those who are doing well and implement that??"

What countries do you mean ?

• that are densely populated and have a Western culture

That rules out copying New Zealand

Rules out copying China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, VietNam
Our society won't accept those rules

Rules out Sweden
with 5-12 x the total deaths / million of its neighbours,
but similar loss in 2020 GDP

Similar high pop density industrialised country is Germany:

< ⅙ deaths/ million of UK with much less 2020 GDP loss predicted
< ⅕ the deaths / million of Sweden with similar % 2020 GDP loss
BUT
achieved via very early lockdown
which brought down infections to a level where restrictions could be relaxed earlier & more than the UK
So most people weren't afraid to go to work, or to go out and spend in most places

AND
Decades of investment in public services, so Germany started off with:
High testing / lab capacity
Efficient track & trace system
Health service with huge spare capacity for early treatment and also continued treatment of important non-COVID ailments
People appointed to key public health roles on the basis of expetise & competence, not cronyism

==> The UK needs a Tardis and a new government

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-54250805
Quadrupling in schools sending home pupils in Covid cases

Based on attendance last Thursday, they show 4% of schools not fully open because of confirmed or suspected cases - up from 1% the previous week.

This could mean about 900 schools sending home pupils.

Overall attendance has also dipped slightly from 88% to 87%.

This means over a million children were off school that day, whether from Covid-related or other reasons, with more pupils missing from secondary schools than primary.

One of the comments my fuming friend made was that the government wont need to instigate a national lockdown because of how the school bubble closures are going to spiral due to people not following the rules.

QuestionMark The number of cases can be disputed as mild / severe etc
Despite the rise in % positive tests
and despite the opinion of scrupulously neutral statisticians like Spiegelhalter that there is a genuine rise in cases

BUT
hospitalisations for Covid are doubling every 8 days

Do you think the NHS are hospitalising people because they have nothing better to do ?

The testing system is an awful lot of data points and very little proper patterns.
How many tests are coming back negative?
How many of those were home / centre / hospital?
How many of the positives are from each source?
Is there analysis of the actual viral load in each test or is it just presence / absence which tells little about risk of contagion

and MORE TO THE POINT
What are the politicians going to do when this lockdown does not work?
because the Leicester one has patently failed

Brexit is less than 100 days away
Climate change is worsening

where is the resilience going to be magicked up from ?

I’d like tee what NewYork is doing atm.
A peak in April like the U.K. but no sign at all of another increase.
My understanding is that no restaurant etc... have reopened. And they have a track and trace system that is working.
Surely you dont need a Tandis for that??

Statisticians can make numbers says a lot of things.
Do you have a link to one of his studies that show how he has done his calculations?

Questionmark
New York restaurants and bars are open, for eating at kerbside or delivery or collection, stores are open
the City is awake, just a bit groggy and deBlasio is still a wazzock
www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/nyregion/indoor-dining-coronavirus.html

BCF - the place where the Covid infections are is Auckland- which is reallly densely populated. But that's beside the point really - as the ship has sailed to copy NZ as the most effective part of their strategy was shutting there boarder in January and anyone arriving going into state quarantine.(you have to be a NZ resident or citizen to be allowed to travel there)

America now reached 200,000 deaths☹️

As far as I'm concerned all new measures won't work. They have lost the support of the people. They do not have enough police to police it. It's time in a NATIONAL crisis to bring in the troops to enforce rules and run the track and trace. We cannot go on endlessly like this. The country will be bankrupt before long, millions on the dole, economy shot and then brexshit on top.

@QuestionMarkNow

Statisticians can make numbers says a lot of things. Do you have a link to one of his studies that show how he has done his calculations?

... The hospital admissions are a matter of record and simple maths, nothing tricky

Graphs and figures are the same for the actuaries group, Spiegelhalter and several other reputable statisticians
and ignored by those wanting herd immunity, as it doesn't fit their wishes