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?

Good luck DGR - we'll be thinking of you!

[quote mrslaughan]So this is interesting.... and scary .
I know there are scientists on this thread, any thoughts?

www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12366565[/quote]
I think this is a very good article explaining how complex it is to even know the ‘death rate’ for Covid.
I also think there are many more variables to include (such as the precision of the test, incl the number of false positive and false negative).

This, for me, has been the issue right from the start btw I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with all the numbers, even more so when they are then used to make predictive calculations.

His point 3 btw is very much asserting what is a basic principle of research in medicine. A study with 100 people will be hard to generalise to the whole population, let alone to be used as a definitive value to be used across the world.

Bonne chance, DGR!

Why are they allowing "NHS Track and Trace" to go unchallenged? I gritted my teeth every time the Buffoon said it in PMQ. It's clearly a narrative they want to push.

At the very least, it could be countered by referring to "Serco Track and Trace" or even "Dido Track and Trace" if preferred.

[quote BigChocFrenzy]NewsThump@newsthump

NEWS!
Kent purchased by NCP[/quote]
At least it wasn't Euro Car Parks

So e.g. a developing country with e.g. mean age 20, as in some African countries would have a v low death rate

Depends on things like incidence of chronic illness, access to healthcare etc. It's probably difficult to get timely excess mortality figures in many African countries.

I have a fair bit of contact with large businesses in South Africa, some of which have conducted extensive testing among their employees. The numbers I have seen suggest case fatality rates of around 1%. This is surprisingly high for a working age sample and it makes me somewhat sceptical about claims of very low death rates in Africa. Younger populations for sure but also a lot of chronic illness like HIV and TB which probably don't improve your COVID prognosis.

Also, I absolutely love the idea that the English love borders so much that they are going to build one round Kent.

But I dare say the good people of Kent knew what they were voting for.

Yes you can’t transfer these numbers from one country to the next when they are so different.

Access to appropriate healthcare is an issue as is the evaluation of the number of cases/death. They will have HIV or TB as misti says but less obesity, younger etc...

misti if the company tested everyone, then they also tested people who are asymptomatic. Which we don’t do. The numbers will end up different (we are back to not comparing the same groups)

As far as I can make out, the Scottish "Test and Protect" tracing programme does seem to be working quite well - maybe because it is primarily run by NHS Scotland and the local health protection teams .

Some people have apparently already been identified via the Protect-Scot app (more than a million people including dh and me have installed it)

I've mentioned the positive test at the local rugby club: the female concerned was at Glasgow Uni and was tested on Sunday (not sure why, as was asymptomatic) and got the result on Monday. By the Tuesday the Test & Protect team was able to say what day contact with her should mean self-isolation (which was a day later than we had thought).

It's also why they've been able to identify why "in home" transmission is driving the recent clusters - rather than the non-socially distanced pubs in Aberdeen hi h led to that cluster or the factory based cluster in Tayside (science led rather than politically motivated as the conspiracy theorists on Scotsnet seem to think ).

@ListeningQuietly

Hilary Private pensions can be paid anywhere in the world STATE and PUBLIC SECTOR pensions have to go into a UK bank account with a UK IBAN which is rather a problem for a LOT of people now

My mother was a teacher (state sector) and had her teacher's pension paid into a Spanish account until 2014 when she went back to the UK.

misti if the company tested everyone, then they also tested people who are asymptomatic. Which we don’t do. The numbers will end up different (we are back to not comparing the same groups)

These were large scale testing programmes testing both people with symptoms and those without - they tested most of their workforce.

What's remarkable to me is that despite the age of the workforce, the CFR appears to have converged towards the "around 1%" that has been estimated by epidemiologists since last spring.

Just caught up with the thread.
Good luck tomorrow @DGrossetti

QuestionMarkNow This is why public health experts say that the gold standard measure of counting deaths is to look at the excess deaths above the historical average for the same period in previous years

The global death toll was not invented by a global conspiracy of governments from the left, right, centre, theocracies, democracies .... or Bill Gates

Countries expriencing a significant Covid epidemic show a sharp peak of deaths over the main period of the epidemic completely unlike previous years
e.g. UK shows 65,000 excess deaths, of which ONS say > 57,000 are with Covid and of these, 90% were actually caused by Covid

Deaths then go down to nearly normal levels in countries that extend lockdown well beyond this peak, i.e. most countries except the USA
i.e. deaths are caused by Covid, not lockdown

See charts comparing 2020 to previous years for countries and also some hard-hit cities / regions

Once again, many thanks

meanwhile, I noticed on another thread something which caught my eye about Irish HGVs being able to "queue jump" at Dover since they're intra-EU (and therefore don't need paperwork) ?

I wonder how that will be reported (if true ?) ?

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/fifth-greater-manchester-schools-been-18983464
A fifth of Greater Manchester schools have been hit by Covid cases - 250 schools and thousands of pupils isolating
Almost 250 schools have been affected by the virus in some way

Here we go again...

www.facebook.com/groups/NorfolkCoronavirus/permalink/612282546095824/

My DD who works with young adult severe autistic people in a home has only been tested once for Covid. Now she had just been informed it will be once a week but that was supposed to happen ages ago! Not carehomes fault test kits not available.

Following on from my last post, what will Irish HGVs (that presumably won't be on DVLA records) experience ?

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-kent-lorries-permit-labour_uk_5f6b6af0c5b629afbe99812b

Tories Accused Of 'Carnival Of Incompetence' On Brexit Kent 'Border' Plan

@Mistigri

So e.g. a developing country with e.g. mean age 20, as in some African countries would have a v low death rate

Depends on things like incidence of chronic illness, access to healthcare etc. It's probably difficult to get timely excess mortality figures in many African countries.

I have a fair bit of contact with large businesses in South Africa, some of which have conducted extensive testing among their employees. The numbers I have seen suggest case fatality rates of around 1%. This is surprisingly high for a working age sample and it makes me somewhat sceptical about claims of very low death rates in Africa. Younger populations for sure but also a lot of chronic illness like HIV and TB which probably don't improve your COVID prognosis.

... I am surprised at that, as evidence from Western countries is that younger people with conditions like T1, T2, high BP etc only increase their risk by the equivalent of a few years of age.

Is there a high % of people in Africa suffering from very grave / untreated conditions ?

We have examined umpteen studies on the stats threads showing Age is absolutely dominant as a risk, far more than almost all but grave health conditions:

e.g. David Spiegelhalter calculated that
Risk of dying from COVID, if infected, increases at 11–12% each year of age
==> risk doubles every 6–7 years
==> risk multiplies x ~ 8 every 20 years

So (my calcs)
==> a 50-year-old has ~ 8 x the risk of a 30-year-old
~ 16 x the risk of a 23-year-old

==> a 63-year-old has ~ 64 x the risk of a 23-year-old .... v relevant for older teachers

==> an 80-year-old has x ~ 500 times the risk of dying as a 20-year-old

Have been saying for ages deaths from Covid over 50,000. It was 48,000 when they decided to knock off a few thousand and then say only those dying within 28 days would be counted and that was end July!

Pity that Kent has no international treaty to keep its borders open! (Not that this appears to matte for the current Government and NI!)

@RedToothBrush

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/fifth-greater-manchester-schools-been-18983464 A fifth of Greater Manchester schools have been hit by Covid cases - 250 schools and thousands of pupils isolating Almost 250 schools have been affected by the virus in some way

... Wow The disruption to education and parents' work Weren't schools promised rapid testing .....

@Peregrina

Pity that Kent has no international treaty to keep its borders open! (Not that this appears to matte for the current Government and NI!)

I wonder what makes Kent part of England , and whether it could be broached in a "limited and specific" way ?

DGR
meanwhile, I noticed on another thread something which caught my eye about Irish HGVs being able to "queue jump" at Dover since they're intra-EU (and therefore don't need paperwork) ?
I cannot see how that would work
especially after the somewhat cavalier attitude of certain Irish lorry drivers to customs seals in Essex

@Sostenueto

Have been saying for ages deaths from Covid over 50,000. It was 48,000 when they decided to knock off a few thousand and then say only those dying within 28 days would be counted and that was end July!

... ONS figures show that cutoff at 28 days under-estimates deaths, whereas cutoff ay 60 days over-estimates

They also show that the brief over-estimation by PHE was tiny compared to the earlier months of under-estimation