Politics Coronavirus

[Gwadien]

Coronavirus: Whitty and Vallance faced 'herd immunity' backlash, emails show

Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance were alarmed by questions over the controversial concept, emails show.

www.bbc.co.uk

When I saw this, I thought about the comparisons between covid and a war.

This reminds me of how generals etc were focused on political point scoring.

 

[Bodhi]

I didn't think asking a question about who's debunked a thing - considering @Marc stated that "it's been debunked" - was face-palmable @Bodhi.

But you live and learn, I guess.

Because it wasn't even a prediction - Valliance was at pains to say that. Strangely enough the media haven't picked up on that and have run with the 50k random mathematical extrapolation they came up with. Fantastic letter to The Times taking that extrapolation to it's logical conclusion:


View: https://twitter.com/SuzanneEvans1/status/1308662556421230593?s=20


Decent read below on the many problems with the data presented on Monday also - if I was being generous I'd call it numberwang, if I wasn't I'd call it outright lying.

Whitty and Vallance are playing a dangerous game

Over the past 6 months, statistics have been misused so often by those who should know better that I find it almost impossible to be shocked anymore. Credit to England’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) for doing so with ease in their joint briefing...

unherd.com

 

[Marc]

I didn't think asking a question about who's debunked a thing - considering @Marc stated that "it's been debunked" - was face-palmable @Bodhi.

But you live and learn, I guess.

Erm, even Boris Johnson admitted yesterday their predictions were way off the mark. Their claim was not supported by the governments own testing data! Its a shambles. "we are on the same trajectory as spain and france". Err if thats the case, we would be upto about 10k a day by end of october, not 50k! There are plenty of professors and experts in their fields stating the 50k a day was utter tripe. I guess its who you want to believe.

They need to stop pissing on our feet and telling us its raining

 

[Moriath]

Erm, even Boris Johnson admitted yesterday their predictions were way off the mark. Their claim was not supported by the governments own testing data! Its a shambles. "we are on the same trajectory as spain and france". Err if thats the case, we would be upto about 10k a day by end of october, not 50k! There are plenty of professors and experts in their fields stating the 50k a day was utter tripe. I guess its who you want to believe.

They need to stop pissing on our feet and telling us its raining

They said in the presentation they were not predictions tho. Just an example of what would happen if doubles every 7 days.

 

[Scouse]

They said in the presentation they were not predictions tho. Just an example of what would happen if doubles every 7 days.

Yep. Not their fault if people don't pay attention to what they're saying properly.

 

[Hawkwind]

Yep. Not their fault if people don't pay attention to what they're saying properly.

Idiots fueled by idiotic online/press articles that precisely misquote and add conjecture just to get some ad revenue on their shitty sites.

Agree with you but I don't think the media is helping things. Only been back in the country for 5 days and I'm already avoiding BBC & Sky News.

 

[Yoni]

The UK Media is a travesty these days with the exception of the FT I have cancelled all subscriptions I had (Guard, Indy, Times and Telegraph at one point). I prefer to read NYT and DN which for foreign news is relatively good.

 

[Marc]

Because it wasn't even a prediction - Valliance was at pains to say that. Strangely enough the media haven't picked up on that and have run with the 50k random mathematical extrapolation they came up with. Fantastic letter to The Times taking that extrapolation to it's logical conclusion:


View: https://twitter.com/SuzanneEvans1/status/1308662556421230593?s=20


Decent read below on the many problems with the data presented on Monday also - if I was being generous I'd call it numberwang, if I wasn't I'd call it outright lying.

Whitty and Vallance are playing a dangerous game

Over the past 6 months, statistics have been misused so often by those who should know better that I find it almost impossible to be shocked anymore. Credit to England’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO) and the UK’s Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) for doing so with ease in their joint briefing...

unherd.com

Most people just believe what this shambolic government tell them

 

[Embattle]

I tend to think the majority don't believe what any government tells them.

 

[Yoni]

Sadly I think there are idiots who are blindly agreeing with Bozza - God knows there is at least one on these forums.... I think Bozza (anti hood) and his band of merry men have less followers now than they had in the election

 

[Talivar]

I keep bumping into people who to me atleast seem to blindly agree with Boris decisions because of Brexit and how they beleive he is the one to deiever it. They almost seem to accept the Covid mistakes as part of the deal and a price worth paying. Again this is just my opinion

 

[Marc]

I tend to think the majority don't believe what any government tells them.

judging by this thread I disagree

 

[Gwadien]

judging by this thread I disagree

I think the vast majority of people here dislike what Boris is doing in terms of lock down etc.

But I think people agree that Covid is pretty bad and we shouldn't 'go back to normal'.

I guess we'll see in the next few weeks, as it seems we're easily going to smash through the March number of cases.

 

[Marc]

I think the vast majority of people here dislike what Boris is doing in terms of lock down etc.

But I think people agree that Covid is pretty bad and we shouldn't 'go back to normal'.

I guess we'll see in the next few weeks, as it seems we're easily going to smash through the March number of cases.

so we are going to hit 100k cases a day which is what the experts estimate we were seeing in March? We are currently at 6k, with massively improved testing. Is that your prediction or just “what could possibly happen”. Apparently the two aren’t mutually exclusive

 

[Gumbo]

We're on way more than 6k cases per day because an enormous amount of people can't get tests, a huge number more are asymptomatic and a huge number more than that couldn't be arsed to get a test.

We're on 6k of people who managed to find a test centre that they could get to, felt ill enough to realise that they were ill, could be arsed to go and get tested. Up to a week ago as well of course because that's how long it's taking to get your results in a lot of cases.

Just look at the admissions for a sense of how in the shit we are/are going to be.

On admissions we're at roughly a third of where we were on the 19thish of March. Admissions were taking about 4 days to double then. Todays number was 275, shall we see what the number is on Monday?

 

[Gwadien]

so we are going to hit 100k cases a day which is what the experts estimate we were seeing in March? We are currently at 6k, with massively improved testing. Is that your prediction or just “what could possibly happen”. Apparently the two aren’t mutually exclusive

People seem to think we have some kind of control over the virus when we clearly don't.

The Government is playing a game of the economy vs the capacity of our health system, once the health system goes beyond capacity we'll then start to see the preventable deaths.

I'd rather not gamble with lives, and there's so much more that the Government can do to help the economy whilst making it as safe as possible. I don't understand why they encouraged everyone to go out to eat when it would seem to make sense to encourage everyone to have takeaways at home instead and devise a method so that all restaurants could offer takeaways. I'm sure there's a couple of billion sitting around that could do that.

I just think that we're in a pretty privileged time where we can look back at pandemics in the past that have wiped out millions, sure, covid isn't the Spanish Flu but I'd rather be cautious now and not have to regret it later. Hopefully we can learn some lessons and have systems in place to prevent the inevitable apocalypse scale pandemic in the future.

 

[Yoni]

I see that the UK is finally going to introduce a sensible job retention scheme similar to the ones used and that have been used in mainland Europe for decades ...

I never understood why office white collar workers were furloughed rather than using tried and tested methods in Europe.

I am currently on KTP (korttidspermittering) at 20% with a 4% reduction in salary which will end 30th Nov. The scheme works well.

The BBC describes Sunak (who I think has been quite good) as creative which this isn’t really...

 

[Raven]

Out of the entire lot of them, Sunak has appeared to be the only one with an ounce of competence.

 

[Embattle]

NHS Covid-19 app: One million downloads of contact tracer for England and Wales

Users are being urged to install the app to protect themselves and others against the resurgent virus.

www.bbc.co.uk

Well according to the app my area has medium risk.

 

[Gwadien]

NHS Covid-19 app: One million downloads of contact tracer for England and Wales

Users are being urged to install the app to protect themselves and others against the resurgent virus.

www.bbc.co.uk

Well according to the app my area has medium risk.

Mine is high, does that mean I'm winning?

 

[Raven]

Mine says medium risk too, despite the fact Northampton is apparently high risk. I'm about 5 miles from town though.

 

[Moriath]

You guys actually downloading the app?

 

[Embattle]

Installed and running.

 

[Raven]

Likewise.

I am willing to try pretty much anything to help this shit get in the sea.

 

[Bodhi]

COVID outbreaks - Week 37

Care Homes 228
Educational 110
Workplace 92
Other 39
Pubs/Restaurant/Food 25

Source: PHE.

a) Quick, close teh pubs!
b) Same mistakes being made as in March / April from the looks of things.

 

[Gwadien]

COVID outbreaks - Week 37

Care Homes 228
Educational 110
Workplace 92
Other 39
Pubs/Restaurant/Food 25

Source: PHE.

a) Quick, close teh pubs!
b) Same mistakes being made as in March / April from the looks of things.

So what are you saying? we should shut care homes/schools/businesses instead?

 

[Bodhi]

So what are you saying? we should shut care homes/schools/businesses instead?

No, I'm suggesting that after 6 months of research into this, we have a clear idea of who is at risk, who we need to protect - and we aren't fucking doing it.

For all the money we are spunking up the wall nationalizing everything and shutting the economy down, we could easily have spent that to put "our arms around carehomes", as Hat Mancock suggested we were doing initially. We could treat them like oil rigs - staff do 3 weeks on, 3 weeks off, wages heavily subsidised to cover the disruption, testing before going in, etc etc. Instead, we heavily restrict the healthy and ignore those at risk.

Fucking shambles.

 

[Gwadien]

No, I'm suggesting that after 6 months of research into this, we have a clear idea of who is at risk, who we need to protect - and we aren't fucking doing it.

For all the money we are spunking up the wall nationalizing everything and shutting the economy down, we could easily have spent that to put "our arms around carehomes", as Hat Mancock suggested we were doing initially. We could treat them like oil rigs - staff do 3 weeks on, 3 weeks off, wages heavily subsidised to cover the disruption, testing before going in, etc etc. Instead, we heavily restrict the healthy and ignore those at risk.

Fucking shambles.

Absolutely agree.

I wouldn't mind the current measures if it was a standard tight arse tory government but they're throwing money at things like it's going out of fashion but it appears that theyre not doing it properly.

As I said before, 100bn for proper testing would be able to create conditions for everyone to be absolutely fine.

Personally I think it shows how little the government actually cares about small businesses, as they were always going to be ones hit the hardest and the governments measures hardly supports them.

 

[Bodhi]

I think the vast majority of people here dislike what Boris is doing in terms of lock down etc.

But I think people agree that Covid is pretty bad and we shouldn't 'go back to normal'.

I guess we'll see in the next few weeks, as it seems we're easily going to smash through the March number of cases.

Easily done when you change the definition of a "case" halfway through the year.

March "case" - someone in hospital requiring medical attention.
Current "Case" - someone who has tested positive for the presence of a virus - no consideration if they are ill, or even infectious (look into Cycle Thresholds on PCR Testing) - or even have it (false positives).

 

[Raven]

Hancock: 'Best thing to do to get app is upgrade'

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he understood "the challenges" around downloading the NHS Covid-19 app.

www.bbc.co.uk

What a twat.