Coronavirus

[johnb]

At this difficult time, may I suggest that we spare a thought for all those company directors and executives whose bonuses are linked to the price of their company's shares.

Don't worry about them - they always claim extenuating unforeseen circumstances and end up getting their bonuses come what may.

[gradus]

Am I alone in wondering why the activities of those that 'short' share prices and currencies aren't better controlled/curtailed.

[Dave2002]

Firstly, we are dealing here with Andrew Bridgen, not the brightest of sparks and certainly not someone deeply versed in epidemiology or virology. ... etc.

OK - but now we are reducing things to a personal level - "he said, she said, they said ...." as though that really matters. Just because Andrew Bridgen appears to be a very rich so and so, doesn't mean that he should be totally disregarded - though I take your point.

There was a letter in the Times yesterday from someone involved in agriculture, who suggested that Professor Ferguson and his team at Imperial have previously got things wrong - and there was mention of a very large number of healthy cows being culled in the foot and mouth epidemic earlier on. I was largely unaware of that, as I think we were mostly out of the country at the time, though I was aware of the damage caused by that outbreak.

I did not know anything about the analysis afterwards, which may (allegedly) have shown that the advice in the case of animal welfare was seemingly incorrect.

Models such as the SIR model I referred to earlier are fairly robust - but only up to a point. Small changes in parameters and initial conditions may have very significant effects, and then if these are translated in to policies all sorts of things can go wrong.

Now we're all involved. Some of the policies may turn out to be completely wrong, or completely ineffective. I (we) just don't know. If the overall system is seemingly very complex all sorts of tweaks may be injected - but it may turn out to be a very simple system, with only a few controls needed. Often trying to adjust a system based on behaviour can lead to instability, and there have been a number of experiments in which people were asked to "correct" the behaviour of a system - not knowing what it really is/was, and they pushed the system into chaos and instability. Afterwards they were shown what they had done, and the changes in the system which had influenced their behaviour - and in some cases it was a single change in just one variable. Hardly any teams ever discovered this, or stabilised the system. That kind of experiment has been repeated with similar results many times.

This is not howver, a suggestion that we should ignore predictions. Steering into icebergs on one of two beliefs - either that there isn't an iceberg, or that a ship is unsinkable, is not clever.

[Bryn]

OK - but now we are reducing things to a personal level - "he said, she said, they said ...." as though that really matters. Just because Andrew Bridgen appears to be a very rich so and so, doesn't mean that he should be totally disregarded - though I take your point.

There was a letter in the Times yesterday from someone involved in agriculture, who suggested that Professor Ferguson and his team at Imperial have previously got things wrong - and there was mention of a very large number of healthy cows being culled in the foot and mouth epidemic earlier on. I was largely unaware of that, as I think we were mostly out of the country at the time, though I was aware of the damage caused by that outbreak.

I did not know anything about the analysis afterwards, which may (allegedly) have shown that the advice in the case of animal welfare was seemingly incorrect.

Models such as the SIR model I referred to earlier are fairly robust - but only up to a point. Small changes in parameters and initial conditions may have very significant effects, and then if these are translated in to policies all sorts of things can go wrong.

Now we're all involved. Some of the policies may turn out to be completely wrong, or completely ineffective. I (we) just don't know. If the overall system is seemingly very complex all sorts of tweaks may be injected - but it may turn out to be a very simple system, with only a few controls needed. Often trying to adjust a system based on behaviour can lead to instability, and there have been a number of experiments in which people were asked to "correct" the behaviour of a system - not knowing what it really is/was, and they pushed the system into chaos and instability. Afterwards they were shown what they had done, and the changes in the system which had influenced their behaviour - and in some cases it was a single change in just one variable. Hardly any teams ever discovered this, or stabilised the system. That kind of experiment has been repeated with similar results many times.

This is not howver, a suggestion that we should ignore predictions. Steering into icebergs on one of two beliefs - either that there isn't an iceberg, or that a ship is unsinkable, is not clever.

I think the time-line re Briden's assertions is important. I did not hear him on Channel 4 but are you sure he was suggesting that Covid-19 had jumped the species barrier before the late months of 2019 when it appeared in Wuhan? I know there are numerous conspiracy theories concerning the virus's origins and that some Chinese epidemiologists have suggested it was introduced to Wuhan from outside, rather than the species jump originating there. Brigen's earlier comments seem to be about the possibility of it having arrived in the UK earlier than thought - a matter of days or weeks, rather than a longer period.

[Bryn]

This, to which I was alerted by Ian Pace's FB page, looks well worthy of consideration:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615370/coronavirus-pandemic-social-distancing-18-months/

[johnb]

The only hard figures we have for the UK are the number of deaths due to Covid-19. It is interesting that the average daily increase in the deaths seems to be around 50%. That rate of increase indicates the increase in the spread of the virus at the time the people were infected, say 14 days previously (though there are various estimates of the average number of days between infection and death).

It is impossible to make any meaningful deductions from such a very small sample but a 50% daily increase in the spread of the virus would be much higher than previous guestimates and IMO make the current clamp down an absolute necessity.

(Also, perhaps I am totally wrong (I often am) but the actual number of people infected with Covis-19 is likely to be vastly, vastly higher than the published confirmed cases. It all depends on the figures you plug into the backwards calculation from the number of deaths.)

[Bryn]

So, Betty Windsor is starting early her Easter residency in the Castle from which her Grandfather took the new family name. Such residencies are usually accompanied by daily guard changes, rather than the 3 days a week the rest of the year. I wonder whether the current emergency will see a temporary halt to such ceremonial displays? The current online schedule shows changing of the guard proceeding on a daily basis from Saturday.

[LMcD]

To replace our Thursday morning social, one of the organizers emailed me (and presumably others) asking how many words I could make out of Coronavirus. She didn't set a time limit, but off the top of my head I managed 28. Any plurals created by adding 's' not counted separately.

[teamsaint]

To replace our Thursday morning social, one of the organizers emailed me (and presumably others) asking how many words I could make out of Coronavirus. She didn't set a time limit, but off the top of my head I managed 28. Any plurals created by adding 's' not counted separately.

Cor !!

[Dave2002]

The press conference this morning with Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance was very well balanced. As they said, some of the data is now firming up, so we do seem to have better estimates of progession and recovery rates. Worth trying to find on BBC TV News from this morning - 19th March.

Even getting a vaccine might not solve the issues for everybody. Mutating strains of the virus might make developing a universal vaccine difficult. I believe that in one year the flu vaccines developed were largely ineffective, as they were matched to the wrong strain - (not deliberately, but things moved on). I have had moderate problems after having a couple of flu vaccinations, so I decided that I'd only have the vaccination if I felt very fit beforehand. mrs d. was very seriously ill about 20 years ago, and vaccinations were just coming out I think. She was advised by her consultants to keep away from the vaccinations as they could make her condition worse.

For people like her, and perhaps also me, there would be benefit in some sort of test to establish whether we might benefit safely from a future vaccine. Without that, applying the general rule that vaccination is a good thing (which I believe, I have looked at the statistics) may not work in some people's favour. Some people do become ill after having a vaccination. As a matter of general policy I know that the health advisers will nearly always recommend in favour of vaccination, but they are dealing with a large population, and are less immediately concerned with outliers and problem cases.

Developing a test such as I am suggesting is unlikely to be a high priority in the immediate future. I would expect work to push ahead on the development of vaccines which may work for the majority in each population, which will have much higher priority.

[LMcD]

Cor !!

That wasn't one of the 28!
Notice in our corner shop: 'Dear Customer's please shop responsably'. Never mind, it's the thought that counts.
More bad news for savers....
Things seem to be in danger of spinning out of control.

[Dave2002]

Cor !!

Or maybe "Caw" - the sound made perhaps by crows - members of the Corvid family IIRC. Not a word embedded in "coronavirus" though.

[Pulcinella]

That wasn't one of the 28!
Notice in our corner shop: 'Dear Customer's please shop responsably'. Never mind, it's the thought that counts.
More bad news for savers....
Things seem to be in danger of spinning out of control.

Was the name of the orifice that most of our country's 'leaders' are speaking out of one of them?

[Dave2002]

Was the name of the orifice that most of our country's 'leaders' are speaking out of one of them?

No - there's no 'e' in coronavirus! You can't get "cure" out either!

[LMcD]

Or maybe "Caw" - the sound made perhaps by crows - members of the Corvid family IIRC.

Sadly, there's no 'w' in Coronavirus .... but there was plenty of cawing in our local wood this morning. I suspect the rooks were 'discussing' who could build nests in which trees.
Just spotted 'sour' 'sonic', 'nous' and 'van(s)'.