Coronavirus

[kernelbogey]

The magic money tree has been discovered?! Surely not?

Sunak found it in the No 11 garden..... He sounded 100% more believeable than his boss, who just can't resist winging it, for whatever reason. He's being tipped for furture leader of the party: I can now see why.

[cloughie]

Sunak found it in the No 11 garden..... He sounded 100% more believeable than his boss, who just can't resist winging it, for whatever reason. He's being tipped for furture leader of the party: I can now see why.

Maybe sooner than we think!

[teamsaint]

Sunak found it in the No 11 garden..... He sounded 100% more believeable than his boss, who just can't resist winging it, for whatever reason. He's being tipped for furture leader of the party: I can now see why.

Local boy, KB ............

[kernelbogey]

One of our sharpest political satirists, Marina Hyde, writing in today's Guardian, had me howling with laughter at times.

By contrast her colleague John Crace struck an unchatactersitically sober note in his politics sketch today. And absolutely nailed the PM.

[kernelbogey]

Local boy, KB ............

Indeed. Do you think he follows Saints?

[teamsaint]

Indeed. Do you think he follows Saints?

Said to be a true believer !!
Think he was at King Edwards wasn’t he ?

Wonder if he refers to cabinet colleagues as “ Mush “ ?

[Anastasius]

I saw this on another forum. I have no reason whatosever to doubt the accuracy or provenance of Jake.

XXX wrote:REALLY Jake? You're certainly closer to IC than I am (geographically at least) but are you seriously suggesting they deliberately set out just to "get their sums wrong"?


I said they were grossly negligent, not deliberately setting out to massacre people.

Surely it's far more likely that with the best will in the world, and especially with all the "unknown factor Xs" which have to be "best guessed" into the final equations, it's far more likely that someone (several people actually) made some genuine mistakes/miscalculations?


Yes, what they did was adapt their pandemic flu model and change various assumptions to reflect what they knew about this coronavirus. What they failed to do, and have admitted not doing, was to change the load on the NHS to reflect the demands placed by this coronavirus on general hospital and ICU wards. Instead, they left the NHS demand assumptions at the same % as used for viral pneumonia in their original pandemic flu model. As a consequence, and based on the projections on those assumptions, they reached the conclusion that the best strategy was to let the virus spread, and then incrementally up the social distancing to manage the load on the NHS so it was never overwhelmed.

There was then a worldwide outcry from epidemiologists, including the WHO and pretty much everyone not bound in with the UK govt policy that the policy was nuts, demanding to see the model. Boris announced the modelling would be released. 10 days later, the Imperial College paper was released (in place of the model itself, which remains undisclosed) in which they stated that their original recommended strategy would have led to 250k deaths but was not viable. In an interview with the FT Neil Ferguson (now in isolation, the lead Professor of the IC team) admitted this was because they had used the viral pneumonia NHS load statistics, which did not reflect any COVID-19 data, it being a much worse disease as we are seeing with our own eyes.

So no, I do not believe those people did their best. The modelling was negligent. It was clearly negligently audited.

They embarked on a plan of relatively light social intervention to favour economics and freedom, at the cost of 250k planned deaths. OK, that is a trade off any public health initiative has to adopt. But, they did so on the basis of favouring a model from Imperial College (there were others, some by people who were screaming at the govt that their strategy was insanely destructive) which gave them a figure they thought was acceptable based on an obviously and seriously incorrect assumption. And clearly did not audit the modelling to pick up the carried over false flu assumption. And it would have killed c1.5m instead of 250k, because they were assuming the death rate would be ~1% because the NHS would be within capacity. If the NHS gets overwhelmed (as it will do in London in 7-10 days, and is likely to do elsewhere in 3-4 weeks given the lack of seriousness of the interventions to date) the death toll from the experience of Wuhan and Lombardy is likely to be 6% of confirmed cases rather than 1%, ie ~1.5m dead.

So no, I do not think everyone has done their professional best. The absence of effort in the containment phase was driven by the assumption that the epidemic could be managed for herd immunity within NHS capacity. That assumption led to a nonchalance about the initial spread of the virus - it was quite desirable to set up immunity among schoolchildren for example - because they thought they could throttle it down later. All that was based on the completely negligent failure to update health service load to reflect actual experience with this coronavirus in all the other countries ahead of us.

I've never met anyone who hasn't made some mistakes in his/her professional life, sometimes pretty serious ones. And that includes me!


True. Doesn't mean you and I have not been negligent. I haven't personally been this negligent.

AND don't forget the time (and no doubt political/time) pressures all these "back room people" MUST have been working under for the last few weeks/months.


The Imperial College team was sloppy and arrogant. The government then took it easy and ignored alarm bells from 360 degrees, because they liked the answer the IC model gave and didn't audit it.

As I say, perhaps you KNOW better than I do, but overall, while I'll happily accept that mistakes have been made, and even that some unnecessary delays have maybe resulted, overall I think "we" (i.e. all of us) aren't doing too badly in the face of what is genuinely an unprecedented situation.


I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.


OK. It helps to understand what happened though. This makes Grenfell Towers public policy failings look like a mere nothing. It's OK for someone on the Imperial College not to update that critical assumption - that sort of thing happens all the time - it's up to the rest of the team to test, retest and re-re-test it before recommending govt action. It's then on the government to take all the models it is presented with and audit them all with microscopic detail before deciding on a course of action. The government set its strategy in February. On being forced under public pressure to publish the model, it took 10 days for Imperial College to realise their catastrophic error and then more time consumingly negotiate all the twisty corridors as to how to deal with that publicly. It wasn't hard to find.

I have never seen a worse bit of governance.

[oddoneout]

Any thoughts on the financial package announced today ?

The wage subsidy for laid off workers looks a good investment. There simply wont be an economic recovery if businesses are decimated.

Support for the self employed doesn't look too generous, but I’m out of touch on that.
Support on in- work credits etc looks as though it is targeted reasonably well, but its a really complex system.
I’d love to see universal basic income evolve from all of this. It is an idea whose time has come.

Not much comfort if your employer isn't a business. Even in 'normal' times the benefits system is hardly a timely or accurate support system.

[MrGongGong]

Michael Parsons' work from the late 1960s is what you need: Mindfulness of Breathing. Then you can move on to his Mindfulness Occupied with the Body of a couple of years later. How prescient were they?

[Pulcinella]

Bus passes for elderly people in York and North Yorkshire can now be used before 9am.
I don't think they'll all be travelling to Whitby or Scarborough for a day at the seaside, though.

Maybe I should post this on the Good News thread, though.
Some shops are getting better at restricting early opening hours to the elderly, disabled, and NHS staff.

[Anastasius]

Well writing a considered post proved to be a complete waste of time, didn’t it ?

I really should have known better.

No, I don't think it was a complete waste of time at all. I know that very often our views differ but you were bang on the money here. A well-thought out and considered response.

[teamsaint]

No, I don't think it was a complete waste of time at all. I know that very often our views differ but you were bang on the money here. A well-thought out and considered response.

Sadly, it’s been deleted. But I appreciate your comment.

[kernelbogey]

Wonder if he refers to cabinet colleagues as “ Mush “ ...?

..or cracks anti-Portsmuff jokes in Cabinet?

[Anastasius]

Since my very long extract has provoked little response, let me precis it.

1) To model C-19, Imperial College took their existing pandemic flu model and tweaked it to suit C-19.

2) Only they forgot to tweak the variable that was 'loading on the NHS'.

3) It would appear that no-one spotted this error. No peer reviews. No test and re-test. The model and conclusions were submitted to Govt and Govt did not do any double-checking either. It went through on the nod.

4) From that single error, they (Imperial) postulated the initial recommendation which was the 'herd immunity' policy.

5) And despite all the furore from other scientists around the world that this was so totally wrong, they persisted. Academic arrogance ? Gross negligence ?

6) They continued in a similar vein until, one guesses someone, somewhere said 'Ooops'.

7) Hence the volte face in Govt policy

8) They (Imperial and the Govt this time) then attempted to obfuscate and bury their monumental cock-up.

[teamsaint]

It doesn't help anyone if you insist on defending what is clearly an iniquitous situation

Many people have what is clearly "spurious" self-employment
I guess that's their "choice" as well ?

As my post was deleted, all the bits where I said the system is wrong , the bits you ignored, are not now visible.

But you just keep on misrepresenting and attacking me, even though I’m on your side, if it it makes you feel good.