COVID19

[Stom]

Our lockdown is over, so we went to buy a car. The county we visited has had 17...

Cases.

Yes, 17 cases in total.

Early lockdown, low levels of international transport, Budapest apart, what else?

[Digby]

Our lockdown is over, so we went to buy a car. The county we visited has had 17...

Cases.

Yes, 17 cases in total.

Early lockdown, low levels of international transport, Budapest apart, what else?

No testing?

[Stom]

Our lockdown is over, so we went to buy a car. The county we visited has had 17...

Cases.

Yes, 17 cases in total.

Early lockdown, low levels of international transport, Budapest apart, what else?

No testing?

Testing numbers are not high, but they’re on a par with neighboring Romania if taken against population, and they have considerably more cases.

[Son of Mathonwy]

This is Tom Chivers, who writes on sciences stuff for UnHerd, and who's motto is "... it might be more complicated than that ..." which is frankly exactly the sort of motto you want any journo to have, but particularly a science writer... his thoughts on the 'More or Less' article mentioned previously.


https://unherd.com/thepost/how-much-dif ... have-made/

How much difference would an earlier shutdown have made?

The Telegraph reports that if Britain had locked down one week earlier, 75% of British Covid-19 deaths would have been prevented. It’s attracted the attention of the BBC’s Jeremy Vine, and George Monbiot in The Guardian.

It’s based on a model by James Annan, a climate scientist, published on his blog, which was mentioned briefly by the BBC’s always fantastic More or Less programme on Tuesday.

I’m not here to debunk the model, exactly, and I would never dare contradict the More or Less team. I just wanted to flag a reason to be concerned with it.

The word ‘model’ can describe many things, from an all-singing, all-dancing climate model which simulates the action of the entire atmosphere and ocean system down to cubic-kilometre units, to a simple statistical curve which says ‘if X goes up by 1, Y will go up by 2’. The Annan model is very much at the latter end.

[https://l35h2znmhf1scosj14ztuxt1-wpengine]Hindcast/forecast for daily deaths in the UK. Credit: James Annan

Its model is amazingly simple: Covid-19 infections were doubling about every 3.5 days in March; that means you get two doublings in a week. So, if lockdown had happened a week earlier, it would have prevented two doublings, so you’d have got a quarter as many infections and therefore a quarter as many deaths.

.....

None of this is to say that an earlier lockdown would not have saved lives. It almost certainly would. But the stark claim that it would have prevented 75% of deaths — 30,000, so far — is wildly overconfident and I think should be reported with far more uncertainty; the true figure could be much lower.

But why only 1 week?

There were 11 days between our giving up on containment (& most testing and all contact tracing) on 12th March and the U-turn to lockdown on the 23rd.

And at our lockdown we'd had 30 days' warning since the Italians had begun quarantine measures on 22nd Feb (with more general lockdown coming in stages over the next 2 weeks or so).

If we'd assumed British humans are equally susceptible to coronaviruses as Italian humans (as I suspect science would advise), we could have locked down in early March when our cases were in the low hundreds.

But let's be charitable, let's wait till the 12th March. Imagine the government had reacted differently to their failure to contain the virus. Imagine they'd followed the example of the Italians (and others in the Far East) and the advice of the WHO, and locked down then. We'd have had an extra 11 days. But we didn't, and so in those 11 days, the number of cases grew from 590 to 6,650. So the delay enlarged the number of infected by a factor of 11 (this is slightly higher than you'd get with the "doubling in 3.5 days" idea - in fact the doubling was every 3.1 days at that point).

So, "back of an envelope" it may be, but it looks like we could have kept the epidemic to an 11th of its size, had we acted differently on the 12th March, and followed the example of the Italians. The current deaths are approx 45-60k (that's ranging from confirmed death certificate deaths to the likely excess deaths at this point), so we could have saved (very rough ballpark numbers) 40-50k lives at this stage.

[Son of Mathonwy]

Chris Whitty spins the figures.

All-cause mortality has come down at the same time as the Covid deaths have come down and it is now at roughly the rate it is at in an average winter. So we are essentially having a winter … in terms of mortality, but in late spring and early summer.

It's not what you'd expect from a scientist. What scientific meaning is there in comparing the first full week of May this year with the 5-year average of a week in late January? Just an attempt to spin 4k excess deaths for the week into something "average".

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... eaths-fall

[Galfon]

pretty outrageous.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... s-lockdown

[Digby]

There aren't many people who'd survive this. Only seniority can save his job and allow him to continue failing upwards

[Son of Mathonwy]

So it looks like he took his wife (sick with Covid-19) from London to Durham, to stay with his parents (who must be in their 60s or 70s?). Possibly he was also showing symptoms at that time, although that's almost irrelevant since 1) his wife was ill, and 2) lockdown applies to everyone, not just those with symptoms.

This is clearly worse than what Neil Ferguson resigned for: he could reasonably assume he was immune at that time.

But it's all down to Boris. Does he think Dom is worth the trouble? I imagine Dom will step back (a little) from official duties for a few months, while still advising Johnson. Then quietly return, preferably while some big news is holding everyone's attention.

[fivepointer]

He should be toast.
If he doesnt go, then expect a wave of family groups doing much the same and claiming, with some justification, that if it was permissable for a senior member of the Govt to break the rules so why not them?
Also his wife has been shown to be a corrupt liar by stating in a piece in the Spectator that they stayed in London during their illness.

[Sandydragon]

I wonder who tipped the media off about that?

[Mellsblue]

Yep. He needs to go. The civil service will be breathing a huge sigh of relief. I’m sure he’ll still be advising Boris from afar, though, if he does get the boot.

[Mellsblue]

I wonder who tipped the media off about that?

There will a very long list of suspects! Though, boringly, it’s meant to be a neighbour.

[Mellsblue]

[fivepointer]

So you travel 250 odd miles while infected to stay with your parents and get your sister to do shopping for you. And there was no one close by where you normally lived who could have done that?

[Banquo]

So you travel 250 odd miles while infected to stay with your parents and get your sister to do shopping for you. And there was no one close by where you normally lived who could have done that?

Given how unpopular he is, probably not

[Son of Mathonwy]

Wow, so he was happy to let his wife lie about is whereabouts, and to let the lie remain uncorrected in the media.

[Digby]

I don't know his wife lied, likely she told the truth, and simply not the whole truth

[Banquo]

covidiocy is strong in this one

A Michelin-starred chef in North Yorkshire has been sent a letter about child employment by a council officer after he was filmed making meals with his children for frontline NHS staff.

Andrew Pern, who runs a number of award-winning restaurants, including the The Star Inn at Harome and Mr P’s Curious Tavern in York, was sent the letter by an officer at North Yorkshire County Council after he appeared on BBC Look North with his family.

The letter said “it appeared that there were children helping out in your commercial kitchen”.

It continued: “I wanted to take this opportunity to offer you some guidance relating to child employment and have enclosed an information leaflet for your perusal.”

Tweeting a picture of the letter he received, Mr Pern said two of his children - aged 21 and 15 - were helping him to cook the meals at his home and called for “common sense”.

A councillor responded to the tweet, saying the authority would be apologising.

[Stom]

Lol

[Which Tyler]

https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/kuenssbe ... nder-fire/

[fivepointer]

All good stuff. This "source" nonsense really irritates me. Its clear its Cummings who is saying these things so why not say that?

Hancock - as well as a few other cabinet ministers - selling their souls and going against their own Govt instructions - "I know how ill coronavirus makes you. It was entirely right for Dom Cummings to find childcare for his toddler, when both he and his wife were getting ill"
As Lewis Goodall says - "Well at least there’s clarity now: if you’re afraid of getting ill, even if you have the virus, it’s permissible to travel vast distances to drop your child off with someone else"

This appalling, irresponsible shower of a Govt are playing with fire. If they dont fire Cummings for a flagrant breach of the rules they will have no defence when families start to travel further and mix more, enabling the infection rate to rise.

[Puja]

I'm just remembering the time when I had a 1 year old and a 3 year old and both my wife and I had norovirus and flu at the same time. They watched a fuck of a lot of BabyTV in high chairs and ate baked beans for dinner, but they were never in any danger. It's perfectly possible to do - not fun, but possible.

Puja

[Sandydragon]

I'm just remembering the time when I had a 1 year old and a 3 year old and both my wife and I had norovirus and flu at the same time. They watched a fuck of a lot of BabyTV in high chairs and ate baked beans for dinner, but they were never in any danger. It's perfectly possible to do - not fun, but possible.

Puja

Agreed. His child is 3-4 so whilst challenging, it’s possible to look after them whilst ill. Different case if they are so ill they need hospital care of course but my missis and I have caught stomach bugs before now and have managed to care for son of a similar age.

I definitely wouldn’t be travelling to elderly parents and risking infecting them.

[Donny osmond]

While I'm sympathetic to his family circumstances, he broke the exact rules that everyone else was adhering to. People died alone in hospitals and in their homes because their families weren't visiting on the understanding that it was against the rules. That this prick should first make those rules then knowingly break those rules is unconscionable. There is, of course, not a single drop of conscience in our cabinet, so whether it's unconscionable or not is neither here nor there.

Sent from my CPH1951 using Tapatalk

[Digby]

Two odd things that Cummings like Calderwood and then Ferguson fucked up in spectacular fashion breaking the rules they were setting, but then the second odd thing compounding the situation around Cummings is the government digging in to protect someone who clearly doesn't deserve but being summarily fired. Both aspects are disappointing and neither should have happened