cashead wrote:
Literally anything would have been a better way to handle covid-19, but no, not with de Pfeffel. Can't be fuckin' havin' that.
I didn’t realise he was in charge of the responses in Italy, Spain and France, all of which are currently in a worse position than we are.
Feel free to point out where I was suggesting Johnson had anything to do with Italy, Spain or France's responses. Go on, I'll wait.
And hey, the UK government had the opportunity to front-foot it on their doorstep, and they sure as fuck failed to learn anything from watching the clusterfuck that was Italy.
Don't mind me, I'm just gonna sit back, and enjoy watching the curve flatten in my neck of the woods while I'm in quarantine.
Mellsblue wrote:Time and a plethora of inquiries will be required to find out who did what, when, how and why.
Just looking at numbers on a graph and deciding who acted correctly without context or letting the whole thing play out isn’t the best way of dealing with this in either the short or long term.
Yes, inquiries are needed, but that's for the future.
When I look at that graph I think "if we want to save lives we need to evaluate what South Korea is doing ASAP, and where appropriate, implement it", not "we can't possibly draw any conclusions from this right now, let's hold an inquiry in a couple of years".
Mellsblue wrote:As an example, I wonder if everyone who is praising the way China dealt with the crisis would accept the response of martial law, executions of dissenters and campaigns of disinformation from de Pfeffel’s govt. I somehow doubt it.
That's a ridiculous straw man.
1) South Korea (a democracy) is the most obvious stand out in that graph and is much more comparable to the UK than China is, so is clearly the first country to look at for best practice in Covid 19 response.
2) Why would adopting some of China's methods imply in any way that other, repressive methods are acceptable?
Mellsblue wrote:Time and a plethora of inquiries will be required to find out who did what, when, how and why.
Just looking at numbers on a graph and deciding who acted correctly without context or letting the whole thing play out isn’t the best way of dealing with this in either the short or long term.
Yes, inquiries are needed, but that's for the future.
When I look at that graph I think "if we want to save lives we need to evaluate what South Korea is doing ASAP, and where appropriate, implement it", not "we can't possibly draw any conclusions from this right now, let's hold an inquiry in a couple of years".
Mellsblue wrote:As an example, I wonder if everyone who is praising the way China dealt with the crisis would accept the response of martial law, executions of dissenters and campaigns of disinformation from de Pfeffel’s govt. I somehow doubt it.
That's a ridiculous straw man.
1) South Korea (a democracy) is the most obvious stand out in that graph and is much more comparable to the UK than China is, so is clearly the first country to look at for best practice in Covid 19 response.
2) Why would adopting some of China's methods imply in any way that other, repressive methods are acceptable?
The U.K. has evaluated what S Korea have done, hence the belated rush for a rigorous testing regime.
If you just look at the data on the graph, we should also be following Sweden or Holland who have far less stringent protocols in place than the U.K. and are tracking below us. By quite a long way in Sweden’s case. You could also ask whether all the testing is worth it as Germany are tracking just below us. Given the anomalies I’ve just pointed out, you can not draw anything conclusive from those graphs. My point is that every internet ‘expert’ has decided definitely what is wrong and what is right. This could be with us for another 18months. It’s a marathon not a sprint.
1) The South Korea govt. are tracking their citizens by phone. I very much doubt that would wash in the U.K. That both are democracies has little do do with it. A good friend of mine lived in S Korea for five years, they are a completely different culture. Far more used to obeying their govt and living with greater govt interference in their lives. I suppose you would do if you have a psycho with a nuclear arms programme on your doorstep. You only have to look at the amount of people flouting the rules, a growing movement asking if the long term economic fallout is worth such draconian measures and claims more lives will be lost in the long term by this steep economic down turn than you COVID to realise that the U.K. might not be as compliant as other nations. Behavioural scientists were part of the numerous committees that fed into SAGE. From what I’ve read, they were warning that the U.K. population would not tolerate overly stringent lockdowns, especially if we we’re ebbing in and out of them for 18 months.
2) Which of China’s less oppressive measures would you have us adopt?
Last edited by Mellsblue on Tue Apr 07, 2020 5:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
paddy no 11 wrote:Also are we not all agreed that the Chinese figures are nonsense and 45k died probably
You’d have thought so. Given they lied to the WHO and suppressed their figures at the very start, executed dissenters, put large swathes of the population under martial law and have let a member of the ruling party and state television repeat the claim it’s a US planted biological weapon.
If the projections here are near right the UK is comparatively fucked. Almost as bad as the US and worse than Italy, France, Germany and Spain put together. I'm not sure how a government could stand in those circumstances.
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
Study published in The Lancet on the effectiveness of closing schools. The first para on p5 might give a clue as to how long we can expect the first wave of lockdown to last (3 months, gulp):
Tlrd? My take of what is there is that there is little evidence as to its efficacy but it’s probably less effective for covid than influenza. The long term repercussions on the economy and the affected children’s education and long term prospects, and the short term effect on the availability of front line workers, might outweigh the benefits. The previous all seems to be based on the fact that the kids will just socialise elsewhere which if there’s lockdown as here, and it’s adhered to, seems a strange train of thought. There’s not enough evidence either way and it’s hampered decision making to the extent that it’s a tactic adopted from the influenza playbook rather than something targeted for covid.
If the projections here are near right the UK is comparatively fucked. Almost as bad as the US and worse than Italy, France, Germany and Spain put together. I'm not sure how a government could stand in those circumstances.
What’s this based on? Just looking at the graphs they have a flat line/constant for available ICU beds and ventilators. I must be interpreting that bit incorrectly as we know that isn’t true. Every other final death prediction I’ve read has the U.K. around the European standard (for want of a better, more humane word) and figures based on cumulative deaths, at comparable times, below Italy and Spain, and similar to France.
Sweden is predicted to suffer less than 5,000 deaths despite having only minimal social distancing (and the lowest number of ICU beds per capita in Europe). Which we are being told by all and sundry is the wrong course of action.
If this proves to be true and the govt can’t stand, the whole system of advisers and care providers needs a radical overhaul, too.
Mellsblue wrote:Study published in The Lancet on the effectiveness of closing schools. The first para on p5 might give a clue as to how long we can expect the first wave of lockdown to last (3 months, gulp):
Tlrd? My take of what is there is that there is little evidence as to its efficacy but it’s probably less effective for covid than influenza. The long term repercussions on the economy and the affected children’s education and long term prospects, and the short term effect on the availability of front line workers, might outweigh the benefits. The previous all seems to be based on the fact that the kids will just socialise elsewhere which if there’s lockdown as here, and it’s adhered to, seems a strange train of thought. There’s not enough evidence either way and it’s hampered decision making to the extent that it’s a tactic adopted from the influenza playbook rather than something targeted for covid.
You are consistently neglecting to account for the increased virulence if the current viral pathogen is several orders of magnitude over that of SARS or MERS. Your risk benefit calculation must take this into account. Are you confident that asymptomatic kids are inefficient vectors for disease? Fuck modeling right now, we still need data.
We've spoken a little on how cultural variations might also affect disease. Here's an employment lawyers take on some of the differences between the UK an Sweden.
Could Sweden’s employment laws help explain its approach to dealing with Covid 19?
I have wondered a lot recently about why Sweden appears to be taking such a different approach to dealing with the Covid 19 pandemic compared to the rest of Europe. So far Sweden has refused to place its citizens or schools into ‘lock-down’ and to a very large extent, life in Sweden is going on almost as normal. Although the trains and buses are less crowded, nearly all the shops are open as are the restaurants, gyms and pubs. Swedish children still attend nursery or school every day and a large percentage of the Swedish workforce is still at work. Why is it, I have asked myself, that Sweden feels able to take such an apparently relaxed approach to dealing with this deadly virus? One reason, I suspect, may be the Swedish employment environment and, in particular, the importance it has long placed on family-friendly policies, health and flexible working.
Sweden is famously egalitarian. It decided many years ago that to get women back into work (and paying those all-important taxes!) it needed to provide high quality, state-run, nursery care for children from the age of one. These days, almost everyone goes back to work by the time their child is 18 months old. This means not only that women spend less time out of the workplace (and therefore pay less of a price in terms of their career progression), but also that Swedish children are educated together from an earlier age, which mitigates against the worst effects of social inequalities. Poor families pay nothing for full-time high-quality childcare and even the richest pay no more than around £110 a month. Compare that to a month’s childcare cost for the average two year old in the UK, and it is easy to see why Swedish women feel able to get back to work sooner, even to less well-remunerated roles.
Whilst on the one hand there is fairly significant cultural and economic pressure to get back to work quickly after a child is born, this comes with a generous ‘quid-pro-quo’ for parents and children alike. Going to work when sick yourself, or sending a sick child to nursery or school is viewed as entirely socially unacceptable and there is no culture of ‘presenteeism’ here. Rather, Swedish employment laws have always made it easy for workers to prioritise their own health and the health of their families without fear of losing income.
Accepting that nobody wants to leave their sick child and go to work, the Swedish government introduced a legal right to paid time off for parents with sick children. If your child is sick in Sweden, you have the legal right to ‘VAB’ for up to 120 days each year . Yes, up to 120 days for each child until that child is 12.
VAB stands for ‘Vård av barn’ which translates as ‘care of children’. For each ‘VAB’ day you take to look after your grisly infant, the Swedish government will pay you 80% of your normal salary. Whilst there are obviously practical considerations for an employer with vabbing staff in terms of ensuring business continuity, there is no immediate direct financial burden for them to bear. Likewise, there has never been much financial incentive for Swedish parents to fill their children with calpol, drop them off at nursery and hope for the best. Whilst of course some UK employers adopt a considerate approach to parents who need to work from home or to take time off when their child is sick, there is still no legal right to do so in the UK and employees can end up using holidays to look after their poorly children without losing pay. When trying to curb the spread of a brutal virus which can look like a mild cold in a child, Sweden’s VAB laws may well have helped reduce the spread of the virus in schools and nurseries.
Swedish parents also have long had the legal right to work 75% of their normal working hours following the birth of a child. This, coupled with the country’s burgeoning tech economy, inevitably led to more Swedes home-working at a relatively early stage. In fact, around 42 % of Swedes were already regularly working from home long before most of us had heard of the coronavirus; a statistic which, in the context of social distancing and the spread of a deadly infection, feels like a considerable head start.
Culturally, Swedish employers have always taken a dim view of staff braving it out and coming to work when sick. Swedes do have a stiff upper lip, but they do not employ it about anything as important as their health. Although the cost of the first two weeks’ sick pay is borne by the employer (apart from ‘day one’ sickness), from week three, the Swedish state takes the strain. Sick pay rates are around 80% of salary up to a maximum of around £70 per day, and not only does the state bear the ongoing cost of this, it also takes over the responsibility of managing sick staff back to work. Even though the UK government has made statutory sick pay (SSP) available from day one of illness during the current epidemic, a week’s SSP still only comes to just over £94 per week, which is unlikely to cover most mortgages. By comparison, Swedish employers have it easy. No sick staff at work, not much sick pay to pay, and less of a time-consuming absence management process: all extremely positive when facing a sickness epidemic. Better still from the Swedish employee’s perspective, they are unlikely to lose their home if they are unlucky enough to get sick.
Comparisons are, of course, odious. Sweden and the UK are politically, culturally and fiscally very different. Swedish employers’ contributions are over double the rate of employers NICs in the UK and Swedish citizens pay around 30% or more tax on pretty much every single krona they earn. Money talks, and it is higher taxes which have enabled Sweden’s ‘nanny’ state to develop a suite of employment law policies which can take such good care of employer and employee alike.
Only time will tell if Sweden has under-reacted to the current pandemic. It is far too soon to predict whether attempting to keep life as normal as possible is a fool-hardy or ultimately a sensible strategy. Nonetheless, I do think that the country’s flexible employment law practices, coupled with a workplace culture which makes it easy to prioritise good health, may well help Sweden weather this desperate crisis in the longer term.
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
Mellsblue wrote:Study published in The Lancet on the effectiveness of closing schools. The first para on p5 might give a clue as to how long we can expect the first wave of lockdown to last (3 months, gulp):
Tlrd? My take of what is there is that there is little evidence as to its efficacy but it’s probably less effective for covid than influenza. The long term repercussions on the economy and the affected children’s education and long term prospects, and the short term effect on the availability of front line workers, might outweigh the benefits. The previous all seems to be based on the fact that the kids will just socialise elsewhere which if there’s lockdown as here, and it’s adhered to, seems a strange train of thought. There’s not enough evidence either way and it’s hampered decision making to the extent that it’s a tactic adopted from the influenza playbook rather than something targeted for covid.
The BBC has had a graphic up for a while showing the effects on hospitalisation rate of the lock down is raised after one month, several months and finally several months followed by social distancing. I suspect this isn’t going to be a short policy and we could have very significant restrictions until the school summer holidays.
Mellsblue wrote:Study published in The Lancet on the effectiveness of closing schools. The first para on p5 might give a clue as to how long we can expect the first wave of lockdown to last (3 months, gulp):
Tlrd? My take of what is there is that there is little evidence as to its efficacy but it’s probably less effective for covid than influenza. The long term repercussions on the economy and the affected children’s education and long term prospects, and the short term effect on the availability of front line workers, might outweigh the benefits. The previous all seems to be based on the fact that the kids will just socialise elsewhere which if there’s lockdown as here, and it’s adhered to, seems a strange train of thought. There’s not enough evidence either way and it’s hampered decision making to the extent that it’s a tactic adopted from the influenza playbook rather than something targeted for covid.
You are consistently neglecting to account for the increased virulence if the current viral pathogen is several orders of magnitude over that of SARS or MERS. Your risk benefit calculation must take this into account. Are you confident that asymptomatic kids are inefficient vectors for disease? Fuck modeling right now, we still need data.
I’m not neglecting anything. I’m merely writing what I’ve taken from that particular study. I’ve also noted there is some logic in there I don’t agree with and very little evidence to prove whether shuttting schools is worth it.
Eugene Wrayburn wrote:We've spoken a little on how cultural variations might also affect disease. Here's an employment lawyers take on some of the differences between the UK an Sweden.
Could Sweden’s employment laws help explain its approach to dealing with Covid 19?
I have wondered a lot recently about why Sweden appears to be taking such a different approach to dealing with the Covid 19 pandemic compared to the rest of Europe. So far Sweden has refused to place its citizens or schools into ‘lock-down’ and to a very large extent, life in Sweden is going on almost as normal. Although the trains and buses are less crowded, nearly all the shops are open as are the restaurants, gyms and pubs. Swedish children still attend nursery or school every day and a large percentage of the Swedish workforce is still at work. Why is it, I have asked myself, that Sweden feels able to take such an apparently relaxed approach to dealing with this deadly virus? One reason, I suspect, may be the Swedish employment environment and, in particular, the importance it has long placed on family-friendly policies, health and flexible working.
Sweden is famously egalitarian. It decided many years ago that to get women back into work (and paying those all-important taxes!) it needed to provide high quality, state-run, nursery care for children from the age of one. These days, almost everyone goes back to work by the time their child is 18 months old. This means not only that women spend less time out of the workplace (and therefore pay less of a price in terms of their career progression), but also that Swedish children are educated together from an earlier age, which mitigates against the worst effects of social inequalities. Poor families pay nothing for full-time high-quality childcare and even the richest pay no more than around £110 a month. Compare that to a month’s childcare cost for the average two year old in the UK, and it is easy to see why Swedish women feel able to get back to work sooner, even to less well-remunerated roles.
Whilst on the one hand there is fairly significant cultural and economic pressure to get back to work quickly after a child is born, this comes with a generous ‘quid-pro-quo’ for parents and children alike. Going to work when sick yourself, or sending a sick child to nursery or school is viewed as entirely socially unacceptable and there is no culture of ‘presenteeism’ here. Rather, Swedish employment laws have always made it easy for workers to prioritise their own health and the health of their families without fear of losing income.
Accepting that nobody wants to leave their sick child and go to work, the Swedish government introduced a legal right to paid time off for parents with sick children. If your child is sick in Sweden, you have the legal right to ‘VAB’ for up to 120 days each year . Yes, up to 120 days for each child until that child is 12.
VAB stands for ‘Vård av barn’ which translates as ‘care of children’. For each ‘VAB’ day you take to look after your grisly infant, the Swedish government will pay you 80% of your normal salary. Whilst there are obviously practical considerations for an employer with vabbing staff in terms of ensuring business continuity, there is no immediate direct financial burden for them to bear. Likewise, there has never been much financial incentive for Swedish parents to fill their children with calpol, drop them off at nursery and hope for the best. Whilst of course some UK employers adopt a considerate approach to parents who need to work from home or to take time off when their child is sick, there is still no legal right to do so in the UK and employees can end up using holidays to look after their poorly children without losing pay. When trying to curb the spread of a brutal virus which can look like a mild cold in a child, Sweden’s VAB laws may well have helped reduce the spread of the virus in schools and nurseries.
Swedish parents also have long had the legal right to work 75% of their normal working hours following the birth of a child. This, coupled with the country’s burgeoning tech economy, inevitably led to more Swedes home-working at a relatively early stage. In fact, around 42 % of Swedes were already regularly working from home long before most of us had heard of the coronavirus; a statistic which, in the context of social distancing and the spread of a deadly infection, feels like a considerable head start.
Culturally, Swedish employers have always taken a dim view of staff braving it out and coming to work when sick. Swedes do have a stiff upper lip, but they do not employ it about anything as important as their health. Although the cost of the first two weeks’ sick pay is borne by the employer (apart from ‘day one’ sickness), from week three, the Swedish state takes the strain. Sick pay rates are around 80% of salary up to a maximum of around £70 per day, and not only does the state bear the ongoing cost of this, it also takes over the responsibility of managing sick staff back to work. Even though the UK government has made statutory sick pay (SSP) available from day one of illness during the current epidemic, a week’s SSP still only comes to just over £94 per week, which is unlikely to cover most mortgages. By comparison, Swedish employers have it easy. No sick staff at work, not much sick pay to pay, and less of a time-consuming absence management process: all extremely positive when facing a sickness epidemic. Better still from the Swedish employee’s perspective, they are unlikely to lose their home if they are unlucky enough to get sick.
Comparisons are, of course, odious. Sweden and the UK are politically, culturally and fiscally very different. Swedish employers’ contributions are over double the rate of employers NICs in the UK and Swedish citizens pay around 30% or more tax on pretty much every single krona they earn. Money talks, and it is higher taxes which have enabled Sweden’s ‘nanny’ state to develop a suite of employment law policies which can take such good care of employer and employee alike.
Only time will tell if Sweden has under-reacted to the current pandemic. It is far too soon to predict whether attempting to keep life as normal as possible is a fool-hardy or ultimately a sensible strategy. Nonetheless, I do think that the country’s flexible employment law practices, coupled with a workplace culture which makes it easy to prioritise good health, may well help Sweden weather this desperate crisis in the longer term.
Very interesting read. Cheers. Also helps explain why the beer is so expensive!
Mellsblue wrote:Now there’s some ‘big state’ I can get behind.
The idea is to limit the purchase and consumption of booze. Thus the droves of people heading over the bridge to Denmark stocking up on alcohol in a civilised nation.
Mellsblue wrote:Now there’s some ‘big state’ I can get behind.
The idea is to limit the purchase and consumption of booze. Thus the droves of people heading over the bridge to Denmark stocking up on alcohol in a civilised nation.
It's possible to pay both too much and too little attention to cultural difference. There are things which might work in one country but not in others. Simple things like people's ideas and standards of cleanliness can make a massive difference and could alter what restrictions need to be put in place and when.
On the other hand, it became clear very quickly that this was coming to every country and that every country was going to need extra ICU capacity and extra ventilators. Even if you are going for an herd immunity policy, you need to actually protect and shelter the vulnerable. You frankly ought to have found ways of getting them PPE. You need that extra capacity.
None of this is contentious. None of it requires epidemiological assessment. And by those measures the UK (and the US) have conspicuously failed.
I personally think that any approach should be underpinned by testing. Though I certainly thought that everyone would get the virus once I heard the incubation period and that it was transmissible during this. I hadn't even contemplated lockdowns of the sort we've seen. But none of that sort of assessment or epidemiological choice is necessary to come to the conclusion that the government have completely fucked this, even starting with the NHS pared to the bone.
I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
Eugene Wrayburn wrote:
On the other hand, it became clear very quickly that this was coming to every country and that every country was going to need extra ICU capacity and extra ventilators. Even if you are going for an herd immunity policy, you need to actually protect and shelter the vulnerable. You frankly ought to have found ways of getting them PPE. You need that extra capacity.
None of this is contentious. None of it requires epidemiological assessment. And by those measures the UK (and the US) have conspicuously failed.
.
From local experience- on ICU beds (there are currently plenty), Ventilators (we haven't reached capacity yet and more are definitely being received) and PPE (I accept that the supply chain is poor, and pharmacies esp are being let down.....but there is plenty of PPE in NHS England's stock pile. My teams are seeing no shortage of PPE). I stress this is local- suspect London is different, but the kitchen sink is being thrown at capacity there (hence the supply chain fck up).
Are you projecting the figures from your previous insight into what you know of NHSE overall capacity? I do totally agree that the system is working very slowly, and should have been triggered much earlier though. I was in a meeting only 9 weeks ago where the senior local NHS folks were calling this as a moderate risk.
Incidentally, there are a few 'side-effects' manifesting themselves in this crisis. Again, its a local view, but a and e's are running at 40% of normal useage, and ambulance use has also decreased, ditto GP volumes. The problem is that folks are now so reticent to call on emergency services that paramedics are now dealing with many more critically ill patients, esp those with CV; another problem is that many families have moved parents in with them, so social care needs have become much more complex and present the first responder with many issues to solve. Its a big shift in the 'system', I suppose unsurprising in hindsight.
