bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

Tested negative for sentience?

Raab staving off covid-19 with his choice of lunch
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dbr__fWWsAAQKtA?format=jpg&name=large

he's still tested DNA positive that he is actually a fucking child of von Ribbentrop.

xp The English disease

Two ministers self isolating on advice of health officials following news Nadine Dorries has tested positive - one is health minister Ed Argar, the other a Cabinet minister (not named)

— Hugh Pym (@BBCHughPym) March 11, 2020

Weighing up whether to trust the editor of The Lancet or the guy with Dominic Raab’s spittle on the back of his head.

It's not this, though, it's the editor of The Lancet v the Chief Medical Officer and the Deputy Medical Officer and CMO Scotland and the Chief Scientific Adviser. Which the Tories have been at unusual pains to stress.

And they're all saying things like "airport testing does bugger all because people are asymptomatic for so long" and most importantly "yes, lockdown, but not yet". With what seems sound reasoning, I think: you need to flatten the curve a bit, not stomp it down so hard that all you do is shift things a few weeks when the arseholes start saying "see? told you it was nothing, I'm off down the pub to lick the gantry" and cause an equally overwhelming spike then.

Effectively they're saying "we are accepting some cases right now, while we can cope, and will time it right to choke them off before we're overwhelmed". Is that playing roulette? To an extent it probably is, but so is saying "if you lock everything down now we will be fine".

I think there's a variety of denial-stage reasoning behind that second line of thought, resisting accepting that this thing has actually happened – it's here, it's spreading, it will have horrible consequences – in favour of "if only everyone would be good then nothing bad will happen and it will all go away".

I don't think that's realistic, especially not the "if only everyone would be good" part. A lot of the data nerd tweeters modelling this stuff are excluding all the messy human factors. Sure, your model shows you can cut cases to 0 if everyone stays home for three months … but it didn't include modelling what happens when society collapses and everyone also busts out with cabin fever.

still a sizeable backlog of tests

This is the bit that has me worried; this and ancedotal reports of people struggling with 111, and struggling to get registered for testing. The execution needs to be way better on this stuff and seems not to be.

That they really don't have a plan of action seems quite obvious rn. Italy already tried that option and it didn't fucking work out very well for them.

No, I don't think that's quite right. They're doing pretty much exactly what they laid out a few weeks ago, it's more a question of how well they're executing that plan, afaict.

And they're learning from Italy: it blocked flights and did airport testing, and that didn't help, so they're not doing it here.

I'm just summarising what i hear on the wireless tbh. but it sounds like a bad plan to me, like as if they waiting for it to blow up before taking any dramatic action. And it is way too soon to be saying what worked and didn't work in Italy as this point.

the post-mortem in 18 months later might conclude they did some things that were actually the correct response but were just rather fucking unlucky..idk!

And it is way too soon to be saying what worked and didn't work in Italy as this point.
you literally just did that!

It's going to be academic shortly though, announcements coming tomorrow apparently

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-uk-set-to-move-to-delay-phase-schools-could-close-and-major-events-cancelled-11955695

was reading this earlier: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/research-finds-huge-impact-of-interventions-on-spread-of-covid-19

...which has people saying things like: “From a purely scientific standpoint, putting in place a combination of interventions as early as possible is the best way to slow spread and reduce outbreak size,” said Prof Andrew Tatem at the University of Southampton.

seemed to be quite proactive interventions with the early cases in this country, but now it seems like the policy is more oh fuck it, lets wait till it ramps up a notch before we really deliver the resources that this thing requires

you literally just did that!

just in a chatting shite tone not with any pretension of authoritativeness!

idk, it seems like there's a happy medium between telling people they have to stay at home or get an ASBO and telling them that they should maybe think about staying home if they have a cough at the end of March. Other governments either at the same stage or earlier in their handling have shut down public gatherings, advised businesses to switch to home working where viable, etc- which, to me, doesn't seem like it carries a great risk - though it looks like they've already decided to bring that in tomorrow.

/still a sizeable backlog of tests/

This is the bit that has me worried; this and ancedotal reports of people struggling with 111, and struggling to get registered for testing. The execution needs to be way better on this stuff and seems not to be.

The key quotes for me in that one NickB posted are:

Tatem said the modelling did not include political factors, such as weighing up the restrictions against the social and economic damages and disruption such aggressive measures can have.

and

“What is less clear from this analysis is what should happen next,” he said. In one scenario the scientists look at, lifting travel restrictions risks a second wave of infections unless contact rates are kept low. “Can that be done, and for how much longer? When can normal life resume?” he said.

There's a similar piece by a psychologist doing huge numbers on Twitter rn which is this one:
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

Which seems plausible and made me want to wrap the house in clingfilm but on reflection also totally skips the question of "when do you stop?". It says "if we spread this over time, we will reach a point where the rest of society can be vaccinated". A vaccine is reportedly around 18 months away at best, so he's saying we should lock everything down as tightly as he suggests for two years?

SV OTM.

when do we stop? i guess that would be once frontline medical services are in a position to cope with the expected rise in severe cases that would occur in the wake of the return to whatever constitutes 'normality'

"it blocked flights and did airport testing, and that didn't help, so they're not doing it here."

this is what i meant, not the more authoritarian restriction of movement actions in italy that caused riots! Anyway it is reassuring that tory govt have had a change of mind and now everything will be alright!

Who benefits from this budget? “In total, the poorest 10% of households might stand to gain by around £40 per year on average, while the richest half of families will benefit by more than £200.”https://t.co/xNAU4KvtKh

— Rebecca Long-Bailey (@RLong_Bailey) March 11, 2020

I like the cut of her jib, if only the labour party had a left-wing membership - but that is too much of a radical idea to work.

both fucking Starmer and RLB don't directly mention Universal Credit in their criticism of the budget.

McD did though :(

The special relationship is alive! We can still fly to the US unlike those terrible Europeans with their filthy diseases.

I'm still waiting for an attack on this budget from the Labour Right that says: the electorate rejected ambitious borrow and spend plans, play by the rules, they voted for austerity!

lol tbf Rachel Reeves was calling austerity a "failed experiment" yesterday, which is a bit rich coming from her.

Bowed out for a while after the election debacle but stumbled upon LauraK yesterday on the news declaring the budget some sort of seismic shift that basically renders Labour obsolete from today on forover and ever. Not in so much words but ygti. Tories applauding heavy borrowing. If they can do that, who needs Labour any more for anything?!1

"SUPPORT OUR NHS"
And the tory lads go
do do-do do-do do do do

LauraK came.

Laura K doesn't see any food banks or child poverty in her neighbourhood so QED!

i've been going to work all week on the tube/bus into a building full of about 1000 people and i've got plans to have dinner with a 75-y-o woman tomorrow. i've kind of fucked it up, right?

I don't think you've really fucked up until the point at which you attend that dinner and even then perhaps not? We're at the point where people know to take this seriously but still aren't sure how to behave, which is why government needs to take the lead. When actual ministers are contracting coronavirus it's probably the tipping point though.

Putting people on lockdown too early runs the risk of everyone getting complacent and starting to go out again a week or so in, before the virus has really been contained. We're going to be at the point before too long when the sun comes out and good luck getting British people to stay inside then.

It's blatantly obvious even to a non-expert observer that the whole point of the Budget is to steal Labour's clothes, close off future lines of attack etc. Coronavirus will complicate that, but still the new approach will be spun as creating jobs rather than giving handouts - which is better than destroying jobs and welfare provisions, which is the usual Tory approach - but isn't anywhere near as radical or revolutionary as it's being made out to be. Particularly to anyone with even a surface knowledge of the Tories pre-Thatcher.

What we could really do with right now is some miserable pissy weather. Not enough to fuck up services but enough to make people not want to go out much.

Obviously a balanced and impartial public broadcaster that isn't under threat of the axe from the government would point this out more forcefully, but the BBC stuff I read yesterday appeared to be providing 'balance' by talking about the government's "colossal overdraft". It's providing 'balance' by taking the Osborne-era line, not to mention using the sort of language that makes economists shout at their screens.

After attacking Corb/McD so hard for their borrow and spend manifesto, they have to show some consistency. Lest the whole veil of unscrupulous lies will unravel and leave them butt naked.

what kind of fuckery is "herd immunity" ? is the official COVID-19 policy basically just let a Darwenian survival-of-the-fittest big die-off happen and then a master race with dead strong immune systems shall arise from the ashes!

You can achieve herd immunity through widespread vaccination as well, the more people are immune the harder it is for the virus to spread. It's going to happen eventually whatever happens but it doesn't mean you actively encourage everyone to catch it to accelerate the process, which is what Johnson seemed to be suggesting the other day.

I understand the official position is about controlling the speed at which the virus moves through the population, if everyone gets it at the same time then herd immunity will happen more quickly but the health service will also be overwhelmed and more ppl will die than if the process can be spread out. How much control they have over this right now is a different question.

It’s slightly risky - it’s a controlled burn approach which is betting they know when to stop but it still feels better than “shutdown immediately with no real end in sight”.

One is preferred by people who want no deaths at all, but that route might end up causing way more in the end because it has no exit strategy.

Both of them have no exit strategy, though?

We will be closer to one by then having seen what's happened in Italy and China right? If there's an end in sight we'll know by then.

But we'll know that either way - the strategy at the moment seems to be _aiming_ for the first bump in That Graph.

Both of them have no exit strategy, though?

Why hasn't the league been cancelled to stop Liverpool winning

I'm not sure what the first one refers to there - the government strategy seems to be to overwhelm the hospitals as soon as possible, to avoid that we'd need to start distancing - well, probably a week ago tbh.

the government says its strategy is to choke things off at the point where the hospitals are going to be whelmed.

Their argument against doing it a week or more ago is that you'd choke it off too early, everyone would emerge and all you would have done is move the spike so they are overwhelmed three weeks later.

People object to that on the grounds that it means people will get needlessly sick and die, but the govt isn't yet answering that with the candid answer which is "yes, we know, it's still better".

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESwmWpnXgAA6uf_?format=jpg&name=small

Jeremy Warner of the Telegraph, ladies and gentlemen

Fuuuuck.

Given the Telegraph's readership someone should probably explain to Jeremy Warner about the value of not annihilating the hand that feeds you.

xp We'd also better hope that the model they are apparently so confident in (to hit the correct level of whelm) has good-enough sensitivities for (say) people having trouble contacting 111 to report cases, or a shortage in diagnosis kits.

his response has apparently been "hey i was only talking about economics"

reminds me of that time the Taxpayer's Alliance suggested some pre-election pledges made to pensioners can be reneged on without too much blowback cos most of the fuckers will be dead soon enough!

Sturgeon has leaked the decision, which is that schools stay open. Feels like they're sticking with "get it out there". Nasty and genuinely tough choice.