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

It sure does sound like lots of the immune compromised are getting hung out to die. Just tories being tories tbf.

"The problem is more that the experts inside the government are following Boris (or more likely Cummings) - the ones outside government seem unconvinced."

Is the Chief Medical Officer following Dominic Cummings? I don't get the sense that this is what's happening.

if the queen dies from coronavirus and its clearly boris's fault then I imagine he may be torn to pieces by a mob, I'm not saying I want this to happen, but it's a possibility he should consider

The more I think about it the angrier I get. Dozens of leaders and experts across the world are recommending varying degrees of isolation and limitation of social interactions to reduce and slow the spread. Ours are saying 'sorry but you're going to die.'

I honestly believe their primary motivation is managing the economic impact.

I was at high risk of respiratory infection *before* covid-19 so I admit I'm taking this a bit personally.

the immune compromised are getting hung out to die

^^^this :(

Vallance good on Today. The major difference here seems to be we are going for “single spike” approach vs the implicit continental “double spike”.

In both you try to keep cases under the line that hospitals can cope with; our lot seem to be betting the NHS can cope better dealing with this all summer than it would with this on top of flu next winter.

His point on the compromised/elderly is he wants to bring the measures in at the time they will have maximum protective effect; he says that isn’t now (see testing point above though).

right or wrong stet my hat is off to your heroic defense of this strategy which i think you are basically alone in, on this thread at least. it's not an easy thing to defend but you're doing a good job of it and i am almost convinced that it's correct i.e. 'crazy like a fox'

My irrational idea of two days ago to go out and lick the infected so I'm ill before the hospitals are full seems less irrational today.

I get the govt position and agree stet's defence is heroic... but we're gambling a lot on some very shaky data.

Not sure if this has been posted but good thread here on the various responses so far

this quote from an emeritus professor of epidemiology on Ireland closing schools is important, I think. Via https://t.co/2fK7POZUI9

I see a lot of people saying we're not moving fast enough. Maybe they're right, but it's not obvious, and there are big costs to moving too fast. pic.twitter.com/Jwo1VFyN3p

— Tom Chivers (@TomChivers) March 12, 2020

Is there any basis for the idea the idea that the UK is four weeks behind Italy other than a man with a reassuring voice said so? The worldometers pages for the two seems pretty clear that the current count (560) for the UK fits between the 26th and 27th of February for Italy - that's just over two weeks.

Here is a good thread commenting on that panel of experts article that Andrew linked to:

This bit from a panel of experts reviewing current UK policy stands out: Govt comms has been very insistent on The Science leading policy decisions, but there's still many unknowns, and it's at that point human judgement has had to step in pic.twitter.com/hjipO2uqYP

— Chris Applegate (@chrisapplegate) March 13, 2020

Basically these are experts working on the partial information they have.

The issue is lack of transparency on the decisions being made.

Again, this would make sense if we didn't already have thousands of infected people visiting parents and grandparents.

Also worth watching https://t.co/uZR6wyBm2Q

— Nathan Wash Hands For 20s Young (@NathanPMYoung) March 12, 2020

I was listening to a bit of a Radio Kent phone-in earlier and the degree of uniformity in the opinions was staggering. Caller after caller saying 'Johnson is listening to the experts, we are four weeks behind Italy, the response in Europe has been wrong, this is the strong leadership we need'. Even allowing for the fact it's Kent, i don't think you'd get this kind of automatic deference to authority in Russia. How long that stays true remains to be seen but it seems to be working incredibly well for now.

these are the type of people that have watched Nolan's Dunkirk 18 times.

i dunno if stet is defending it or just saying it isn't obviously a crazy Tory conspiracy. if it's the latter i agree with him - of course Tories deserve no trust but this is a situation where any government would be at the mercy of more specialist expertise and there don't seem to be any obvious choices.

also yeah xyzzy is correct the most obvious shortfall in the response up to now has been in sharing information/transparency

Kent AND calling into radio phone-ins. Give it a couple of weeks

i wouldn't go as far as calling it a conspiracy but i have a big suspicion of callousness and incompetence at work here

This is such a different approach to other countries and this interview with a modeller is worth a listen.

Long thread -> This is a great BBC Newsnight interview with Prof. Graham Medley about the modelling of the coronavirus spread and herd immunity. I reckon the "act as if you have the virus" advice is genius and should be widely shared: https://t.co/QF52ztCGQo

— Stuart Ritchie (@StuartJRitchie) March 13, 2020

People doing the best on very tough questions and really not knowing how it's gonna go. For all the rhetoric on experts over the last few years they haven't gone away.

That thread is enforcing the "where is the reasoning exactly".

What the UK approach seems to consist of is lots of behavioural science modelling which is why our approach is so different to other countries and why some other types of experts (Public Health professionals) are laying into the government. Both here and abroad.

In other words, pure Cummings.

Maybe. Although from that interview the rationale for not closing schools doesn't sound reckless.

Maybe there won't be a radio Kent phone-in a few weeks from now. All the callers will be dead.

Daily Mail editorial: well done, Boris!
Daily Mail internal email: The advice is dreadful, we aren’t following it. https://t.co/LaY7VMbggk

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) March 13, 2020

Surely the CMO would resign rather than be dictated to by Cummings? I mean I wouldn't rule out that happening anyway but he isn't exactly going to be short of work if he does quit.

i dunno if stet is defending it or just saying it isn't obviously a crazy Tory conspiracy.

Ha yea, I think I'm more stress-testing the stuff they're saying against all the concerns I'm hearing. So far it seems to be holding up. I really hope they're right: lots of my immediate family is at very high risk for this.

I definitely don't think this is Cummings; there's no way CMO takes a steer from him. It's more about different trade-offs, as far as I can tell. Lock down now you keep cases down — but how long can you sustain that for? Not until a vaccine arrives in 2021.

I think the 'nudge' stuff is overblown too. You don't need to be a genius to know what happens if you shut Britain down right now, wait while nothing really happens for 6 weeks, and then summer arrives. It seems like a perfect recipe to have parks and pubs rammed right at the peak.

And yesterday might have been the only time in my life I've almost respected Boris. He could so, so easily have done the actual Brexit Churchill bit, with indomitable Brits getting through this unscathed into the sunlit uplands of Brexit. And he didn't, he said "lots of us are going to die". It might be wrong, but it's not Trump, and it's at least largely science-led.

xp - He's only been in office since last October - I don't know, maybe it is scientist lead, but the thing where it doesn't match the most basic facts ("we're four weeks behind Italy") while still allowing for the easy end of Boris's Churchill impersonation gives me the fear.

xp youd think, but i think that all over the anglosphere we've seen exactly what impact experts and professionals resigning has had on idiot govts, ie none whatsoever. so why would you?

Is there any basis for the idea the idea that the UK is four weeks behind Italy other than a man with a reassuring voice said so? The worldometers pages for the two seems pretty clear that the current count (560) for the UK fits between the 26th and 27th of February for Italy - that's just over two weeks.

I heard it's "we are four weeks behind where Italy is in their response" — eg we are four weeks away from hospitals at maximum capacity and deaths. Right now Italy is at 867 deaths and we're at 10, so that would make more sense. In cases we're obviously much closer, but our response to them should be better because we don't have the double-whammy Italy did of a) being caught on the hop and b) it starting there among very elderly people.

if you shut Britain down right now, wait while nothing really happens for 6 weeks

This isn't remotely on the cards, though? Unless they stop testing people (in which case Boris will end up hanging from a lamppost), the number will continue to rocket up.

I mean, even the best shot at "shut down Britain" won't stop transmission, it's just a brake to try to avoid overwhelming the NHS.

Right now Italy is at 867 deaths and we're at 10

Italy's topped 1000 now - but it was at 10 deaths... two weeks ago (okay, two and a half)

Exactly - we're already heading for a spike and telling us we're going to die isn't going to flatten or slow it.

xp

I hate hate hate to defend this government, but the fact they were trialling drive-through testing facilities a month and a half ago suggests they’re not as complacent as thought. That’s how they’re testing so many in South Korea.

This isn't remotely on the cards, though?

I'm handwaving a little bit, but even with exponential growth you still have a good couple of weeks before the numbers get scary enough to get visceral for people. It doesn't seem wrong to say timing matters.

Ultimately this is a judgement call: across Europe they're all basically saying the same thing — "flatten the curve". It's a question of "when" and "by how much?". (And to a lesser extent solutions are different: Singapore hasn't closed schools, for eg.)

They're saying "the best way to flatten and slow this spike right now, the thing the science tells us we should do, is isolate people who have started to show symptoms. Schools, big events, they won't have the impact we need at this point in the graph". That's the crux of the credibility thing, I think.

Italy's topped 1000 now - but it was at 10 deaths... two weeks ago (okay, two and a half)

That's not how this works — deaths don't double at the same rate as cases. Italy's mortality rate is 10% which is very high because aging population and delayed response. If you say that our mortality rate is a (still scary) 1% because we responded relatively early and have a different demographic profile, we hit 10,000 deaths around April 20th. Which is five weeks away. They clearly have a higher figure in mind than 1%, but not 10%.

Singapore though have massively invested in medical infrastructure since SARS and are more outbreak prepared (or so I heard on WS earlier) and aren't country sized!

Re: behavioural science, this is following on from some Cameron-era thinking. As detailed from this article.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2019/05/cass-sunstein-and-rise-and-fall-nudge-theory

I’m not sure you can compare like with like - Singapore is the third densest country in population terms and yeah they got experience with SARS - but they had to. The risk of infections spreading out of control really quickly in a small dense place like that are probably different from those faced by the UK as a whole.

Sorry I goosed both of my bloody numbers there. We hit 1,000 deaths around April 9th, which is four weeks away.

(this is why I'm more trusting of the epidemiologists frankly; I know I'm an idiot)

My birthday! xp

Going out boozing with work colleagues tonight so, er, you love to, er, see it?

Oops, serious developments, one of the work people invited to the pub tonight just got tested positive and was still coming into work as of yesterday. One of the women I work with is freaking out in case he decides to show up at the pub tonight, she was at lunch with him yesterday - she's also Italian and somewhat jumpy at the best of times.

Lol

Downing Street say that, despite the advice from the Electoral Commission, they think the May elections should go ahead.

This is an interesting piece of guidance to ignore.

— Sam Coates Sky (@SamCoatesSky) March 13, 2020

Twitter again telling you that the guillotine is the only option for the class enemy.

Jeremy Warner, who opined that a benefit or coronavirus was a "cull of elderly dependents" is upset because his favourite ski resort is closed. pic.twitter.com/WoBJX6xYYr

— Martin Barrow (@MartinBarrow) March 12, 2020

Eek, stay well Tom!

People in govt royally ****ed off at this Newsnight graphic which they say is deliberately reductive in order to go viral / attack the govt, and omits any context of where each country is in terms of timeline, or the scientific advice on each measure pic.twitter.com/crKcPpyjLR

— Alex Wickham (@alexwickham) March 13, 2020

(Maybe Govt should put some people up for fucking Newsnight then)

I've been expecting to get it all along tbh, I reckon they'll start dropping like ninepins in my work next week and it'll be closed a week from now.

stet: dingdingdingding

and are more outbreak prepared

Singapore will also fine or deport you for ignoring their instructions tbf.