love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

I know they are probably doing the same in other countries to different degrees but I feel like this lot might just have a bit more enthusiasm to flatten that curve by any means nec seeing as they've fucked this up worse than the rest of Europe.

They'd have to bring back Jeremy Hunt what a prospect xp

Do we actually have any idea where we are in the curve? You'd think the daily death rate would be an essential statistic but apparently not.

449 deaths announced yesterday and even with a bump for care home deaths that still seems to be going down? But it's meaningless if no one believes it and a steady drip-drip of these stories is just obliterating trust.

My garbage homespun theory is they are still in mitigating their own fuck-ups with spin mode, they've fucked up so big they've gone into a state of denial because copping for this is too big and they know all the polling is very fragile and could quickly turn into murderous anger against them. It will make a hell of a good read one day, but it sure sucks shit to be living (and dying) through it.

Spinning it now is digging further into the hole but you might be right.

The office of national statistics are lying. Those people would have died anyway. It is good that thousands of people have died, we all have herd immunity now

Think the numbers probably are going down
because of the lag between cases due to distancing.

Discrepancy between ONS figures (available 11 days after the fact) and daily in-hospital count are inevitable. It's actually not quite as bad as I feared for w/e Apr 10, given the huge discrepancy in the figure for w/e Apr 3. Total number of deaths for w/e Apr 10 in Eng+Wal now around 8k above seasonal mean (18.5k vs 10.5k), and "only" 6.2k mention Covid-19 on cert. (And that 6.2k is higher than the cumulative count that would have been available *at the time*).

So, yeah, it's worse than the daily headline figures, and that's likely the same everywhere.

FT graphs are still the best indication I've seen of where nations are on the curve.

https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

UK is *just* over the top (London is coming down the other side), US has yet to plateau (NY state is over the hill too). Daily figures (in rolling 7-day aggregates) and not ONS-style after-the-fact "true" totals, but still a decent indicator of trends, I guess.

We need a few days' worth of data...does anyone know whether other countries have gone from 700+ to 400+ in two days like we have? xp

France had days where 1400+ died, is it worse there are they just counting differently?

France has been including non-hospital deaths throughout but their outbreak occurred earlier than ours and they appear to been caught unawares. We had more time to prepare and learn from other European countries so the death rate should be lower than France. Really it should be way way lower than it is but we all know what happened there.

One of the advantages of being behind the curve is that you can take note of what happens when other countries relax restrictions and the UK shouldn't even think of doing that until we have a few weeks' worth of proper data from France, Spain and Italy.

From the ft graph page: April 9: All maps and charts now exclude nursing home deaths from France’s totals to maintain cross-national comparability

It shows us worse than them, which is probably accurate

The UK government only made a formal request to Turkey over a consignment of PPE on Sunday - the day after a cabinet minister announced the "very significant additional shipment" was already heading to the UK.https://t.co/PXCf9YtbTm

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) April 21, 2020

doesn't matter for the reasons outlined above about the lack of accountability in our political system. having four years of our esteemed press and sensible centrist commentariat training their ire on the opposition didn't help with that

Over the past week or two Trump and Boris (in absentia) have had half of the world's CV deaths between them.

This brings tears to my eyes, King. Finally we have a leader of the opposition that has a forensic love of Her Majesty.

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) April 21, 2020

as a point of comparison, more than 50% of total deaths in Ireland have been in nursing or care homes

I notice in Scotland there's been a lot of deaths in care homes - but, you know, at least they're reporting them.

Lots of people sharing this article by Philip Pullman today

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/april/philip-pullman-coronavirus-essay-change.html

he's certainly not afraid to show his anger, however there is a lot about Brexit and nothing really about austerity, which surely is worth a mention?

not if you’re deranged by #fbpe brainworms

There's no accountability because they have an 80-seat majority with five years to run. It's right there in that Dominic Cummings job at, the government has no reason to worry about short-term unpopularity. This is different world now, and this shit could easily turn into long-term unpopularity of the kind you can't row back from, the press could decide to Major them, but the worse that gets for them the more incentive there is to prolong that parliamentary term to the bitter end.

There's very little scrutiny from an opposition that appears to be terrified of putting a foot wrong, but even then Parliament has been closed for most of Johnson's tenure as PM.

The only thing that might provide some genuine accountability is a proper independent inquiry with teeth, and presumably that can't happen unless the government orders one?

ah, big Phil Pullman, the Dick Dawkins of entitled FBPEeeps

lol wus gonna sayisn't he a bit of an FBPE type? some of them lot have a muted kind of indifference to austerity, where they'll do the odd bit of performative lip service, but be damned if they'll ever support an anti-austerity party.

Pullman has criticised austerity before but has also trotted out weird combinations of post-war austerity nostalgia and eco-accelerationism. From what I can see he just likes sounding off, Dawkins comparison OTM.

If the government was worried about emboldening FBPErs it would probably have thought twice about excluding itself from EU ventilator and PPE procurement schemes, not to mention the wisdom of threatening a No Deal exit at the end of the year.

Of course the reason why the ONS w/e Apr 10 figures are bad, but not as bad as you might think re: "excess deaths vs those explained by Covid-19" or excess deaths generally, is cos 10/4 was Good Friday. Only a third of registration offices were open. So this time next week you're gonna get a lot of "we're past the peak" vs "OMG, look at how many you didn't count". Both of which may be true.

turkish PPE thing is ironic. the last time the government mentioned Turkey it was as a threat that they'd join the eu and we'd be overrun with turkish, was very much part of the leave campaign's talking points (along with eu subscription money for hospitals).

Misread that as Turkish Follow Back Pro Erdoğan on my phone!

Osborne demanding cuts:

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-04-20/architect-of-u-k-austerity-says-retrenchment-needed-post-crisis?

ok, which bit of him should we cut off first?

BREAKING: UK decision not to participate in EU procurement of medical kit & ventilators was a "political decision", @SMcDonaldFCO says. "It was a political decision. The mission... in Brussels briefed ministers about what was available, what was on offer & the decision is known"

— Deborah Haynes (@haynesdeborah) April 21, 2020

just confirming what we already knew.

can’t believe the government’s original excuse of ‘oh we lost the eu’s email down the back of the filing cabinet’ is failing to stand up to scrutiny

Back to 800+ deaths.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/nurse-shortage-causes-nightingale-hospital-to-turn-away-patients

Manchester is getting absolutely battered by this. https://t.co/Du60YSok4W

— jamie k (@jkbloodtreasure) April 21, 2020

This is good and is somewhat akin to what Sanders was doing for a while.

let's not even go down the road of imagining this crisis under a left wing government. but let's, for a moment, imagine we have an active, fighting, competent left opposition. what would they be doing?

— Sita Balani (@sitainshort) April 21, 2020

https://www.ft.com/content/67e6a4ee-3d05-43bc-ba03-e239799fa6ab

FT estimating up to 41k Coronavirus deaths so far in the UK.

As 24 per cent of deaths normally occur in care homes in the UK, the analysis suggests that just under 11,000 more people than normal have died in residential care since the start of the outbreak.

I was just listening to Chris Hayes talking about people in the US coming in for other medical complaints and only then being diagnosed as having serious cases of Covid. Like somebody just having been stabbed , medical team going to treat him for collapsed lung and only then finding out that they had a raging bout of covid.
Asymptomatic seems to be pretty much an understatement.
Hayes also had somebody saying that the patient would seem to have the attributes of somebody on the top of Everst in term sof how much oxygen is getting to them. THey're not getting the carbon monoxide symptoms that normally go hand in hand with lack of oxygen or something to that effect. but once boduily functions are monitored tehre is a serious problem very visble.
This person was saying people with these kind of readings would normally be in a state of collapse but as far as they can see things they are perfectly healthy. So it spreads.

I saw some of the Minneapolis protest against having the state closed yesterday, not sure who the news channel was, Unicorn Riot., Sounds like a p-take and what they gained by being in the midst of a crowd at this time.
NOt sure if anybody in th eUK is actually wilfully doing something like that. THough would be far from surprised if it was being echoed.
& further spreading the problem that they're denying. I'm reminded of the small groups o fpeople who were prtesting pro Brexit last year.

& opening up the economy just means that people who now have the option of rstaying home where thy're not spreading disease are forced into returning to work.

I know both of those are US but would think the effect was universal.

No one is doing US-style protests over here, and if they are they're the fringest of fringe cranks and barely visible. These people are disproportionately represented in right wing media like The Spectator but appear to have very little popular support. Something like 90% of the UK population is in favour of the lockdown.

I think the same is true of most of the US, and that the protests are getting coverage isn't in line with the numbers, and exaggerates the support?

Twitter thread on the 41k figure.

NEW: The excess UK deaths linked to coronavirus are likely to be around

41,000

as of yesterday, not the 17,337 of the hospital deaths announcements

Here is the explanation for that estimate, which I will update daily

1/

— Chris Giles (@ChrisGiles_) April 22, 2020

In terms of ministers going or not it seems they are hanging out that care minister to dry.

This crisis has broken the political firewall. It’s not just left-wing pundits pointing out the failure. Minister after minister is now being exposed and cornered by formerly sympathetic pundits. pic.twitter.com/R2MPq7UgpY

— Jonathan Lis (@jonlis1) April 20, 2020

(you may have also seen Piers Morgan giving her hell a few days ago)

And this is a counter to the FT statistical exercise:

A thread on the measurement of excess mortality and uncounted COVID19 deaths. Key point: be careful inferring number of uncounted COVID19 deaths from a look at all-cause mortality data 1/n

— Stéphane Helleringer (@helleringer143) April 21, 2020

The NY Times has a stunning look at excess mortality from vital statistics in various countries and cities out today with quotes from outstanding demographers (I provided some tips) 6/n
https://t.co/xUFhC4EB44

— Stéphane Helleringer (@helleringer143) April 21, 2020

why the two triangular notches in the uk figures here? is it something as simple as bank-holidays?

Watching pmqs with Sir Forensic. Making some good points, but they were ones he shouldn’t have waited weeks to make. Plus his hair is too long.

Barry Gardiner zooming into pmqs from the bedroom, gwaaaaaaaan

nice "I don't need to be corrected, I was talking about the tests" bit

James Sunderland, a Conservative, asks Raab what are the ingredients that will take the country through this.

Raab says the critical ingredient is for the country to come together. He says people understand how important key workers are. We can and will rise to the challenge as one United Kingdom, he says.

inspiring stuff from the boy raab there