Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[danny la rouge]

Did Nadhim Zahawi really state in Parliament that trial participants who had received placebo would be treated as if they were fully vaccinated?

He only thinks he did, but to him it feels as if he did.

 

[elbows]

Pagel was doom-mongering about a new variant in the north east a couple of weeks ago.

It was reasonable for people to look at the North Easts figures and wonder what lay behind them.

Although I wasnt too impressed that a few responses to her tweets on that subject, which pointed out that some modelling exercises had expected the North East to be especially badly hit in this wave, did not seem to get picked up on and repeated by her.

Some of the Indie SAGE mindsets have demonstrated their limitations to a higher degree than I'm happy with in this wave. But I still find them useful when consumed as part of a balanced diet.

 

[elbows]

Besides Im still pissed off with them for playing their part in the 'call for palatable action rather than demanding we u-turn on easing of restrictions' in relation to step 3 unlocking which, in partnership with Delta, enabled this wave.

Its a bit too Guardian or LibDem-tastic for me at times. There are plenty of public health aspects which can be sensibly discussed within such constraints, within that comfort zone, but they struggle with some of the more dramatic, draconian stuff that may actually be prudent at times.

 

[Supine]

Pagel was doom-mongering about a new variant in the north east a couple of weeks ago.

Doom-mongering or trying to analyse the data and form an opinion on it. Or literally doing her job as some would call it.

 

[elbows]

Did Nadhim Zahawi really state in Parliament that trial participants who had received placebo would be treated as if they were fully vaccinated?

I've not followed the story properly but I did see placebo trending on twitter last night and saw at least one part of the jigsaw puzzle as a result:

 

[elbows]

Doom-mongering or trying to analyse the data and form an opinion on it. Or literally doing her job as some would call it.

And at least we know who she is and where she is coming from, what the agenda is, unlike some dubious spinners of a narrow pandemic line here, who routinely invite us to know our place and place our trust in arbitrary authorities.

 

[Cat Fan]

Going through medical school decades previously, where you did a handful of courses on the simplified subject, which will now almost entirely be out of date, does not make you better qualified than, well, anyone really.

Are you disputing the ONS finding that 90%+ of adults have antibodies, or what's your point? It feels like you're using an ad hominem argument because you don't like the conclusion.

See data here:

Coronavirus (COVID-19) antibody and vaccination data for the UK - Office for National Statistics

Antibody data, by UK country and age, from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey.

www.ons.gov.uk

 

[platinumsage]

Doom-mongering or trying to analyse the data and form an opinion on it. Or literally doing her job as some would call it.

No, doom-mongering.

 

[Cat Fan]

Well, if you are going to go with doctors, what about the BMA chair I just quoted? That's lots of doctors.

I agree with what the BMA are saying. They're also acting in their members' best interests as any good union should.

 

[elbows]

No, doom-mongering.

Are you the sort of cunt that would happily describe Whitty and Vallance as doctor doom and professor gloom at key moments of the pandemic in order to further an agenda?

 

[Cat Fan]

Doctors are trained to treat people - they are not trained to be scientists.

Some are both... But normally it's helpful to have multidisciplinary teams to get the best outcomes.

 

[platinumsage]

Aere you the sort of cunt that would happily describe Whitty and Vallance as doctor doom and professor gloom at key moments of the pandemic in order to further an agenda?

I'm not aware that Pagel has ever said anything optimistic whatsoever. Surely if she was "doing her job" in her balanced analysis she'd occasionally realize once or twice that she had over-egged the pudding and say as much. When it comes to Twitter talking heads, I tend to prefer the people with a stats background who are straight-up in stating what they don't know, and clear that their predictions may be an over or under estimate of the actual situation. I assign the label "doom monger" to people whose output seems unreasonably unbalanced.

 

[8ball]

It looks like the rise in cases might be levelling off slightly.
Guess sooner or later the virus will run short of new youngsters/idiots to infect, but seems a bit early for that.

 

[2hats]

The kabbess’ supervisor is a researcher in infections and still says that he personally doesn’t feel qualified to talk about coronavirus immunity because he specialises in bacterial rather than viral infections. He in turn knows viral researchers who don’t feel qualified to talk about this viral infection.

Reminded me of this apposite article:

Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die

Which is too bad because we really need to understand how the immune system reacts to the coronavirus.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[8ball]

Reminded me of this apposite article:

Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die

Which is too bad because we really need to understand how the immune system reacts to the coronavirus.

www.theatlantic.com

I like the joke at the start.
I learned just enough immunology in Uni to get a tiny taste of how brain-melting it is, and this was in the 90's.

 

[platinumsage]

Are you the sort of cunt that would happily describe Whitty and Vallance as doctor doom and professor gloom at key moments of the pandemic in order to further an agenda?

Here's an example. Have we peaked? A 15 post Twitter thread from Pagel. No case for and against - just everything she can think of to suggest cases might rise again, and can't resist putting that line about new variants at the end...

Balanced? No. Doom-mongering? Yes.

 

[elbows]

Are you disputing the ONS finding that 90%+ of adults have antibodies, or what's your point? It feels like you're using an ad hominem argument because you don't like the conclusion.

See data here:

Coronavirus (COVID-19) antibody and vaccination data for the UK - Office for National Statistics

Antibody data, by UK country and age, from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey.

www.ons.gov.uk

Why should anyone support unsafe conclusions?

You know the dangers of drawing the wrong conclusions from antibody studies, since you yourself said this in the past:

True, but a lot depends on whether those antibodies are effective against the Delta variant or not.

 

[Cat Fan]

The public inquiry may reveal some specific details of interest but we dont need that at all in order to form some prety strong conclusions about the response to previous waves.

There are very few questions that require us to wait years to get answers, and when it comes to previous waves we have the death tolls to indicate who was wrong and who was right.

This particular wave is more complicated in some ways, and we have to wait a little bit longer for certain answers. So I have been especially keen to hedge my bets in this wave, and not to stick to all my prior assumptions that served me well in previous waves.

But thats not the same as staying neutral, and we dont have to read many posts to know that neither you or I are neutral. For example whatever happens next with this wave, I do not think it was a good idea to let over a million people get infected, or for the NHS to be placed under this much strain again at a time where it needed to start dealing with backlog in other cases. 805 hospital admissions/diagnoses in England on the 20th July, a fucking disgrace!

It is certainly true that there are possible scenarios in this wave which those who oppose the precautionary stance of Indie SAGE will use to attempt to claim that Indie SAGE was wrong and are extremists that should not be listened to. It will be disgusting 'let it rip', 'if not now then when' extremists who will most delight in making those claims, should that time actually come. The sort of murderous shitheads who have had the luxury of falling silent and walking away in previous waves when their deadly stances resulted in a criminal level of infections, hospitalisations and deaths. They just shrug and think oh well, maybe next time. If this turns out to finally be 'their time', via an early peak, then I will not think any better of these shits, or you for that matter.

It's hard to say without a randomised controlled study what would have happened if different things had happened at different times.

In any case I'm not a lockdown sceptic and I don't appreciate being pigeon holed as one.

Nor do I appreciate the snide personal remarks against me or others, let's stick to the facts.

 

[elbows]

Here's an example. Have we peaked? A 15 post Twitter thread from Pagel. No case for and against - just everything she can think of to suggest cases might rise again, and can't resist putting that line about new variants at the end...

Balanced? No. Doom-mongering? Yes.

Fair enough, to an extent. I already commented on her thread and said that I would not confidently claim that there is no way this is the peak.

How am I doing in this wave do you think? Have I done enough to avoid the label of doom-monger in recent weeks? (Not earlier before this wave got going, when I was keen to point out some of the more alarming modelling results). Is my balancing act reasonable?

 

[Cat Fan]

Why should anyone support unsafe conclusions?

You know the dangers of drawing the wrong conclusions from antibody studies, since you yourself said this in the past:

What unsafe conclusions? At no point did I say we should throw caution to the wind just because population immunity is looking reasonably high. I'm not one of these frothing at the mouth Spectator types.

 

[elbows]

It's hard to say without a randomised controlled study what would have happened if different things had happened at different times.

In any case I'm not a lockdown sceptic and I don't appreciate being pigeon holed as one.

Nor do I appreciate the snide personal remarks against me or others, let's stick to the facts.

Facts include that you attributed a lack of cancer care to lockdowns instead of it being an inevitable consequence of letting infections spiral out of control.

Yes, completely. If we had to wait until there is no pressure on the NHS before we ended lockdown then would still be in lockdown in 2100. Lockdown causes different kinds of health problems, like fewer people being treated for cancer.

 

[8ball]

Here's an example. Have we peaked? A 15 post Twitter thread from Pagel. No case for and against - just everything she can think of to suggest cases might rise again, and can't resist putting that line about new variants at the end...

Balanced? No. Doom-mongering? Yes.

Not getting into the arguments about doom-mongering or othwerwise, but there's some interesting stuff there which helps with my question - cheers.

 

[elbows]

What unsafe conclusions? At no point did I say we should throw caution to the wind just because population immunity is looking reasonably high. I'm not one of these frothing at the mouth Spectator types.

Why quote tweets from Dr Charles Levinson then? Did you check what agenda he was promoting via the antibody stats?

He is after all the sort of person who has this pinned to the top of their twitter feed:

 

[teuchter]

All those doom-mongers who've spent the last 18 months telling us that things are not going especially well - and yet in reality it's been a year and a half of joy and larks! Time to stop paying any attention to them.

 

[elbows]

My filthy language has already demonstrated what I think of those that use labels like doom-monger for a purpose.

However I do consider it relevant to consider that stuff from a slightly different angle.

I do not exclude the possibility that the likes of Indie SAGE and recently Labour may have walked into a trap. This is one of the reasons I have warned people not to stick to narrow assumptions about peak timing this time around. And why I can imagine scenarios which enable the likes of Johnson to gloat and to accuse his pandemic opponents of being too cautious and gloomy.

A trap that I am clearly keen to avoid, at the price of even more waffle, bet hedging and fence sitting than usual.

 

[8ball]

A trap that I am clearly keen to avoid, at the price of even more waffle, bet hedging and fence sitting than usual.

Tbf that 'predicting the future' lark is a mug's game.

 

[elbows]

All those doom-mongers who've spent the last 18 months telling us that things are not going especially well - and yet in reality it's been a year and a half of joy and larks! Time to stop paying any attention to them.

Yeah and some forms of optimism have been deadly in this pandemic.

But there are many different angles where optimism can be pointed. I doubt anyone would think of me as an optimist in this pandemic, and yet I have been consistently optimistic when it comes to questions of how many people will get a pandemic clue and do the right thing, how much of a positive effect on viral levels that will have, how much burden people will carry without society collapsing and civil unrest. And I've been keen to point out peaks and good news whenever such opportunities have fleetingly made themselves available.

I'm sure we know what sort of optimism (or bloody minded madness) people are referring to most of the time, and there have been slim pickings for such optimists gaining credibility by actually being right in this pandemic so far. My assumption at the moment is that it is dangerous to assume that this state of affairs will simply persist in the dramatic form which we have become used to in this pandemic so far. They may yet have their day, their moment, and if this is an 'exit wave' where a big chunk of the wave crushing is actually caused by immunity, it would be foolish to ignore this prospect.

 

[elbows]

Tbf that 'predicting the future' lark is a mug's game.

I prefer giving people a sense of what the realistic spectrum of possibilities looks like. And that spectrum has been rather broad in this particular wave so some of my old near certainties, which have served me well in previous waves, are currently suspended.

 

[elbows]

Plus I seem to remember going on in the past about how I wont get bogged down by dogma, how I will move with the times in this pandemic. But it would probably be ridiculous to claim that I have not accrued any dogmas of my own during this pandemic. Aware of this, I have forced myself to reduce my rigidity at this stage. Whether there was any need to do this now or whether I would have gotten away with a narrower stance remains to be seen. In recent weeks I've given myself lots of future opportunities to blow my own trumpet if this wave turns out to peak earlier than many expected, with lots of caveats with which to salvage my credibility if things just carry on being a shitshow instead.

 

[8ball]

Plus I seem to remember going on in the past about how I wont get bogged down by dogma, how I will move with the times in this pandemic. But it would probably be ridiculous to claim that I have not accrued any dogmas of my own during this pandemic. Aware of this, I have forced myself to reduce my rigidity at this stage. Whether there was any need to do this now or whether I would have gotten away with a narrower stance remains to be seen. In recent weeks I've given myself lots of future opportunities to blow my own trumpet if this wave turns out to peak earlier than many expected, with lots of caveats with which to salvage my credibility if things just carry on being a shitshow instead.

I'm fully expecting a continued shitshow, regardless of when Delta peaks.