Yes that could be the article I was remembering...or something similar around the same time.I found one of the old Italy articles from the period.
To put the timing in context, this was about 3 weeks after alarming signals started to emerge from Italy, and a few days after their lockdown rapidly expanded to the whole country. And it came on the notorious Friday 13th at the end of the big week where the UK's plan A was going down badly in press conferences. On a day where the establishment had one last go at selling that plan, including going on about herd immunity. A week where my alarm bells went off about wave surveillance and modelling because they told us in press conferences that we were 4 weeks behind Italy when we were actually 2 weeks behind Italy. Plan A died within hours of this article, or at the very least did not survive the weekend.
Coronavirus: Three reasons why the UK might not look like Italy
Boris Johnson's chief scientific adviser says the UK is four weeks behind Italy, What does that mean?www.bbc.co.uk
Thanks elbows for all of your work on this thread, it's great that someone is making the science easier to understand and cutting through the bullshit.
It was amazing how pervasive UK exceptional ism was at the start of the pandemic. Even pretty rational people I knew seemed to dismiss that we would ever have a problem with Covid on the same scale as Italy.I'm sure i remember back then people writing about how the italians are more convivial, have bigger multi generational family units etc, so we'd be fine.
With words like cower, Javid rises up my pandemic shit list quicker than the Delta virus in the middle of a football tournament.
Fantastic article by Tim Harford, well worth a read.
Repealing lockdowns may not a particularly powerful tool for restarting growth. If people are otherwise concerned about potential infection, lifting legal restrictions on their activity has limited effect. Moreover, such a policy would have to be balanced against the fact that S-I-P orders may slow the spread of the disease—see, e.g., Baker et al. (2020), Chen et al. (2020), Dave et al. (2020b, 2020c), or Friedson et al. (2020). If repealing lockdowns leads to a fast enough increase in COVID infections and deaths and a concomitant withdrawal of consumers from the market place, they might ultimately end up harming business activity.
The shutdown orders did, however, have significantly reallocate consumer activity away from “nonessential” to “essential” businesses and from restaurants and bars toward groceries and other food sellers.
It certainly shows he's a shitball. Never mind the rest of the population who have been taking reasonable precautions, how are vulnerable people who have to return to work, go on public transport, brush past unmasked people in the shops supposed to feel? A lot of those people are already scared and they've now got that cunt deriding them.
But on another note it doesn't suggest this particular member of government is rowing back from 'freedom day' rhetoric as it seemed a couple of them were in the face of rising numbers. Is it possible that 4/5 days of lower figures are acting as a mini dose of confirmation bias and we are back on course with the bullish wrecklessnes of say 3 weeks ago?
Well, you're free to disagree with the piece. But Tim Harford's articles tend to be well researched and backed by data.The masks and lockdown points in that article annoy me in some ways, because some of what is said only covers a couple of quite narrow angles.
In regards lockdowns, I dont think anyone here thinks that everything revolves around the formal rules. We know how much people had started to modify their behaviour in this country some time before the government finally had a formal lockdown. And the study linked to in the article is all about the economics and 'consumer traffic'. And I decided to take this opportunity to skim through that studies details.
For example it includes bits like this. Its American so it tends to use terms like SIP which I assume is Stay In Place.
Plus in addition to measuring overall activity, they looked at diversion of business that was due to formal restrictions.
I coud go on for ages about other aspects of lockdown that make real differences beyond peoples voluntary response to the pandemic. I wont do that right now, but for example I remember well the period when peoples sense of risk reached a suitable place, but lockdown was not yet in place. It ws very unpleasant to leave it to individuals to make decisions about whether they should pull their kids out of school, and there are various forms of the 'social solidarity' he mentions that can be significantly enhanced with the right rules at the right time, for reasons very much including the message that sends and how well crafted and communicated rules can restrain certain elements that are a threat to the sense of 'we're all in this together' can be weakened. Obviously when those with special status then turn out to not be following those rules, the opposite happens, but thats a subject for another day.
"More or Less" is a bastion of sanity as the rest of the media goes to shit. And notably a show that's more than ready to point out its own errors.Well, you're free to disagree with the piece. But Tim Harford's articles tend to be well researched and backed by data.
If you have seen scientific studies that disprove any of what he's saying then feel free to share.
"Full recovery from Covid a week after testing positive. Symptoms were very mild, thanks to amazing vaccines.
"Please - if you haven't yet - get your jab, as we learn to live with, rather than cower from, this virus."
No dashboard results today. Maybe waiting until the sunday paper deadlines until publishing…
Outrage is rightly growing over this fucking dumb tweet from Javid.
[Martin McKee, director of public health at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.]
Is testing waning? Hospitalisations increase but the recorded case rate has been appearing to tail off or plateau this week. Surely that can only be explained by lower testing.
Is testing waning? Hospitalisations increase but the recorded case rate has been appearing to tail off or plateau this week. Surely that can only be explained by lower testing.
Like maomao says in the post above yours, English school term only finished on Friday, with many places having an inset day or two before that. They won't have made any impact on the figures yet. Colleges, sixth forms and private schools finished a couple of weeks ago and Scottish schools about a month ago. I think you could overstate schools' impact on the current drop in figures.I suggest that the drop in cases is partly because the [little germ factories] school pupils & students are not being tested and are not in quite so close contact with other [little germ factories], so less transmission in educational settings
As you note, it'll most likely be a combination of things, including the good weather, that have caused figures to drop.Secondly. The weather has been hot and dry so reducing the survival rates of floating virus particles.
Thirdly, a lot of social interactions are happening outside, with plenty of ventilation.
Outrage is rightly growing over this fucking dumb tweet from Javid.
[Martin McKee, director of public health at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.]
ETA - that tweet quoted Javid's tweet, which he has since deleted, this is what he posted -
This was confirmed a few days ago by Hadjibagheri, and is mentioned in the methodology 'small print'. That the daily dashboard case numbers of late don't reflect actual infections on the ground (variously by factors of 2/3/4, for a range of reasons) has been clear for some time.Well people who are re-infected are not included in dashboard figures.
Well, you're free to disagree with the piece. But Tim Harford's articles tend to be well researched and backed by data.
If you have seen scientific studies that disprove any of what he's saying then feel free to share.