Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

[teuchter]

When I read the paper I also noted the implication that uncritical citations of this single study (the original one produced Scott the choir outbreak) had somehow distorted the overall picture about the importance of ventilation and masks, and thought that seemed a nontrivial claim to make, and a dubious one.

 

[teuchter]

Do you have an opinion on the methods in the paper, or are you just going to make a series of posts about how the authors rank on your personal scale of acceptability?

The main point of the paper, which is that the original study had various qualifications and cautions about its conclusions, and which contained certain untested assumptions, seems sound.

The issue I'd say is what is then extrapolated from this.

You can see that the news article you linked to has somewhat focused on the extrapolations side of it, perhaps predictably.

 

[elbows]

Do you have an opinion on the methods in the paper, or are you just going to make a series of posts about how the authors rank on your personal scale of acceptability?

Its completely legitimate to study the authors since I have very rarely read a study in my life that didnt have some degree of inevitable bias to it. And good science tends to come from an accumulation of many studies and papers, not individual papers taken in isolation. And I'll certainly not be taking lessons in science from the Church Times which you used as a source.

I am left with absolutely no doubt that the strong actions taken at key stages of this pandemic reduced spread and saved lives. These actions also caused an understandable amount of soul-searching, some oversimplifications, some veering from one extreme to another, and a variety of different sorts of denial. Some long forgotten old public health orthodoxies were brought back, others were put on ice, and there was a lot of 'thinking the unthinkable' in a short space of time. It was inevitably messy, and I also consider it inevitable that some never accepted how far we went, and that the mainstream would also seek to return to the previous standards once the moments of most acute danger were behind us. I do not expect science is going to perfectly answer some of the resulting questions, just as it was thoroughly unsurprising that people on here were quibbling about the extent to which pubs were responsible for viral spread and needed to be closed during the worst periods. Neither I nor science was ever going to be able to offer cast iron proof of the exact level of risk and infection in those realms to the high burden of standards that some demanded. There were plenty of occasions where waiting for good enough scientific proof was not an option, and where some basic common sense and logic had to be relied on instead. Some of the practical implications of that common sense were damaging to peoples perceived self-interests, and they sought to resist. In this later period they may now manage to unpick some of the 'common wisdom' from the time, some of the flawed details may be discovered and dispensed with, but not to the extent that a radical reevaluation seems necessary.

 

[elbows]

Does that paper reveal anything that means certain venues should have been left open, certain activities allowed to continue during those times? I dont think so. The likes of Dingwall wanted all that stuff to continue at the time, didnt believe in taking massive actions to reduce the size of those waves. In that battle ground detailed scientific study was not the only weapon, not the only driver of measures, even though there is a need to pretend it was. So pick some of it apart all you like, I dont think it makes as much difference to the fundamentals as some would have us believe. Far more basic beliefs, principals and logic actually underpinned much of that stuff and many of the decisions, and some of the detailed attempts at scientific study and attempts at quantification of risk were actually just window dressing.

 

[elbows]

In other words, the bottom line was that anywhere people met has the potential to spread the virus, and authorities had choices to make about curtailing a large chunk of that during certain periods.

They prioritised keeping certain vital industries, services and supply chains etc going. Some crudely left in harms way, other stuff crudely curtailed until they could make the hospitalisation etc equations work with any degree of confidence.

All sorts of people wanted a more knowledge-based, sophisticated level of detail to be placed on top of that picture and to influence key decision making. What was actually possible along those lines was far from adequate, was never going to be adequate due to our actual capabilities and the timescales involved. We were never going to be able to unpick everything, never going to be able to neatly separate all the factors.

I try not to let that drive me crazy, it is what it is and we can still build a useful picture by sticking to the basics. A similar thing will probably happen at the public inquiry - there will be endless picking over the modelling-based advice but the bottom line is we saw what happened in Italy, removing the desperate hope that other countries fates would somehow be different to Chinas, and so had to act. The numbers in terms of scale of wave and time of doubling were grim, and so all sorts of nuanced plans to delay school closures etc went out of the window in just a few weeks. No complex science was required to bring about that evolution of response, just some basic numbers, just an appropriate sense of potential scale. And we saw this happening before our very eyes, without a high degree of insider or expert knowledge being necessary. And the simplest of amateur data exercises bore more useful fruit in terms of accurate timescale predictions than Vallances '4 weeks behind Italy' managed, no peer reviewed papers necessary to come up with the basic picture that mattered.

 

[elbows]

Also I'll never apologie for, or consider it inappropriate to rant about Dingwall or point out his involvement in papers or articles given that he said this in March 2020:

There is, though, a first question: who says it is desirable to prevent every death regardless of the cost? My impression is that the loudest voices are coming from young or middle-aged people who have yet to accept that death is a normal part of life. It comes to all of us in good time. A wise person would, of course, prefer to die later rather than sooner, but they might also consider that some deaths are easier to bear than others. It is not for nothing that pneumonia was described as ‘the old man’s friend’ in the days before antibiotics. Contrary to some media coverage, no-one is advocating that any old person is abandoned to die without professional nursing care. However, we should acknowledge that many frail old people might see Covid-19 infection as a relatively peaceful end compared with, say, several years of dementia or some cancers. Government encouragement to discuss this question within families would not be a plan to cull the elderly but respect for their autonomy and their right to make such decisions rather than have others make them on their behalf.

Speaking of death, sometime soon I intend to point out in some detail what happened to deaths from all causes in a much younger age group, the 1-14 age group, in England and Wales during the lockdown years. They went down. We dont hear much about that from anyone, and certainly not from the likes of Dingwall, even though they claim their stance is part of a well rounded attitude towards death.

 

[platinumsage]

tldr but I'll take that as a no.

 

[existentialist]

tldr but I'll take that as a no.

 

[platinumsage]

The main point of the paper, which is that the original study had various qualifications and cautions about its conclusions, and which contained certain untested assumptions, seems sound.

The issue I'd say is what is then extrapolated from this.

You can see that the news article you linked to has somewhat focused on the extrapolations side of it, perhaps predictably.

Yes the main criticisms are for the papers that were based uncritically on the original report.

elbows might not think this matters, but in any other field of science, doing this sort of stuff is part of the process. Just because these previous papers were published during a pandemic, and worst of the pandemic is over, doesn't mean that it's not important to replicate/analyse/criticse etc.

 

[elbows]

Its not that I consider that broad issue as completely unimportant. I just have a different approach to trying to factor it in. Place much less weight on every paper, whether its one promoting a particular sense of reality in the first place, or one that comes later and attempts to prove the original paper wrong.

Because its hard to overstate just how big an issue the problem with taking individual scientific studies at face value is. Its a huge issue, and in this era it has been labelled as the 'replication crisis'.

eg:

Science is in the throes of what is sometimes called the replication crisis, so named because a big hint that a scientific study is wrong is when other teams try to repeat it and get a different result. While some fields, such as psychology, initially seemed more liable than others to generate such “fake news”, almost every area of science has since come under suspicion. An entire field of genetics has even turned out to be nothing but a mirage. Of course, we should expect testing to overturn some findings. The replication crisis, though, stems from wholesale flaws baked into the systems and institutions that support scientific research, which not only permit bad scientific practices, but actually encourage them. And, if anything, things have been getting worse over the past few decades.

The replication crisis has spread through science – can it be fixed?

It started in psychology, but now findings in many scientific fields are proving impossible to replicate. Here's what researchers are doing to restore science's reputation

www.newscientist.com

Its a nightmare. There is no quick fix. Science is far from immune to the influence of individual and institutional beliefs. Maintaining a healthy degree of skepticism and picking at the interests and potential biases of those involved in studies is something I indulge in in the meantime.

 

[elbows]

tldr but I'll take that as a no.

Well I am in part reliant on others to check parts of the study that I cannot properly check for myself. I cant reproduce the maths they used, for example. I will be keeping an eye out for responses to this study and will mention them if I see them.

If their use of case timing and fitting those cases to epidemic curves has been done well, then its the strongest, most substantial part of their study and I hope there are other sources that will look into that.

I cant say their attempts to model the infection risk within that location were very illuminating. I didnt see much that they did which can really strongly support the idea that "In particular, it is unlikely that transmission occurred through aerosol clouds in the rehearsal hall or main church.". I think its very hard to get the science on that right, its very hard to model such things properly and thats one of the reason people were tempted to use superspreader events and other mass gatherings to try to learn stuff about this in the first place. There are all sorts of studies out there which manage to downplay the risks in all sorts of different settings, just as there are ones which attempt to highlight such risks, and I dont think humankind is doing a very good job of getting to the bottom of this stuff at all, leaving vaguer notions about 'common sense' in the driving seat.

The part of the paper that I find it most easy to broadly agree with is:

A point-source origin is attractive to disease control specialists as it raises the possibility of a well targeted and highly focused prevention intervention. Multi-source introduction and overlapping
risks are, however, ubiquitous features of the Covid-19 pandemic. Transport, occupational and leisure networks often overlap, and so too do routes of exposure.

Thats consistent with how impossible it was to have a proper stab at quantifying the risk of pubs when that subject was discussed here at certain points. Unfortunately that messy reality is fertile ground for quibbling that people use to argue for all sorts of things to stay open, for not bothering to employ strong, broad mitigations. For example their next sentence reads:

Failure to recognize this encourages stigmatization of vulnerable occupational and population groups, and of activities that have an important role in supporting wellbeing.

But whether a particular reaction, conversation and authority action counts as stigmatisation or a reasonable measure then comes down to other individual beliefs and stances that are not solved by the available scientific study, not then, and still not now. These unclear pictures of risk can be used to argue that we should act in a precautionary way, or that we should have kept all these things open in the absence of hard evidence. Or just keep certain things open which happen to be in tune with the priorities and beliefs of the person making the case. The likes of Dingwall were keen to argue against government action, and in favour of individual choices which people should make based on their own personal understanding of risk. But at times in the past he was caught getting the maths wrong and making claims that had a negative influence on peoples ability to judge those risks for themselves. I cant remember the detail but I think at one point he made some absolutely ridiculous claims about the numbers used to describe the risk of covid risk to older people.

 

[elbows]

I was also unimpressed by a lack of diagrams in the paper, they didnt offer any visual aids to understanding the physical layout and pattern of infected people, unlike various other studies of this type. And it was hardly a substantial paper. Looking at other studies into possible choir-related outbreaks tends to show all sorts of methods and diagrams which were not a feature of the Dingwall paper at all.

For example this which looks like it was published a few days ago and relates to a couple of events involving choirs in Germany:

Analysis of two choir outbreaks acting in concert to characterize long- range transmission risks through SARS-CoV-2, Berlin, Germany, 2020

Background Superspreading events are important drivers of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and long-range (LR) transmission is believed to play a major role. We investigated two choir outbreaks with different attack rates (AR) to analyze the contribution of LR transmission and highlight important...

journals.plos.org

Obviously it is possible that this other study contains various flaws of its own. Reading through it provides some indication of some of the areas where better data would at least give us a somewhat better chance of unpicking particular possible mass infection events. The most obvious of which is genomic sequencing. Only a little bit of that data was available for this particular study, limiting the scope of the conclusions that can be drawn. But in situations where a large quantity of genomic analysis has been possible, such as some studies of viral spread in UK hospitals, it can really help remove specific uncertainties and leave us with a much better picture of whether people were infected via a particular route/circumstance or not.

 

[2hats]

Has someone, presumably screened out by my drivel filter, been pedalling a Torygraph hobby horse?

Particular occasions aside, which may or may not be superspreader events (individual infection risk at which is now understood to be significantly influenced by genetic and antigenic history factors), aerosol physics still has some bad news for victims of sky fairy cults (amongst others). Singing is most definitely a risk factor and has consistently been found to trump talking and breathing for viral dissemination.

 

[2hats]

A PDF of this (pre print) paper is here, for anyone interested in reading it.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350622003237

Regarding that paper...

I first note that another of the usual suspects couldn't resist commenting on it in the same rag the following day - archive.ph .

Then, to the flaws in the Axon paper, a mathematician writes:

Alex Selby (@alexselby1770)

Covid-19 history-rewriting bothers me. Heneghan, Jefferson and Axon, Dingwall et al make a big stretch as they seek to discredit a well-known early study of a superspreader event at a choir rehearsal (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm).

nitter.net

TLDR: the claims made in the paper aren't credible and don't stand up to relatively simple mathematical statistical analysis.

 

[elbows]

Thanks for taking the time to poke at that study and the subject more broadly.

I'll continue to use Dingwalls presence as a guide in future. For quite a chunk of time I managed to have a nice break from following his foul output and the articles the Telegraph etc were able to write off the back of his bullshit. Although I confess that I laughed the other day when searching for him, since it seems that some months ago he was describing Vallance rolling his eyes at Dingwalls bullshit in 2020. And of course the Telegraph, the Daily fucking Mail etc wrote this up:

Prof Robert Dingwall had pushed for a study to find out if children really need to wear face masks at school. It was late summer 2020, schools were supposed to reopen after the Corona lockdown and the professor wanted to know what the evidence for such a draconian measure was.

At the government scientific meeting, held remotely via Zoom, the respected sociologist called for a pilot study to examine the need for masks. Out of the corner of his eye, he said, he could see Sir Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser, rolling his eyes in apparent disapproval. Prof. Dingwall took the message and stopped his pleading speech.

“I was persona non grata from the beginning,” recalls Prof. Dingwall. Concerned about the impact of the lockdown and other strict measures – such as the two-metre social distancing rules – he had expressed his dissent. “The problem was that the social and economic voices were not taken into account,” he told The Telegraph.

(taken from How Sir Patrick Vallance 'rolled his eyes' to smash dissent over controversial Covid rules - UK Daily News so I dont have to link directly to the Telegraph or the Mail)

Its sort of hard to imagine Dingwall actually stopping his bullshit when met with an eye-roll, easier to imagine he would have carried on regardless. In my book 'social and economic voices' is a fake distinction anyway because avoiding tough measures would not have dodged the pain on those fronts, it would likely have made those impacts even worse, just like delaying lockdowns etc eventually made things worse, led to more deaths and illnesses and longer lockdowns and periods of reduced economic activity.

There is a consistency to the stance these shitheads have. They are consistently out of whack with reality, consistently shit, consistently best ignored.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Thanks for taking the time to poke at that study and the subject more broadly.

I'll continue to use Dingwalls presence as a guide in future. For quite a chunk of time I managed to have a nice break from following his foul output and the articles the Telegraph etc were able to write off the back of his bullshit. Although I confess that I laughed the other day when searching for him, since it seems that some months ago he was describing Vallance rolling his eyes at Dingwalls bullshit in 2020. And of course the Telegraph, the Daily fucking Mail etc wrote this up:



(taken from How Sir Patrick Vallance 'rolled his eyes' to smash dissent over controversial Covid rules - UK Daily News so I dont have to link directly to the Telegraph or the Mail)

Its sort of hard to imagine Dingwall actually stopping his bullshit when met with an eye-roll, easier to imagine he would have carried on regardless. In my book 'social and economic voices' is a fake distinction anyway because avoiding tough measures would not have dodged the pain on those fronts, it would likely have made those impacts even worse, just like delaying lockdowns etc eventually made things worse, led to more deaths and illnesses and longer lockdowns and periods of reduced economic activity.

There is a consistency to the stance these shitheads have. They are consistently out of whack with reality, consistently shit, consistently best ignored.

School children in Denmark were not made to wear masks. It's not bullshit to question that policy given that you can make a strong case for saying that Denmark had the best pandemic of any European country.

 

[teuchter]

Regarding that paper...

I first note that another of the usual suspects couldn't resist commenting on it in the same rag the following day - archive.ph .

Then, to the flaws in the Axon paper, a mathematician writes:

Alex Selby (@alexselby1770)

Covid-19 history-rewriting bothers me. Heneghan, Jefferson and Axon, Dingwall et al make a big stretch as they seek to discredit a well-known early study of a superspreader event at a choir rehearsal (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm).

nitter.net

TLDR: the claims made in the paper aren't credible and don't stand up to relatively simple mathematical statistical analysis.

Am I right to understand that "journal pre-proof" means it's not been peer reviewed yet?

If so, it would be interesting to see what comes out of that peer review process.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Don't get the Dingwall hate. In May 2000, he said this:

'There is a fair degree of consensus now among people who are more expert on these things than I am that outdoor transmission is negligible... Fleeting contacts are really irrelevant – if a jogger runs past you in the park, this is not a big deal.'

That comes across to me as a caution of sanity reading it now, given what was happening at the time - parks closing, etc.

 

[2hats]

Am I right to understand that "journal pre-proof" means it's not been peer reviewed yet?

Usually reviewed by that stage. Varies slightly with the journal/field but to quote from that very journal:

Journal pre-proofs are Articles in Press that have been peer reviewed and accepted for publication by the Editorial Board of this publication. They have undergone enhancements after acceptance, such as the addition of a cover page and metadata, and formatting for readability, but are not yet definitive versions of record. These versions will undergo additional copyediting, typesetting and review, and may not yet have full ScienceDirect functionality. For example, supplementary files may still need to be added, links to references may not resolve yet, etc. The text could still change before final publication.

 

[elbows]

School children in Denmark were not made to wear masks. It's not bullshit to question that policy given that you can make a strong case for saying that Denmark had the best pandemic of any European country.

If a nation does other strong things at key, early stages of the pandemic that prevents the virus from running rampant in the population then it gives them wiggle room to be less strict in other ways. Schools are far less of a transmission risk if the prevalance in the population is kept extremely low, if the virus lacks a substantial starting point. Multiplication where one of the numbers is very low gives very different results to multiplication where that part of the equation already starts off orders of magnitude higher.

 

[elbows]

Don't get the Dingwall hate. In May 2000, he said this:

'There is a fair degree of consensus now among people who are more expert on these things than I am that outdoor transmission is negligible... Fleeting contacts are really irrelevant – if a jogger runs past you in the park, this is not a big deal.'

That comes across to me as a caution of sanity reading it now, given what was happening at the time - parks closing, etc.

You can find some Dingwall quotes that are not unreasonable. The others are the problem, of which there are many.

So of course at times Dingwall did tread into more complex territory, territory which a much broader range of people can reasonably ponder the nuances. I'm sure I could find a whole bunch of sentences that came from him which I could manage to agree with, at least in part. But I would also find many more that were extreme shit, incompatible with what this country faced.

Many of these areas would also mirror the disagreements me and you had in the past. They involve all the usual themes, including masks and lockdowns. Lets not repeat all those again now, I'm sure we both know where we stand on those things. And people should know well by now where the Telegraph stands on those things, where HART stands on those things. Your stance on the pandemic and what the right thing to do was is broadly compatible with Dingwall etcs stance, mine isnt.

 

[elbows]

A bit more detail about Denmark and school closures and reopenings in response to the first wave. The detail matters.

How Denmark safely reopened schools without masking

In the early weeks of the pandemic, Denmark reopened elementary schools without worsening...

www.sfgate.com

eg:

First it tamped down the outbreak by ordering a month-long nationwide lockdown.

When Danish schools reopened, there were only 185 new cases daily in the country, although at the time only those patients with medium to severe symptoms were being tested.

Classes were limited to cohorts of 10-12 pupils and one teacher throughout the day. Parents were not allowed into schools except under special circumstances.

Whenever possible classes were held outside. Public parks were reserved between 8 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. for lessons. Hotels, libraries, museums and conference centers were made available to schools.

Masks were never mandatory for children or teachers. However, face coverings were recommended for students who were feeling sick and on the way to isolation, and for those taking public transportation.

And more in that article that I wont go over the top by quoting now.

Its also important to consider all phases of the pandemic and a countries response, including how timely their actions were. So for example here is a description of a broader period of the schools situation in Denmark. They locked down much quicker when we did and were also prepared to act again later.

Danish schools have undergone four major phases since the outbreak of the coronavirus. On March 11th, 2020 the Prime Minister announced that schools were closing down, in line with many other public organizations (Ministry of Health, 2020a). This closure of schools and day-care facilities remained in place until mid-April, 2020, where schools began to open gradually over the course of a month, starting with the youngest pupils. Restrictive measures were put in place to secure physical distance between pupils and teachers, routines of handwashing as well as ventilating and cleaning classrooms and surfaces. Schools remained fully open during the summer and autumn, and while restrictions remained in place, they were somewhat loosened, mainly regarding physical distance, in order to enable pupils to return to their original class sizes. On December 7th 2020 a partial closure was enforced as older pupils in 38 municipalities were sent home, followed by a complete closure of schools on December 21st 2020, this is called phase two in this report (Ministry of Health, 2020b; Ministry of Health 2020c). Beginning of 2021, day care centers for children under the age of six remained fully open in order to secure better working conditions for parents of small children. Schools were also open for the youngest half of students since February 2021, and the oldest half of students were returning gradually (Ministry of Health, 2021). During every closure “emergency on-site school” was made available to children who, for whichever reason, needed to leave their home.

(quote is from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...ort_2021.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1ULTQIV_s-3jYkduRXAI0N )

Much later in the pandemic Denmark was prepared to act early and do things that countries like ours resisted, such as shutting schools early in December last year:

Schools in Denmark to close early for Christmas as Covid cases surge

Closing time of midnight set for nightclubs, bars and restaurants

www.irishtimes.com

The entire picture and response matters. If you are prepared to act early and strongly and manage to dampen things down quickly, then you might give yourself the opportunity to recover more quickly and have more normality in the periods between the most dangerous moments. Decisions about masks should be influenced by prevalence rates. Things like Eat Out to Help Out in this country hardly set the scene for a successful return to normality in schools in September 2020. And we were not exactly brilliant when it came to ventilation in schools, or embracing teaching outdoors etc etc.

 

[elbows]

One of the telling things about the shits is that the sense of 'balance' they claim to favour isnt actually about balance at all, they are usually against all the potential balancing mitigations too, they offer no counterweight, no alternatives for reducing the risks. Often they are just as much against the other mitigations as they are the most draconian ones.

So they dont just come out against school closures, they also pissed on masks and social distancing measures and investing in ventilation and changing routines. Dodgy as fuck.

And this theme did not become irrelevant once we got well into the vaccine era either. Instead it persisted along those lines, with the same people often being the ones against the vaccination of children. What I would ideally do at this point is post a handy graphic showing comparisons of the levels of covid vaccination in children between different countries. But I havent managed to find one right now, I think I saw one earlier this year but I cannot remember where.

 

[elbows]

I forgot which threads I have recently mentioned the issues with whats happened to the uk workforce, probably a few different ones. It was certainly mentioned in the budget statement, with the government having a plan to investigate and report on what can be done about it.

Anyway the BBC have an article about the numbers. We can see a complex picture involving a whole bunch of causes, some of which are linked to the pandemic in different ways. For example the worsening waiting lists are responsible for some of it. Also long covid, mental health impacts stemming from the pandemic itself, from lockdowns, from the way people were treated in their jobs (and loss of jobs). And some of that stuff probably needs to be mixed in with what was happening over a longer period of austerity pre-pandemic. Also a bunch of other factors that arent pandemic-specific including demographic realities, generations being shat on, cumulative effects of this nations shit priorities etc.

Articles like this one can be lopsided in terms of what areas they focus on most, and certain possible narratives that they leave out. Especially for those whose stories of why they have left the world of work isnt a purely health story, but involves some cross over with other phenomenon that got some attention in recent years such as work-life balance, how people are treated, valued or not valued, etc etc.

Ignore the silly headline and subheadline, its not a question of people not being sure why, rather its a whole bunch of reasons that arent served by a single simple answer, and thats what the substance of the article is all about really.

The puzzle of UK’s half a million missing workers

The number out of work through ill health has been rising sharply - and no-one is really sure why.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[elbows]

Have we had the news that Bra maker Michelle Mone and her husband might have secured a £200million deal for providing Covid stuff when this started?

Tory peer Michelle Mone secretly involved in PPE firm she referred to government

Exclusive: Leaked files suggest Mone and her husband were involved in business given £200m contracts

www.theguardian.com

The Guardian have now seen more documents about this:

The Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her children secretly received £29m originating from the profits of a PPE business that was awarded large government contracts after she recommended it to ministers, documents seen by the Guardian indicate.

Revealed: Tory peer Michelle Mone secretly received £29m from ‘VIP lane’ PPE firm

Documents suggest husband passed on money from PPE Medpro, which secured £200m contracts after Mone lobbied ministers

www.theguardian.com

 

[existentialist]

The Guardian have now seen more documents about this:

Revealed: Tory peer Michelle Mone secretly received £29m from ‘VIP lane’ PPE firm

Documents suggest husband passed on money from PPE Medpro, which secured £200m contracts after Mone lobbied ministers

www.theguardian.com

And I can pretty much guarantee that she will not be held to account, far less have to return the money.

These are the people who govern us.

 

[Thesaint]

Don't get the Dingwall hate. In May 2000, he said this:

'There is a fair degree of consensus now among people who are more expert on these things than I am that outdoor transmission is negligible... Fleeting contacts are really irrelevant – if a jogger runs past you in the park, this is not a big deal.'

That comes across to me as a caution of sanity reading it now, given what was happening at the time - parks closing, etc.

The hate isn't about Dingwall himself.

There is now going to be a lot of soul searching and reflection on what happened over the last few years and for many wedded to a idioloical and often narrow short termist view on the pandemic now have to come to terms with the response was driven by an emotional panic rather than any calculated or rationale response.

The willfully blindness of other viewpoints (often accompanied with abusive posts to filter them out online) has left them thinking there was only their observations existed and now the shock arrives that a) they even existed and we'rent the alt-right b) had a valid point to make.

 

[Thesaint]

And I can pretty much guarantee that she will not be held to account, far less have to return the money.

These are the people who govern us.

I'm sure "the lessons will be learned" as usual though.

 

[elbows]

No, I'm painfully aware that shitheads like you with your shit views exist and have existed all the way along. Its no surprise, and that sort of stance was even more dangerous during the early waves of the pandemic because the fuckers advocated doing little even in the pre-vaccine era, and letting the bodies pile higher. Plenty of us ranted about that shit at every stage, its not a new phenomenon to have people like you coming out with this shit now, or for people to continue to refute your version of reality. If you'd joined this forum years earlier you'd not be able to paint this as a recent phenomenon. Some of the people that got in on that crap act from the start were made fools of by the virus, when they tried to make claims about subsequent waves being overhyped, only to see the exponential growth of the virus shit all over their stances a second time. Later things got more complicated and the worst case concerns that people like me stuck to stopped coming to full fruition every time, allowing more room for nuance and more occasions where the reality did not turn out as bad as my worst fears. Once this was demonstrated to be the case last winter a lot of people stopped posting here at all, and plenty of the people who had previous entertained shit beliefs didnt see the point in spouting their shit any more because the heaviest restrictions they didnt like were gone. Those who still seek to revise history because of their crap beliefs still pop up from time to time, with you currently fulfilling that role.

Meanwhile:

Patients dying as ambulances face crippling delays in England

Warning by NHS bosses as nearly three in 10 crews caught in queues outside A&E in England last week.

www.bbc.co.uk

Prof Sir Stephen Powis said the figures showed fears of the so-called "tripledemic" - high levels of flu, Covid and a respiratory infection called RSV - were very real.

 

[Thesaint]

No, I'm painfully aware that shitheads like you with your shit views exist and have existed all the way along.

Aimed at myself? Thank you for proving one of my points either way by your use of abusive languange.

You want, sorry need,  to paint anyone else who has any viewpoint or observation as being a total 'do nothing granny killer' and what you perceive complete opposite because it gives you a strawman to lash out at and feel 'right' against.

You spend a lot of time studying all this data etc which I much admire, but you aren't helping yourself and your well being by doing this assuming anything else is the total opposition.