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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Azrael said:
When cases and mortality are in decline, and when alternative suppressive measures are in place.*

* If Vallance is pig headed enough to disregard these and attempt to sell Britain his "herd immunity" snake oil a second time, don't expect him to stay Chief Scientist for much longer.
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you don’t half talk some misguided crap
 
Part-timah said:
Plod being nobheads:
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TBF to the plod they handled his anger really well. I mean, it's understandable to be angry and sweary when your door's knocked down for no reason, but some other police forces would have reacted with force. They shouldn't be breaking down doors just on one call but that might not have been the whole story.
 
scifisam said:
TBF to the plod they handled his anger really well. I mean, it's understandable to be angry and sweary when your door's knocked down for no reason, but some other police forces would have reacted with force. They shouldn't be breaking down doors just on one call but that might not have been the whole story.
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This individual is lucky he doesn’t live in America.

Out of curiosity, do police wear body cameras in this country? Presumably if there was another side of the story, the local police force would have released footage to provide some balance?

Either way, from a totally selfish point of view, even if the pigs were completely wrong in this case, I wouldn't want to live next to this individual.
 
elbows said:
There is plenty of variation in how slippery with words and substance and politics the various press conference participants are. But broadly speaking they are all there to articulate and justify the government position on various things at that moment in time. It is therefore important to consider then when, even more than the who. What she said then was a defence of their stance on those issues in the past and up till that moment. When the government stance changes, all these people are likely to sing the new tune, in their own style.



As I've said many times, they really didnt fall badly out of step with those norms. The international norms had some obvious weaknesses in terms of pandemic assumptions, and also certain areas of flexibility, where all manner of national circumstances and competing interests were accomodated for in the recommendations. This is why, in many respects, EU countries followed broadly the same approach, but exceptions to this were to be found in countries that had some vastly different capacity on some fronts. Germany is the obvious example, and they could follow the same ECDC advice as everyone else, but could simply take certain aspects of it further than many other nations because they had a large, flexible, decentralised diagnostics/testing setup already in place, that could respond on a scale that unlocked certain other options. The international and regional norms allowed for this, but also allowed for all the countries that utterly failed on this front due to their lack of existing diagnostics scaleability.

The failures in this country cover a long period of time, and I'm sure an argument could also be made that the British establishments tendency towards top down control freakery, centralised power with somewhat superficial and token layers of devolved power doesnt lend itself for the mostly timely and flexible response. It might have been easier to still respond somewhat effectively with such a rigid system, if it had at least properly funded all the required services and facilities for the last 40 years. Its so much harder to make decent choices when the priorities for decades have set us up for failure.
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If the various doctors were setting aside their clinical judgement to parrot a government line they believed to be wrong, however much we may expect such behaviour, it'd be a scandal in its own right (and a breach of their duty to candour), but not nearly as concerning as the alternative explanation that they believe what they say. Corruption to keep a job is easily understood: a genuine belief in a discredited approach is far more insidious.

Regarding the ECDC guidelines, yes, there's superficial similarities to the "herd immunity" plan, but beyond them, stark differences that point to a fundamental difference in the underlying justifications. The ECDC emphasize that there should be a "strong focus" on testing and contact tracing throughout the epidemic, and take as their "baseline scenario" the maintenance of social distancing until a vaccine or other game changer's available. There's references to natural immunity and "cocooning" the vulnerable: but not as part of a deliberate policy goal to accelerate the epidemic to create "herd immunity". Abandoning testing and tracing and ignoring social distancing in order to engineer a fast peak and population-wide immunity appears different in kind.

So are the lines taken by the various chiefs primarily a result of government pressure? The available evidence doesn't seem to point that way. We've had no indication that Vallance or Whitty advocated an aggressive suppression strategy as an alternative only to be overruled by Cummings: Cummings and Vallance were reported to work well together, with Cummings obsessed with avoiding a "second peak" to justify the death toll to himself. Nor, if the advisors had offered suppression via testing and tracing, is there any obvious reason why the government wouldn't jump on it; if nothing else, it'd be a lot easier to sell to the public than the "herd immunity" plan with its horrific death toll. The devolved governments are also telling. Scottish politicans and chiefs, with every political motive to break from Westminster, instead fell into lockstep. Why would Bute House do this if their advisors were furiously resisting Whitehall's approach?

I'll of course change my mind if more evidence comes to light.
 
Chilli.s said:
This is it really, no evidence at all yet that herd immunity is even a thing with this virus. Chinese doctors saying that immunity may only last a few weeks and only in young/children is the closest to fact driven research that I've seen.
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Is there a link for that, please?
More investigation is going to need to be done into this particular factor anyway.
Especially if antibody testing ever becomes a workable thing.
 
Some thoughts on lifting the lockdown.

In fact, it was only a few days ago, widely reported by the media, that the World Health Organisation set out its criteria for easing restrictions. It lists not one but six "important factors to consider". Only the first is that transmission is controlled. Secondly, sufficient public health and medical services, which includes the ability quickly to detect, test, isolate and treat new cases as well as to trace close contacts. Thirdly, outbreak risks in special settings like long-term care facilities must be minimised, fourthly preventive measures must be in place in workplaces, schools and other places where it's essential for people to go, fifth, importation risks must be managed; and sixth, communities are fully aware and engaged in the transition.
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Arguably, the UK currently fulfils none of these criteria and even if we saw transmission declining, there would be considerable difficulty in coming up to specification on the other factors – and especially the "test and trace" elements of the public health system.

If, however, the media are content to boil down the criteria into the one factor – whether the transmission rate is down – ministers once again will have been allowed to fudge issue and allow to country to drift into a relaxation of the lockdown, for which it will be almost completely unprepared.
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EU Referendum

eureferendum.com eureferendum.com
 
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little_legs said:
Either way, from a totally selfish point of view, even if the pigs were completely wrong in this case, I wouldn't want to live next to this individual.
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Why? Nasty working class man who understandably swears when his door is broken down and his home invaded? At least he maintains social distancing, unlike, ironically, the police who have come three-handed, all standing together, who have come round to have a go at him about, erm, social distancing.

I have a feeling there would be little chance of you ever living next door to him, and not just because you live in the U.S.

Also, "pigs"? That's what 13 year olds at my school call them.

Not sure I'd want to live next door to you tbh.
 
William of Walworth said:
Is there a link for that, please?
More investigation is going to need to be done into this particular factor anyway.
Especially if antibody testing ever becomes a workable thing.
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I'm sorry I can't find it! Sadly disappeared into history, I did read it a couple of weeks to 10 days ago and it seemed as credible as anything at the moment. China having seen cases since november that are now assumed to be early ones seems the logical place to look for any immunity and oppinions of it though.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Not till the start of May at the earliest, I would have thought. One advantage the UK has in being behind most others is that they can see the results of other countries' easing (although it will take a few weeks for those results to become apparent, tbf). But Austria and Spain are easing up a little this week, Switzerland plans to ease in two weeks if all goes well, I'd expect Germany to ease soon as well if their good numbers continue.

It will be interesting to see how the atmosphere changes as this happens.
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In what way
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Sustained reduction in hospitalised cases is the best measure for the UK, I would suggest, given the paucity of meaning in current UK testing figures. That's where we are in a bad place compared to others - as Germany's new cases reduce, or Switzerland's, or Italy's for that matter, they can be confident that means something, and can combine it with other indicators to have confidence where they're at.

France has been shite about testing as well. Don't think it's a coincidence that France plans a longer and harder lockdown. I don't know the details of France's response, but it sounds like they've been as crap as the UK.
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Huge amount of care home deaths from C19, this is the main story today in the Guardian and elsewhere.
 
keybored said:
So are the cops, there are plenty of instances of people shooting police who have broken into their homes.
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True.

planetgeli said:
Why? Nasty working class man who understandably swears when his door is broken down and his home invaded? At least he maintains social distancing, unlike, ironically, the police who have come three-handed, all standing together, who have come round to have a go at him about, erm, social distancing.

I have a feeling there would be little chance of you ever living next door to him, and not just because you live in the U.S.

Also, "pigs"? That's what 13 year olds at my school call them.

Not sure I'd want to live next door to you tbh.
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LOL, covid-19 has cops treating white people like minorities and they lasted a day or so before declaring it unprecedented abuse of power.
 
The ONS have released some figures which may be of interest - see this twitter thread:



these two tweets in particular caught my attention:

1586862615086.png

so 6082 more deaths than average in week ending 3rd April, but only 3475 coronavirus deaths: implying either there's a big undercount, or there's a substantial number of people dying from other things because they can't or won't access healthcare (I think? Someone pick me up on this if I'm reading it wrong)
 
killer b said:
The ONS have released some figures which may be of interest - see this twitter thread:



these two tweets in particular caught my attention:

View attachment 206689

so 6082 more deaths than average in week ending 3rd April, but only 3475 coronavirus deaths: implying either there's a big undercount, or there's a substantial number of people dying from other things because they can't or won't access healthcare (I think? Someone pick me up on this if I'm reading it wrong)
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Probably both.
 
killer b said:
The ONS have released some figures which may be of interest - see this twitter thread:



these two tweets in particular caught my attention:

View attachment 206689

so 6082 more deaths than average in week ending 3rd April, but only 3475 coronavirus deaths: implying either there's a big undercount, or there's a substantial number of people dying from other things because they can't or won't access healthcare (I think? Someone pick me up on this if I'm reading it wrong)
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Same thing happened with Scottish figures last week.

Over the past five years, an average of 1,098 people died in the first week of April. This year the figure had risen to 1,741, although the report only linked 282 of those deaths to Covid-19.

Ms Sturgeon said there was not yet enough information to explain this, although she said it may partly be down to the fact registration offices had been closed the previous week.
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www.bbc.com

Coronavirus: New figures suggest higher death toll

New figures suggest that 354 deaths have been linked to coronavirus in Scotland since the outbreak began.
www.bbc.com
 
killer b said:
The ONS have released some figures which may be of interest - see this twitter thread:



these two tweets in particular caught my attention:

View attachment 206689

so 6082 more deaths than average in week ending 3rd April, but only 3475 coronavirus deaths: implying either there's a big undercount, or there's a substantial number of people dying from other things because they can't or won't access healthcare (I think? Someone pick me up on this if I'm reading it wrong)
Click to expand...

So exactly the opposite of what a lot of the media have been suggesting. The overall rate of death has increased by considerably more than the amount of official coronavirus deaths. The BBC in particular have been plugging the idea that the majority of deaths were people near the end of their lives anyway. I guess there could be a corresponding dip (or smaller raise given there will be coronavirus deaths anyway) later in the year if the virus runs out of easy targets but I doubt it'll be as big as that.
 
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