Fez909
toilet expert
I know who is responsible for the policy but the decision to use a policy from the Nudge Unit and not copy say, Italy's strategy, has the hallmarks of Cummings, IMO.
Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
- Thread starter Sasaferrato
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MrCurry
right after this urgent rest
Good article here on the govt's strategy. Very risky. Has all the hallmarks of Cummings.
Keep Calm and Wash Your Hands: Britain’s Strategy to Beat Virus
While China quarantined 56 million people and the whole of Italy is on lock down to counter the spread of coronavirus, the U.K. is taking a radically different approach. Instead of keeping people inside their homes, Boris Johnson’s government is trying to get inside their heads.www.bloomberg.com
Everything they’re doing (or rather not doing) has a reason (excuse) attached to it in that article. Someone has carefully crafted a narrative to make it all look justifiable, then fed that to the press.
I want to believe it, but then I remember who is in government and I suddenly feel much more afraid. I do wonder how much the perceived benefits of “getting this thing done with” have swayed the decision making, especially with the ticking clock of the end of the Brexit transition period to think about.
“A Britain which has weathered the storm, terrible though it was, but has come out the other side and is now ready for business again, even while other nations continue to bear the brunt of their prolonged epidemics....” You can almost hear Boris tub-thumping about it later in the year
8ball
Decolonise colons!
“A Britain which has weathered the storm, terrible though it was, but has come out the other side and is now ready for business again, even while other nations continue to bear the brunt of their prolonged epidemics....” You can almost hear Boris tub-thumping about it later in the year
Slightly sceptical, but this last bit has a ring of plausibility to it.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Now on ignore - BYE.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Everything they’re doing (or rather not doing) has a reason (excuse) attached to it in that article. Someone has carefully crafted a narrative to make it all look justifiable, then fed that to the press.
I want to believe it, but then I remember who is in government and I suddenly feel much more afraid. I do wonder how much the perceived benefits of “getting this thing done with” have swayed the decision making, especially with the ticking clock of the end of the Brexit transition period to think about.
“A Britain which has weathered the storm, terrible though it was, but has come out the other side and is now ready for business again, even while other nations continue to bear the brunt of their prolonged epidemics....” You can almost hear Boris tub-thumping about it later in the year
Regarding the 'carefully crafted narrative', actually there is a logic to it that requires no government spin to grasp. For example I was rambling on in certain posts about the theory and the timing of the strategy. I based what I said on what I had learnt in the past, and stuff that not-UK-specific scientists has been talking about online(well before the detail of UK approach was revealed). Someone here commented that what I'd said was very similar to what Whitty had been saying, and sure enough when I checked, it was.
The thing about their approach that I'm struggling to match with your expectations is that the UK strategy is not supposed to get the whole thing out of the way quickly, its to drag out the first epidemic wave so that it lasts longer, but with a much lower peak. In theory there could be a point reached that involves the sort of tub-thumping you describe, but it would be much further down the road. And it would only really work if our country was being compared to a country that had fairly successfully 'kept the virus out/prevented an epidemic wave', with the side effect that their countries population would not have built any herd immunity, and were still just as vulnerable to an epidemic from fresh imported cases as ever.
There is another problem with the article that is being discussed. It doesnt acknowledge that the UK governments plan does include far more draconian measure to be unleashed at some stage. They havent decided never to do any of that stuff, its more a question of timing. They might fuck the timing up totally, in which case they will deservedly be skewered. The draconian period might resemble a massive u-turn while under intense pressure, even though it was actually part of the plan. So there are many political landmines waiting to go off.
Timing is certainly something I could criticise. I spent a fair amount of time in February going on about all the issues with when and who countries will decide to test (seek and you shall find), and various sorts of lag. But as far as UK-specific dodgy timing, some of the timescales they have been coming out with recently seemed a bit off to me. eg hoping to get through the whole of March before moving to another phase. And all the talk of trying to delay the first epidemic peak till 'the summer'. Hmmm, maybe, sort of, if you start blending phases rather than making no changes and suddenly switching phase and response one day, and if your definition of summer isnt really summer at all, but rather just past the period when winter seasonal influenza-like-illnesses have fallen away.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
They have just announced a £30bn programme to protect the country from the coronavirus, including £5bn emergency funding for the NHS, and more if required. .
elbows
Well-Known Member
Yeah. And unfortunately similar discussion is going on in two threads at the same time today, I will try to resist urge to repeat everything I just said in the other thread here, but it is a good match for what you are talking about.
But yeah, one of the problems they have when communicating their strategy is that the logic of the strategy does involve lots of the population ending up infected, because without the usual things like vaccines, thats the only way to actually start to build some herd immunity in this country. Otherwise, if you instead avoid an epidemic completely but the virus is still elsewhere, waiting to be reimported into the uk, then you are still just as threatened by an epidemic as you were in the first place, but with less energy/resources/will.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
That decrease in testing seems a bit crazy. Heard from a friend today that someone she knew with all the symptoms of coronavirus couldn't get tested because she'd not (knowingly) been in contact with anyone with it. The doctor even said it might be coronavirus, but in her age range she'd be fine, but no, it wasn't possible to test. Seems nuts to me. Can anyone fathom the logic of that?
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
Doesn't make sense, considering yesterday's announcement.
With the number of UK coronavirus cases set to rise, NHS England says it is scaling up its capacity for testing people for the infection.
It means 10,000 tests a day can be done - 8,000 more than the 1,500 being carried out currently.
Confirmation of any positive test results will be accelerated, helping people take the right action to recover or quickly get treatment. Most of the people tested should get a result back within 24 hours.
Coronavirus : NHS to ramp up testing capacity
NHS England will be able to carry out 10,000 tests per day, up from 1,500 currently.www.bbc.co.uk
StoneRoad
heckling from the back!
Just transpose USA for Britain and Trump for Bojo in there ... sounds somewhat familiar ...<snip>
“A Britain which has weathered the storm, terrible though it was, but has come out the other side and is now ready for business again, even while other nations continue to bear the brunt of their prolonged epidemics....” You can almost hear Boris tub-thumping about it later in the year
<snip>
elbows
Well-Known Member
They gradually increase the criteria for suspecting cases, and thus who can be tested.
To start with you needed the right travel history, or the right contact with a confirmed case.
Then the travel history bit broadened to include more locations.
Then they started testing hospitalised pneumonia cases, and activated broader testing & surveillance in 100 GPs surgeries/clinics.
Most recently, yesterday, they broadened the criteria for suspecting a case, so that anyone with any influenza-like-illness symptoms who was ill enough to be hospitalised can be tested.
I'm not defending the timing of these things, I spent a good deal of February moaning about this sort of thing, and how it is the norm (eg same sort of thing happened with swine flu). Although part of the reason it does peoples heads in and seems crazy is that people are given a misleading impression about what the actual mission is at these early stages. They were not trying hard to catch every case. They wanted enough data to build an estimate of the actual picture, and they wanted 100+ cases early on that they could study from a clinical point of view.
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
Yes, I’m aware of that. Just confused how you got the idea that there are any clubs, let alone techno clubs, where people dance like that
Orang Utan
Psychick Worrier Ov Geyoor
It was a serious comment
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
I've seen a handful of reports about people getting it, then testing negative, but later testing positive again, but they have tended to suggest the most likely reason was faults in testing, and that they hadn't actually recovered in the first place.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
Interesting piece here:
A small study out of China suggests that the new coronavirus can persist in the body for at least two weeks after symptoms of the disease clear up.
This sort of persistence isn't unheard of among viruses, experts told Live Science, and thankfully, the patients are most likely not very contagious in the post-symptom period. The findings may even be good news, said Krys Johnson, an epidemiologist at Temple University's College of Public Health. The viruses that tend to hang around in people's systems also tend to be the viruses that the body develops a strong immune response against.
"If the virus is staying in people's systems, then they may not be able to be reinfected," Johnson told Live Science.
Can people spread coronavirus after they recover?
Coronavirus may linger in the body for weeks after people recover.www.livescience.com
elbows
Well-Known Member
Yes, it doesnt sound too promising.
However, I believe that even some moderate and not terribly long lasting immunity would start to make a difference to epidemic modelling. And I expect they would much prefer to be facing next winter after a large chunk of the country has had this coronavirus, than without.
It would be unwise of me to get ahead of things with this topic though, just too many unknowns, and we dont know at exactly what stage pharmaceutical interventions will begin (other than not soon at all).
andysays
Love and solidarity
It's one thing not to want to start a hard lockdown too soon, but quite another to basically do nothing other than urge people to wash their hands.
There are many "social distancing" measures which could have been promptly introduced before getting to the hard lockdown which is likely to become necessary sooner than it otherwise might, had more decisive measures been taken earlier
hegley
never odd or even
QueenOfGoths
Fuck you Dave!
Is there another Cobra meeting today?
elbows
Well-Known Member
I think so, unless I have got my days confused. I expect something to be announced this evening (maybe Hancock 7pm thing)
QueenOfGoths
Fuck you Dave!
Thanks
I thought so but wondered if the budget might have effected things.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
There's the testing of those who have the symptoms, traveled from X and the rest. However I haven't heard about any 'random focused' testing i.e. testing of a-symptomatic individuals in wider communities, areas and demographics to get a sense of underlying patterns of transmission.
Edit: meant to say, am I right in thinking those kind of studies don't seem to be taking place?
prunus
Tick tock.
A potential problem with this approach, I think, is that we’re going to get a more than necessarily scary fatality rate, if we skew the population we test towards people ill enough to require hospitalisation. I understand of course that it’s a resource management game, and also a data manipulation one, and certainly with sub sampling and so on we (they) will be able to extrapolate the ‘invisible’ case number and have an estimate of the true CFR, however this may end up with them saying it’s still under 1% or whatever, while the numbers they publish are going to show 2% or more, which is going to be increasingly difficult to spin. Maybe. Am I wrong?
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Will certainly be loon-fodder.
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