Fuck off, George.
George Osborne, Architect of U.K. Austerity, Says New Cuts Needed Post-Crisis
The architect of the controversial austerity drive in Britain after the financial crisis said another period of belt-tightening will eventually be needed to deal with the fiscal damage wrought by the coronavirus shock.www.bloomberg.com
thank you for this - saved me doing it.
If a third of people were vulnerable to re-infection, you'd think there would be a lot more examples of possible re-infection happening.
I wonder about the integrity of the tests.
Yep, spot on. The difference between '7 days from onset of symptoms' and '14 days from the cessation of symptoms' is obviously enormous. As you say, the former is to avoid calamity, but the latter is what places like South Korea and now New Zealand are insisting on as they aim for total elimination. That really struck me when I first heard of SK's current policy - test at the airport, ok, fair dos, but then 2 weeks in solitary if you test negative. Wow. But if you're after zero, that does make sense.Originally 7 days struck me as the kind of compromise a state would reach when trying to balance between the actual infection risk, and what percentage of the workforce would be absent according to various models. I could sort of see the rationale behind it when they were mostly going for the 'anyone with any symptoms vaguely similar to Covid-19 should self-isolate'. But its not a number of days driven purely by medical knowledge, its a compromise. And then, just like with decisions to describe certain kinds of contacts as close only if they lasted at least 15 minutes, the arbitrary numbers we have chosen for a specific reason then end up getting treated as some kind of fundamental truth, rules the virus sticks to. When obviously it doesnt care about our rules and definitions. So its bloody stupid to take the 7 day value, which was a compromise for a particular situation, and then treat it as though this is the amount of time that actually confirmed cases who tested positive should isolate for, and that any longer is unnecessary.
So yeah, I would say its not wise. Its possible that they can get away with such things without it making a really large difference because so much of the transmission between people actually tends to happen earlier, in which case it would be another numbers game, another factor that went into the earlier compromise calculation. But its not what you would choose to do if you were actually trying to minimise the risk for every single person, its the sort of thing you might get away with if only looking at the very largest picture, and trying to dodge the very scariest scenarios with their terrible orders of magnitude. If tens of thousands of lives lost now matters, but hundreds still dont, all sorts of sloppy decisions can be gotten away with in that numbers game, and it is tempting for me to put the 7 days thing in that camp
This is the frustration, yes. It's utterly mad. The docs in that zoom thing were all very polite and reasonable about it, but none of them had any idea how test and trace was going to be done. They'd clearly not been told/asked a thing about it.
The point made by the doc who raised this (a GP who is lined up to work there but hasn't been needed yet) is that she worried that all the effort was put into these headline projects that look good on telly at the expense of other, more important things. She didn't think it was a bad thing per se, but she did question the priorities of the government that led to it.
You'll give yourself a headache
I'm increasingly reaching the conclusion that this has been their approach to lockdown as well. Stay home, protect the NHS, and build the shiny new facilities. There, job done. No, not job done. Disaster averted temporarily. That's all. Now the work starts...Oh, I definitely agree with that in terms of the Government.
Just waiting for the vaccine is no policy at all
Plus, the obvious point made in the zoomcast - lovely smooth procurement chains break down during a crisis, so there is really no substitute for a good old-fashioned stockpile. It may look inefficient, but this isn't a capitalist business you are running. It is a public service. Empty hospital beds may also look inefficient, but they are also a necessary part of a well-run health service.
Isn't the logistical problem of scaling up the bit that could be expedited in a way we have never seen before? This thing has brought the world to a halt - there is incentive for governments around the world to invest billions in making sure a vaccine, once made, becomes available asap at least in the countries that can afford those billions.
Or, it could be that there's nothing wrong with testing, but the results are mundane. As far as I understand (more than happy to be corrected), the presence of antibodies is something that develops over time post-infection, so variance between participants may not be so alarming. The article suggests that some people had levels below what was expected, but this is early research, so what would the yardstick be?
One leading UK group with a novel vaccine is expecting 18-24 months at best to go from where they are (post animal model/pre human trials) to verification, (hopefully) approval and mass production.
I mentioned the other day that I know someone who works in a factory in Co Durham making the 95% 3M masks. Not sure, but I think that's the only place they are manufactured in Europe.
