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www.voanews.com

Dutch Students Complete Atlantic Crossing Forced by Virus

The children, ages 14 to 17, watched over by 12 experienced crew members and three teachers, were on an educational cruise of the Caribbean when the pandemic forced them to change plans
www.voanews.com www.voanews.com

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Greeted by relieved parents, pet dogs, flares and a cloud of orange smoke, a group of 25 Dutch high school students with very little sailing experience ended a trans-Atlantic voyage Sunday that was forced on them by coronavirus restrictions.


The children, ages 14 to 17, watched over by 12 experienced crew members and three teachers, were on an educational cruise of the Caribbean when the pandemic forced them to radically change their plans for returning home in March
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weltweit said:
Something is out of kilter in the US I think.

These are not hunting rifles, they are guns designed to kill people. Why would you need such guns?
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That's a good question, and as for 'out of kilter' that's massive understatement. The right-wing loony tunes were eqally tooled up with AR-15's and suchlike.
 
weltweit said:
Both sets of people are deeply worrying imo.
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From the linked article, my bold. Seems like a fairly reasonable response/statement imo. But you are right, things are badly awry in the US, it may only be a question of time before things get really nasty:

A black lawmaker came to Michigan’s capitol with an escort of armed black citizens on Wednesday, days after white protesters with guns staged a volatile protest inside the state house, comparing the Democratic governor’s public health orders to “tyranny”.

The state representative Sarah Anthony, 36, said she wanted to highlight what she saw as the failure of the Michigan capitol police to provide legislators with adequate security during the protest, which saw demonstrators with rifles standing in the legislative chamber above lawmakers.

“When traditional systems, whether it’s law enforcement or whatever, fail us, we also have the ability to take care of ourselves,” she told the Guardian. Anthony became the first African American woman elected to represent her district in Lansing, Michigan’s capital, in 2018....
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2hats said:
Indeed, here the Swedish State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell contradicts Giesecke on care homes:

www.theglobeandmail.com

Swedish epidemiologist Anders Tegnell the target of praise, criticism over handling of COVID-19 pandemic

The 64-year old bureaucrat has become such a polarizing figure that while 2,000 Swedish scientists have signed a petition denouncing his strategy, more than 100,000 people have joined Anders Tegnell fan clubs
www.theglobeandmail.com www.theglobeandmail.com
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on the care homes thing - I presume there will be differences between nations on the number of people in care homes or similar settings. I believe in some countries it is more common than in the UK for elderly relatives to be cared for by family (get the feeling this is the case in Southern Europe) so may be less of these types of places. Given that in the UK at least some homes have been a hotbed of transmission then will this have any kind of significant difference on mortality figures? I might see if I can find some numbers for this.
 
from 10/05/2020 'It isn't over': South Korea records 34 new Covid-19 cases, the highest in a month
South Korea has reported 34 new coronavirus cases, the highest daily number in a month, after a small outbreak emerged around a slew of nightclubs that a confirmed patient had visited.
..
The resurgence followed a small but growing coronavirus outbreak centred around a handful of Seoul nightclubs, which a man in his late 20s had visited before testing positive for the virus.
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At least 15 people were traced to that man as of Friday, and 14 of the 26 cases were reported from Seoul on Sunday, although the KCDC did not specify how many were linked.

The outbreak prompted Seoul city to impose an immediate temporary shutdown of all nightly entertainment facilities on Saturday. The city said it is tracking down about 1,500 people who have gone to the clubs, and has asked anyone who was there last weekend to self-isolate for 14 days and be tested.
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..
As part of a long-term battle on Covid-19, the KCDC will be given greater power and renamed the Disease Control and Prevention Administration, Moon said. Local governments will set up their own epidemic response systems with more experts.

“We will also push to establish hospitals specialised in treating infectious diseases and a national infectious disease research centre,” Moon said.
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“These tasks are very urgent if we are to prepare for the second epidemic wave that experts predict will hit this fall or winter.”
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www.reuters.com

Coronavirus spread accelerates again in Germany

New coronavirus infections are accelerating again in Germany just days after its leaders loosened social restrictions, raising concerns that the pandemic could once again slip out of control.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

meanwhile here in the UK

www.mirror.co.uk

Furlough announcement 'due on Tuesday' with plan for workers to return part-time

More than six million people have been furloughed in the UK as a result of the coronavirus pandemic but many of these might be made to work part-time, it's said
www.mirror.co.uk www.mirror.co.uk
 
Imperial's model being questioned here and by ex Northern Rock's Telegraph neo-con Matt Ridley. Turns out it is 15k lines of 13-year-old code.

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

A critique of Neil Ferguson’s (the Imperial College) pandemic model

A few weeks ago our party assembled a team to audit pandemic models that are being used to inform public policy. Team members have a mathematics and programming background, enabling them to examine whether these...
timesofindia.indiatimes.com timesofindia.indiatimes.com

We note that the progression of the disease in Sweden has not been particularly different to that in other countries. Further, in all countries, the progression of disease has tapered off. This could have the following implications, that: (a) the impact of lockdowns on R0 is relatively low; or (b) the impact of disease progression on R0 is much more front-loaded than current models assume.

Sweden has been able to moderate the increase in deaths in Stockholm after an initial spurt of deaths in aged care homes. The number of its new cases is plateauing. This may have the following implications, that (a) isolating the elderly is a viable strategy, particularly if more resources are deployed towards that purpose; and (b) most of the mortality and healthcare overburdening risk comes from high risk clusters about which we now have more information and can therefore plan better.

www.telegraph.co.uk

Is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork?

Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College “stepped back” from the Sage group advising ministers when his lockdown-busting romantic trysts were exposed.
www.telegraph.co.uk www.telegraph.co.uk

We now know that the model’s software is a 13-year-old, 15,000-line program that simulates homes, offices, schools, people and movements. According to a team at Edinburgh University which ran the model, the same inputs give different outputs, and the program gives different results if it is run on different machines, and even if it is run on the same machine using different numbers of central-processing units.
 
phillm said:
We now know that the model’s software is a 13-year-old, 15,000-line program that simulates homes, offices, schools, people and movements. According to a team at Edinburgh University which ran the model, the same inputs give different outputs, and the program gives different results if it is run on different machines, and even if it is run on the same machine using different numbers of central-processing units.
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That could mean anything. It could just mean that it is a stochastic model and using different machines creates a different random seed. In which case yes, the “outputs” would be different, but the distribution of outcomes would be materially the same for every run, with acceptable simulation error if enough simulations are run.
The article smacks of journalists that don’t understand mathematical models desperately searching for a “gotcha” and writing up the first thing they think they found,
 
The stuff about the age of the code is not a new revelation at all, its an old criticism that is being recycled by shits who would never have had a lockdown at all if they'd got their way.

The modelling might not be excellent, and even if models are good they can still be ruined by the wrong assumptions being fed into them.

But the bottom line for me is that what really changed minds and caused plan A to be abandoned wasnt just down to the models, it was real data from the reality in Italy in March. The death reality, the hospital reality. Other countries too, like China and Iran, but for various reasons it resonated more when it was happening in Europe.

The public didnt even get to see the output from Fergusons model until March 16th. And yet days before that happened, the original plan still went down very badly with the public, people were going crazy about the herd immunity shit, and the phrase Boris the butcher was doing the rounds. All of this happened without any knowledge of the model, it happened because people were suspicious of the Johnson regimes priorities, and they had seen what happened in other countries.
 
phillm said:
Imperial's model being questioned here
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The model software on github smacks of code that has grown organically, possibly the original core being over a couple of decades old. That core likely ported from FORTRAN or a rewrite in C++ by a FORTRAN programmer (knowing some of the people and influences involved, that would be my bet).

But, there isn't one model. There are many being run in the Imperial group alone, and many more in many more groups across the UK, let alone internationally. The bulk of them are in broad agreement.
 
2hats said:
But, there isn't one model. There are many being run in the Imperial group alone, and many more in many more groups across the UK, let alone internationally. The bulk of them are in broad agreement.
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And although the ill advised UK '20,000 deaths would be a good result' was likely based on modelling, at least the UK didnt keep giving new total death predictions based on the models. Unlike the USA where they occasionally treated numbers from the iffy IHME model far too seriously, and made public pronouncements about how they could have 200,000 deaths, then changed to how they would probably have 60,000 deaths, only to have to revise that again to 100,000, and since then the model was revised to over 130,000.
 
elbows said:
The stuff about the age of the code is not a new revelation at all, its an old criticism that is being recycled by shits who would never have had a lockdown at all if they'd got their way.

The modelling might not be excellent, and even if models are good they can still be ruined by the wrong assumptions being fed into them.

But the bottom line for me is that what really changed minds and caused plan A to be abandoned wasnt just down to the models, it was real data from the reality in Italy in March. The death reality, the hospital reality. Other countries too, like China and Iran, but for various reasons it resonated more when it was happening in Europe.

The public didnt even get to see the output from Fergusons model until March 16th. And yet days before that happened, the original plan still went down very badly with the public, people were going crazy about the herd immunity shit, and the phrase Boris the butcher was doing the rounds. All of this happened without any knowledge of the model, it happened because people were suspicious of the Johnson regimes priorities, and they had seen what happened in other countries.
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Yep.
 
Poland are to reopen cafes and bars from next week. But only with table service and only those places with gardens at first. They also have to have a minimum of 2m apart from other tables.

Nursery's have open from th middle of this week.

Social distancing measures which still apply are keep your distance, and a mask must be worn at all times outside. Heavy restrictions still in shops (masks and gloves mandatory). But centres have been open sinc Monday.

However, a lot of people are breaking the rules when outside. Not wearing masks properly (or even at all), people now starting to visit friends (I had 2 people round for my birthday and next door constantly have guests). But compared to the UK it all looks pretty mild. No mass gatherings. No clapping. No excuses.

It was 28 degrees today and after 2 months people have had enough.

Current situation: In Poland there are +300 (ish) cases day on day. About 20 per day dying.

In my region around Krakow (Malopolska, or lesser Poland) there are between 10-20 new cases each day and 1 death every day/every other day.

Currently there's a bin fire going on in Silesia (started by an outbreak in a mine!) and also a smaller bin fire in Greater Poland (wielkopolksa). The numbers are stable for now.

Masovia (where the capital is) has seen a dramitic drop in day on day cases after an early outbreak.

There certainly is light at the end of the tunnel here but compared to the UK people have been much, much stricter.
 
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teqniq said:
From the linked article, my bold. Seems like a fairly reasonable response/statement imo. But you are right, things are badly awry in the US, it may only be a question of time before things get really nasty:
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Trumps going to stir some shit ,bigley , if the elections do go ahead and he loses ... he will set up his own tv channel for his ar15 touting white beard bellys and wind them up to maximum nuttery......
 
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