Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson is an embarrassment to journalism

[frogwoman]

Sweden have had slightly tighter restrictions to the ones we had around the time of pubs opening , the entire time, with a few others added in eg only essential travel between different parts of the country, ban on care home visits etc. Quite a few pubs not following social distancing rules have been shut. And they still ended up with one of the highest deaths in Europe.

 

[co-op]

There seems to be a weird idea among UK right wingers that they did nothing at all to stop the spread of covid

To be fair, that argument is also deployed by furious liberal-lefties who want to argue that the Swedish death rate is down to irresponsible Swedishness.

The whole "debate" is kinda weird. Instead of some kind of discussion about risk management it's turned into a shitfight with binary certainties - when it's precisely the sort of issue that can't have those. Depressing.

 

[killer b]

So that's indicative that Gupta is a lone voice among epidemiologists?

She's certainly in a very small minority, if she's having to pad out her letter with academics so far outside the field.

 

[NoXion]

But care homes are precisely the places where we don't do herd immunity (if such a thing exists). Nearly every country in Europe fucked up protecting the elderly who are clearly highly vulnerable. Among the wider population the risks seem much much lower and might well be out-balanced by the costs of the current strategy. I'm not sure why people get so angry about this - it's just a fairly standard attempt to try and get the costs and benefits balanced.

Think about who's making this particular "attempt". Look at that fucking letter that got posted above, it has a bunch of goddamn economists names on it. They are the high priests of a market-worshipping cult that is currently sacrificing human lives and the habitability of this planet to its ever-thirsting gods.

Flowery language aside, they don't give a fuck about us. So why trust them?

 

[frogwoman]

To be fair, that argument is also deployed by furious liberal-lefties who want to argue that the Swedish death rate is down to irresponsible Swedishness.

The whole "debate" is kinda weird. Instead of some kind of discussion about risk management it's turned into a shitfight with binary certainties - when it's precisely the sort of issue that can't have those. Depressing.

Who is arguing this? They had a better death rate than ours in part due to better investment in public health plus a load of factors about how the epidemic spread.

 

[chilango]

She's certainly in a very small minority, if she's having to pad out her letter with academics so far outside the field.

...and even then there's not that many signatories.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

One thing the UK does seem to be copying now is the Swedish recommendation that people work from home right through to next spring if they can. And the UK isn't the only country that has got its 'back to work' messaging wrong post-lockdown. That raises tricky questions as to the extent to which it is possible to copy Sweden from where we are now, given that one of the main planks of the Swedish approach has been to establish sustainable measures right from the start.

Re Gupta, her model was misreported somewhat. She presented other ranges of possible interpretations that fit the data just as well (in her opinion) as Ferguson's model, although it was clear which end of the range she favoured. The end of her model that had half the country already infected was wrong, but then so was Ferguson's '300k dead with no lockdown' end.

One feature of Sweden's approach, whatever you think of it, has been public honesty about uncertainties and unknowns, including some rather pessimistic predictions about how long the virus will be around, which contrasts sharply with the laughable UK pretence that somehow everything is under control, it'll be ok by Christmas, etc. I'm not holding my breath that the UK govt will be copying that aspect of Sweden's approach any time soon.

 

[frogwoman]

I have spoken to a few Swedes who basically support the government's strategy and they are appalled at the way eg Cummings' Durham trip (which wasnt allowed in Sweden), Trump has handled it and the thought of letting it rip through.

 

[frogwoman]

Another country that's probably much better example of a deliberate 'herd immunity' strategy is Mexico but nobody ever suggests copying them.

 

[Badgers]

I hope she dies

 

[chilango]

Another country that's probably much better example of a deliberate 'herd immunity' strategy is Mexico but nobody ever suggests copying them.

it's funny how whenever people bandy other countries about as blueprints it's always "nice, white, ones".

 

[frogwoman]

it's funny how whenever people bandy other countries about as blueprints it's always "nice, white, ones".

Also because Mexico have had around 74000 deaths, with the real total reported to be around 122,000.

 

[frogwoman]

Funny as well that the right wing pundits who advocate following Sweden never want to actually invest in public health which is one of the real reasons for their deaths being not as bad as ours.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Funny as well that the right wing pundits who advocate following Sweden never want to actually invest in public health which is one of the real reasons for their deaths being not as bad as ours.

This is where you get a fair few strange bedfellows on this subject. To be fair to Gupta, in the interview I saw with her, she was damning about the long-term underinvestment in the NHS and clear that it was costing lives. I don't doubt that she is generally pretty left-wing.

 

[Pickman's model]

This is where you get a fair few strange bedfellows on this subject. To be fair to Gupta, in the interview I saw with her, she was damning about the long-term underinvestment in the NHS and clear that it was costing lives. I don't doubt that she is generally pretty left-wing.

i don't doubt that pearson has at best scanned what gupta's said, that she hasn't engaged with it on anything more than the most superficial level

 

[frogwoman]

It's funny that they keep advocating the 'Swedish approach' of universities being kept open when they were the one of the first things to shut there.

 

[xenon]

So that's indicative that Gupta is a lone voice among epidemiologists?

well she’s in the minority. That’s why they keep wheeling out the same couple of people on these points. There is a parallel with climate change denial. A couple of scientists go against the mainstream body of opinion. Hence good copy. Doesn’t mean she’s wrong, but you Gotta wonder.

 

[not-bono-ever]

above all, its a badly written stream of bollocks. I dont know how she makes a living with this stuff TBF

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

above all, its a badly written stream of bollocks. I dont know how she makes a living with this stuff TBF

Not acquainted with the Daily Telegraph then?

 

[littlebabyjesus]

well she’s in the minority. That’s why they keep wheeling out the same couple of people on these points. There is a parallel with climate change denial. A couple of scientists go against the mainstream body of opinion. Hence good copy. Doesn’t mean she’s wrong, but you Gotta wonder.

I'm not so sure there is such a thing as a mainstream body of opinion here, though, hence the wide variety of ideas about what is best to do. Harsh truth is that we're a bit clueless about much of this.

The Telegraph is most certainly pushing a particular line hard, but it's carried articles by other epidemiologists criticising various aspects of the half-arsed 'suppression' strategy, including criticism of the basic ideas behind the first lockdown by SAGE member Mark Woolhouse.

Back in July, Woolhouse said this in response to the idea of a total elimination strategy:

We need to think very carefully before embracing any COVID-19 response strategy that could result in more long term damage than can be justified by the public health gain. This is the case for any strategy to respond to this pandemic.

expert reaction to the Independent SAGE Report 7 on elimination of the virus from the UK | Science Media Centre

And if anything his position has hardened since then. The Telegraph article is paywalled, but he's not some off-the-wall crank. He warns directly against some of what the government is doing here, including questioning the predicted size of the second wave. Eg we were prepped for second wave restrictions by the leaking of the plausible worst case scenario of 85,000 dead this winter, double the first wave number (and it is very clear now that this leaked figure wasn't a consensus opinion of the SAGE committee). Given what we are seeing in Spain and France atm, is that a credible number? I don't think so. Sweden released its worst case scenario a few weeks ago with a figure of 3,000, half the first wave number. The wide variation in calculations being taken seriously by govt bodies is indicative of the huge gaps in knowledge and the lack of a mainstream with a solid base.

 

[frogwoman]

Freshers week hangover and needed to blag some cash from mater.

No I just think she made it up for clickbait.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

above all, its a badly written stream of bollocks. I dont know how she makes a living with this stuff TBF

It’s the Telegraph, Johnson used to write down a load of lies which they’d print and give him a lump of dough. So she’s a natural fit.

 

[elbows]

He warns directly against some of what the government is doing here, including questioning the predicted size of the second wave. Eg we were prepped for second wave restrictions by the leaking of the plausible worst case scenario of 85,000 dead this winter, double the first wave number (and it is very clear now that this leaked figure wasn't a consensus opinion of the SAGE committee). Given what we are seeing in Spain and France atm, is that a credible number? I don't think so. Sweden released its worst case scenario a few weeks ago with a figure of 3,000, half the first wave number. The wide variation in calculations being taken seriously by govt bodies is indicative of the huge gaps in knowledge and the lack of a mainstream with a solid base.

What sort of number was that 85,000? If it was excess deaths then its not double the first wave size, since the first wave included around 65,000 excess deaths.

I notice you mention earlier about an incorrect first wave size without lockdown prediction. Do you have a sense of how much it was incorrect by? Given that you know, we did have a lockdown, albeit a late one, so we dont actually know how many deaths there would have been in the first wave here without a lockdown.

No matter how the press report these numbers as single things, almost all estimates done seriously consist of a variety of different scenarios, and predictions tend to end up covering quite wide ranges rather than actually being single numbers. This happens even in situations where there are far less unknowns than there are in this pandemic.

There may be some things we can tentatively conclude from the stage of viral resurgence reached in France and Spain so far. But since it is still only September, I hardly think they serve as a handy guide to the amount of death we might predict over winter.

But yes there are a few interesting details in France and Spain which I would like to explore in another thread sometime quite soon, and some of them might even appeal to you. Mostly to do with whether the things they are still doing are helping the growth in things like hospital admissions to resemble something more like linear growth than exponential growth. But even if that is the case at the moment (I need to triple-check this), I would be wary of projecting that into the future as if it were a near certainty that future hospital admissions growth would continue to look more linear than exponential.

Swedens future trajectory is not assured either, although as usual we might not get to see that picture in full if it starts to happen because presumably this time they will introduce further measures to compensate for any alarming, exponential-like growth in cases beyond a certain threshold.

Do you have a reasonable number in mind for UK Covid-19 or excess deaths over the next wave, winter, or next 6 months, whatever milestone you want to use?

 

[elbows]

And dont forget that reasonable worst-case scenarios and the estimates they result in are just that, worst case scenarios.

Very useful stuff for planning and policy purposes. Useful to give a sense of what might happen if you base your policy on optimists or people with extreme levels of resistance to draconian measures, and the optimists get it all wrong and we end up staring at mount doom.

Not that getting things wrong seems to put these people off from sticking to their guns, as you are also demonstrating nicely with your barely modified stance despite the obvious lessons of August and September and the reemergence of more widespread infection.

 

[elbows]

I suppose I get frustrated that a lot of these sorts of 'we reacted too strongly' stances are never going to tested beyond the initial test that they clearly failed in this country (though not as far as they are concerned). So they have the relatively luxury of knowing that their ideas are actually not going to be tested in full in this country, Because the government will act, and even if it is too little, too late, it is still more than a lot of those people want.

But I would still find it a lot easier not to keep badgering you if I had some sense of where any limit to some of your own beliefs could be found. Some pandemic eventuality that if it were actually to occur here in the UK, would cause you to have a major reevaluation of one or more of the core ideas that has guided your pandemic thinking so far.

So please, I am almost begging you to give me more clues about a scenario which, if it happens, will make you think again. There has to be one, right? or does all this no lockdown stuff carry on going even if we had a really insanely large number of deaths? Alternatively, how bad would it need to get in one or more regions of Sweden to cause a rethink?

 

[elbows]

It is also not lost on me that some of the people who supported a different approach were only too keen to embrace the idea that outbreaks could be successfully managed via really good test & trace systems and stuff done at a local level. I supported the use of such systems where possible, they can be key, but repeatedly warned that they only work up to a certain scale of outbreak, and that they would struggle to function when there is much broader, widespread transmission. And that the test & trace systems themselves could be the thing that ends up providing the warning data that things are getting out of control and that other measures are required.

And then weeks ago we discovered that the UK testing system was already struggling to cope with the demand, demand that was driven by various things including a rise in infections.

So now its clear that that system will not manage the UK infection weight it was being asked to carry, that was required of it in order to effectively continue such a strategy. If you have to ration tests then you cannot pretend to have a comprehensive test & trace system that will save the day.

And yet this turn of events and its implications has not been dwelt on by those who dont like lockdown etc, they just move on as if nothing happened.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Modern take on the Measles Parties of yore.

I always preferred Clap parties, myself.

 

[ViolentPanda]

I rather hope she doesn’t. We want fewer people to get it, not more.

In fairness I’d be equally unconcerned if my son caught it.

...and equally unconcerned if he passed it on to you or Kris?

 

[ViolentPanda]

Telling though that her experience of her son is that he only calls to whine or demand money

Lad probably tells people his Mum is a mass-murderer, or is "on the game", rather than admitting the shameful truth.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Freshers week hangover and needed to blag some cash from mater.

"I've got Covid" is probably code for "I spunked a grand on Charlie & blow-jobs, so need a bail-out".