Generic Virus Thread

[darrenm]

4 hours ago, darrenm said:

I don't like to use up my attachment quota but here's another few KB  This is cases by date https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases

You always get reporting delays over the weekend but generally Thursdays and Fridays are the full data. Some reporting delays get backfilled into previous days as they come through too.

The 1st and 2nd of July are both lower than 30th June. They're a Thursday and Friday. Maybe there's a significant reporting delay with cases, I don't know.

You'd expected the 2nd to have a few more added, then 3rd and 4th to have lots more from the weekend reporting delay, so today will probably look terrible because it'll be something like 40,000 new cases. But as I was saying before with deaths, that's new recorded cases added to the overall total, not new cases by date.

I think double jabbed people are 65% less likely to be infectious (as far as I can recall) and are 98% protected against severe disease. Plenty of double jabbed people can still catch it but they're a lot less likely to pass it on and will be very likely to suffer no ill effects.

Sajid's about to change it you don't have to self isolate now if double jabbed because you won't be pinged on the app. Could be interesting.

Only 28,000 extra cases today. That's a lot lower than I was expecting considering the weekend reporting delay. I'm becoming more sure that cases are reducing.

[blandy]

6 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

My argument against that @blandy is that if that was persuading voters, Labour wouldn't have had a bunch of election results that range from average to very bad indeed. I know you are a fan of the 'it's all about the vaccine rollout' thesis - I'm not, because it cannot explain the Chesham and Amersham by-election for one - but even if that thesis is correct then by the time that 'vaccine bounce' disappears very little of that stuff is going to feel like anything other than ancient history, and the ones that won't - such as the damage to schoolkids - won't benefit the opposition because the public will correctly perceive that the opposition would have done little different themselves.

I agree with the part of your previous post about picking at each little rule - I think that's what the wider public has seen or picked up. I don't think they've (we've) been given a clear consistent message about government incompetence. Personally I think a mix of clear incompetence messaging, together with targeted alternative solutions (like the NHS) would have been the way to go. It's all so disjointed. Starmer sometimes looks like he's getting it right in the PMQs, but it stops there. The next day they'll be back to saying something inconsequential about nothing much.

I feel that the whole country knows, underneath the surface, that the tories have made a mess of so much of all this. They also feel/felt happy about opening up on June 21st. I wonder if we're at the point now, where when things next go wrong because of something the government has/hasn't done, the vaccine/opening up bounce will vanish and reverse, even. -I mean it did before - around September time, was it? Starmer was miles ahead of Johnson on all kinds of metrics. This latest no going back opening up thing - it's just hostage to fortune. It's unbelievably stupid on multiple levels. tactically from the politics, from the public health perspective, too.

If Labour gets itself sorted on messaging (not much hope there) and the tories continue to mess up, things might get interesting.

[blandy]

5 minutes ago, darrenm said:

Only 28,000 extra cases today. That's a lot lower than I was expecting considering the weekend reporting delay. I'm becoming more sure that cases are reducing.

I'm not

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases#card-recent_7-day_case_rates_by_specimen_date

[Panto_Villan]

14 minutes ago, blandy said:

I agree with the part of your previous post about picking at each little rule - I think that's what the wider public has seen or picked up. I don't think they've (we've) been given a clear consistent message about government incompetence. Personally I think a mix of clear incompetence messaging, together with targeted alternative solutions (like the NHS) would have been the way to go. It's all so disjointed. Starmer sometimes looks like he's getting it right in the PMQs, but it stops there. The next day they'll be back to saying something inconsequential about nothing much.

I feel that the whole country knows, underneath the surface, that the tories have made a mess of so much of all this. They also feel/felt happy about opening up on June 21st. I wonder if we're at the point now, where when things next go wrong because of something the government has/hasn't done, the vaccine/opening up bounce will vanish and reverse, even. -I mean it did before - around September time, was it? Starmer was miles ahead of Johnson on all kinds of metrics. This latest no going back opening up thing - it's just hostage to fortune. It's unbelievably stupid on multiple levels. tactically from the politics, from the public health perspective, too.

If Labour gets itself sorted on messaging (not much hope there) and the tories continue to mess up, things might get interesting.

That's interesting, as I have the opposite read on the situation. I don't think Labour is onto a winner just by trying to tell the public that the Tories have actually failed on covid, despite us being one of the first countries to open up because our vaccination rates are so high.

When she heard about the corruption scandals re: the PPE contracts, my wife who doesn't really follow politics just shrugged and said she didn't expect the government to get everything right given the circumstances (which was the government frantically scrabbling around trying to get PPE from literally anywhere). If your starting point isn't hatred of the Tories, I think the government gets quite a bit of leeway given they were in a difficult situation with a lot of unknowns and they also have the vaccine rollout as a definite success they can point to. Plenty of mistakes, sure, but I think overall the Tories have had a decent pandemic (electorally). I quite like Starmer but I'm certainly not convinced Labour would have done a better job, as I'm not sure I'd for example see him throwing enormous quantities of money at experimental vaccines that may or may not materialise.

Labour need to change the discussion. The Tories have already won this battle imo - at least in public perception, if not in fact.

Edited July 6, 2021 by Panto_Villan

[blandy]

2 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

The Tories have already won this battle imo - at least in public perception, if not in fact.

That's fair.

The public perception (from a Labour perspective) needs, therefore, to change, does it not?

I think in a way that's what we're getting at - perception is gained from both parties' messaging. The tories have been saying how brilliant they all are, and whatever Labour's said has in the past 8 months not hit home.

The tories had a "national emergency" boost, then a slump as people saw they'd effed it up, then along came vaccines and they had their boost back.

I think if this opening up doesn't go well (it won't, would be my guess) then they'll slump again come the autumn. 

[blandy]

3 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

You can consider them whatever you like, but your claim was that they 'are bowing to back bench nutters for face saving reasons'. This suggests that you think there is no logic to their decision other than party management.

A clue as to why that is probably not the case is that so far, no 'non-political' advisors have spoken out about or resigned over this decision

Just seen this:

Whatever Johnson says, we can’t defeat Covid with ‘personal responsibility’ alone | Stephen Reicher | The Guardian

Quote

 ministers have decided that vital safety measures, such as mask wearing, should be. In doing so, they have abdicated the responsibility to govern in the midst of the greatest crisis of our generation. Their approach, as West said, is “absolutely bonkers”....

Stephen Reicher is a member of Sage

 

[Panto_Villan]

Just now, blandy said:

That's fair.

The public perception (from a Labour perspective) needs, therefore, to change, does it not?

I think in a way that's what we're getting at - perception is gained from both parties' messaging. The tories have been saying how brilliant they all are, and whatever Labour's said has in the past 8 months not hit home.

The tories had a "national emergency" boost, then a slump as people saw they'd effed it up, then along came vaccines and they had their boost back.

I think if this opening up doesn't go well (it won't, would be my guess) then they'll slump again come the autumn. 

I agree that if the opening up goes badly then it gives Labour a massive opening, but personally I think we're going to see a lot of cases but not many deaths or serious hospitalisations and the Tories will benefit even more from having won the battle against covid. It's certainly a gamble though and both outcomes are perfectly plausible.

I think if the opening up isn't a disaster then I just don't think Labour is going to be able to change public perception no matter what they say, and I think it'd be a mistake to try too hard to do so. It makes them look petty and sucks oxygen away from things that could actually help them win.

Guess we'll see how things unfold over the next few weeks though!

[Genie]

8 minutes ago, blandy said:

Just seen this:

Whatever Johnson says, we can’t defeat Covid with ‘personal responsibility’ alone | Stephen Reicher | The Guardian

 

Yep, I alluded go this in my post earlier.

Hes listened to SAGE, and then done the opposite of what they were recommending (again).

For good measure he said he was following the data and not dates which is another barefaced lie.

[Panto_Villan]

7 minutes ago, blandy said:

Just seen this:

Whatever Johnson says, we can’t defeat Covid with ‘personal responsibility’ alone | Stephen Reicher | The Guardian

 

True, but look at that guy's article history. He's written 24 prior articles since May last year criticising the government's covid response, so even if he's correct him calling out the government for the 25th time probably isn't going to raise too many eyebrows.

[HanoiVillan]

18 minutes ago, blandy said:

Just seen this:

Whatever Johnson says, we can’t defeat Covid with ‘personal responsibility’ alone | Stephen Reicher | The Guardian

 

That's interesting, thanks. Important to note though that he's a member of the Sage sub-group advising on behavioural science, not the main body (as I understand it).

EDIT: Also - tangentially, but I think important to his credibility - he is making claims that are not about behavioural science, and which are not supported by evidence (the main hook of the article is that masks are a 'vital safety measure' - they mostly aren't, and the evidence for the effectiveness of mask wearing in reducing transmission is not strong).

Edited July 6, 2021 by HanoiVillan

[Genie]

1 minute ago, Panto_Villan said:

True, but look at that guy's article history. He's written 24 prior articles since May last year criticising the government's covid response, so even if he's correct him calling out the government for the 25th time probably isn't going to raise too many eyebrows.

I’m glad he continues to call out this government who have the unnecessarily deaths of tens of thousands of people on their hands.

I think people have a right to know if Boris and co are going against their recommendations.

Edited July 6, 2021 by Genie

[darrenm]

34 minutes ago, blandy said:

I'm not

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases#card-recent_7-day_case_rates_by_specimen_date

That link shows it slowing down even a week ago?

74, 73, 71, 67 looks like decreasing figures to me.

[Genie]

A bunch of parents wouldn’t release their children for football training tonight. Several had just finished isolating and were trying to avoid another spell as they approach the last couple of weeks of primary school.

The coach has cancelled training for the next few weeks for this reason.

[HanoiVillan]

41 minutes ago, blandy said:

I agree with the part of your previous post about picking at each little rule - I think that's what the wider public has seen or picked up. I don't think they've (we've) been given a clear consistent message about government incompetence. Personally I think a mix of clear incompetence messaging, together with targeted alternative solutions (like the NHS) would have been the way to go. It's all so disjointed. Starmer sometimes looks like he's getting it right in the PMQs, but it stops there. The next day they'll be back to saying something inconsequential about nothing much.

I don't disagree with you here, but I think it's important to note - partly echoing what @Panto_Villan said - that there is a big tension specifically between the idea that the Tories have been incompetent on the one hand, and that the vaccine rollout is the source of their electoral success on the other. On the most obvious surface level, there is clearly a tension between this idea:

44 minutes ago, blandy said:

I feel that the whole country knows, underneath the surface, that the tories have made a mess of so much of all this.

. . . and the rollout of the vaccine being so widely perceived as a success that their good election results are mostly credited to it. Maybe we can say 'well that's the only thing they got right!', but it's clearly a very big thing, and will weigh down a competence-based critique.

But on a deeper level, I think competence-based critiques don't work very well for other reasons. Firstly, the crisis is just clearly extremely hard, with trade-offs and no easy answers everywhere you look. Secondly, there is no commonly-accepted 'pandemic playbook' that the Tories have failed to execute; this is the first time we have faced this situation, at this scale, in living memory. Thirdly, the final destination is that we will end up with roughly comparable death rates to nearly every one of our peers of advanced western democracies. And fourthly, it is not at all clear that Labour would have done anything substantial different to the government. They have not had a consistent argument from philosophy that has been proven right by events, and in fact they have downplayed some areas - such as sick pay - where their 'traditional view' would seem to have come into fashion. They have flip-flopped on issues as much as the Tories.

As @Panto_Villan said, the public feel this stuff. I've had conversations with quite a few people who aren't interested in politics about the pandemic, and they usually boil down to 'it's a thankless job, I feel sorry for Johnson, I wouldn't want to do it' or some variant of that.

[blandy]

12 minutes ago, darrenm said:

That link shows it slowing down even a week ago?

74, 73, 71, 67 looks like decreasing figures to me.

Unless I'm going stark raving mad (entirely possible)  - no it doesn't.

We also need to understand that "Data for the period ending 5 days before the date when the website was last updated with data for the selected area, highlighted in grey, are incomplete."

I've been watching these figures for ages and the backfilling is often significant. 

Are we looking at the same thing, Darren?

27/6 - 14,876 daily cases. 28/6 - 22868 cases, then 20479, 26078, 27989 then incomplete data | 27125, 24885, 24248, 27334, 28773 |

daily cases have doubled in number 2 weeks. even today's incomplete count is more than 1 July complete count.

[blandy]

13 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I've had conversations with quite a few people who aren't interested in politics about the pandemic, and they usually boil down to 'it's a thankless job, I feel sorry for Johnson, I wouldn't want to do it' or some variant of that.

Oh, yeah. For sure. Same here - often with "and I've had my jab(s) now" - it's been a massive positive for people and it is a hard job to keep people happy. But they have got almost everything wrong. Even by their own actions of having to reverse so much shortly after doing it.

My boss used to say to me "when you're in the swamp up to your neck in crocodiles, fighting crocodiles is what you need to concentrate on, not plans for draining the swamp".

But at some point the swamp draining needs to take over from the crocodile fighting. I think many semi interested people are just looking at the crocodile fighting and cheering on Bunter and Co and forgiving the errors, like you say. But for a good while the feeling has also been of things getting better. Not least because we all want them to and hope for them to. But as they improve, set-backs hurt more and people start to be more questioning of what's been done. Like last year we had the summer and eat out to help out, and then we all had to go and hide in our rooms again, and people got proper cross with Bunter and liked Kier a lot more.

The tories may get lucky with their gamble, but that's what it is "heads or tails", not a clearly data supported selection. Some easing - yes. Abandoning all mitigations - reckless.

[Xela]

3 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

Can you imagine the logistics of just surveying every public building, assessing what they have, working out what they need, informing the Planners, getting the kit ordered, organising installation.

I’d suggest, if we ignored cost and tendering and just got cracking, that would be a couple of years work.

There are still buildings clad in the same material as Grenfell. That tragedy was 4 years ago!

[Rugeley Villa]

21 minutes ago, blandy said:

Oh, yeah. For sure. Same here - often with "and I've had my jab(s) now" - it's been a massive positive for people and it is a hard job to keep people happy. But they have got almost everything wrong. Even by their own actions of having to reverse so much shortly after doing it.

My boss used to say to me "when you're in the swamp up to your neck in crocodiles, fighting crocodiles is what you need to concentrate on, not plans for draining the swamp".

But at some point the swamp draining needs to take over from the crocodile fighting. I think many semi interested people are just looking at the crocodile fighting and cheering on Bunter and Co and forgiving the errors, like you say. But for a good while the feeling has also been of things getting better. Not least because we all want them to and hope for them to. But as they improve, set-backs hurt more and people start to be more questioning of what's been done. Like last year we had the summer and eat out to help out, and then we all had to go and hide in our rooms again, and people got proper cross with Bunter and liked Kier a lot more.

The tories may get lucky with their gamble, but that's what it is "heads or tails", not a clearly data supported selection. Some easing - yes. Abandoning all mitigations - reckless.

Was your boss this fella by any chance 

[Genie]

Boris is the PM that gets things done.

First Brexit, then the vaccine rollout, now back to normality. 

Hip hip, hooray!

[ml1dch]

1 hour ago, blandy said:

But at some point the swamp draining needs to take over from the crocodile fighting. I think many semi interested people are just looking at the crocodile fighting and cheering on Bunter and Co and forgiving the errors, like you say. But for a good while the feeling has also been of things getting better. Not least because we all want them to and hope for them to. But as they improve, set-backs hurt more and people start to be more questioning of what's been done. Like last year we had the summer and eat out to help out, and then we all had to go and hide in our rooms again, and people got proper cross with Bunter and liked Kier a lot more.

Obviously this is all groundless speculation, but it wouldn't surprise me if / when thus starts to feel over, any goodwill is quickly forgotten because people just want to forget about it. 

It's not the end of World War II, but using it as a comparison anyway- the public were famously very reluctant to reward the then-Prime Minister in electoral support. 

It'll be interesting to see it play out, but the biggest problem the current lot have is that they are incapable half-wits. If anything, the pandemic has given them a curtain behind which they can hide their incompetence. When they can't blame things on the pandemic because in the eyes of the public, the pandemic is over - but they are still having to deal with the consequences of it, the curtain will be lowered and what's on the other side might not be all that attractive. 

The only real question is if the opposition parties are in any way capable of capitalising on it.

Edited July 6, 2021 by ml1dch